Cristy C. Road is a freelance illustrator, author and zine publisher. This novel incorporates both her artistic and literary talents, and uses some elements of zines to tell a story. Bravely straddling creative media, she fictionalises her own experiences as a rebellious young woman searching for human connections in a detached New York City.

Carmencita, our damaged heroine, takes us on an uncensored trip through her world of dingy bars, cheap drugs and inadvisable forays into strangers' beds. The troubles she faced growing up in Miami followed by a wild life in New York have led to the bad habits of the title. Hers is a defiantly punk attitude, with an edge of insecurity and sexually self-destructive behaviour.

It's a fast, hectic read and chapters can be dipped in and out of despite the chronological narrative; plot is not the most important aspect here. True to her history in zine publishing, Road has written a novel with a similar juxtaposition of image and word and with the personal feel of a riot grrrl or confessional punk zine. And confessional it most certainly is: this is one close look into someone's universe, with every traumatic event and glorious moment outlined in Carmencita's navel gazing tone. Many of her ideas hark back to her teen punk youth and ring a little too naïvely searching and angsty for a street smart 25-year-old. However, these ruminations – though difficult to empathise with – are often coupled with an image of cinematic proportions.

Road edited her own zine for years and has provided artwork for numerous magazines, punk bands, exhibitions and her own published books – all by her mid 20s. Celebrating outsiders and intelligent slobs everywhere, this is transgressive writing from the viewpoint of a young Latin bisexual woman dealing with heartbreak, drug addiction, homophobia, misogyny and everyday life in a big city. The author brings something fresh to her field and, as such, you really want Bad Habits to be utterly brilliant, socking it to the man with its undeniable charm.

But it is only partly brilliant. Road's strengths lie in her illustrations, which thankfully adorn almost every page. These immaculately composed snapshots of Carmencita's haphazard journey to clean living and independence much improve the story. The writing is not terrible, by any means, and the pictures don't quite tell a thousand words. It's just that a purely graphic novel may have been a better medium for Carmencita's tale, and it will be interesting to see if Road pursues this extraordinary talent in the future.
Alexis Somerville

The story of the psychedelic era has been told many times in glossy print and television series, an Anglo-American tale about the crazy collision between long-haired noisemakers and LSD. Essentially what emerges is merely a Technicolor variation of good old rock and roll as it existed before all the mind-blowing special effects.

In late 60s West Germany, however, some radical musicians attempted to steer away from both US influence and their own nation’s immediate past to create a multitude of sounds that were genuinely different. Now the story of these innovators has been given the full media treatment via a recent BBC4 documentary and this coffee table book.

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy is an extensive series of essays and biographies about the diverse bands, producers and record labels that formed the German alternative scene between 1967-75. Lavishly illustrated, the book is an essential Christmas annual for those fans of Amon Duul II, Can, Cluster, Faust, NEU!, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream and the rest, whi were not quick enough to buy Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler before it went out of print.

Like so much original music of that era, krautrock was initially played in the UK by John Peel and ultimately mass marketed by Virgin Records. The term lumped together disparate German groups, making no distinction between conventional guitar/ drums combos, flute/ bongos/ cement mixer trios and those artists exploring the kosmische possibilities of enormous new-fangled synthesisers.

Since then, the krautrock canon has come to be seen by some as hermetically sealed and timeless although, as this book illustrates, it had roots in the work of experimentalists like Stockhausen, Beuys and the Fluxus movement and the players involved had pasts and post-kraut futures in some cases every bit as embarrassing as those of their English prog rock contemporaries.

Of course Kraftwerk were the biggest name to emerge from the genre and certainly the most influential on the mainstream. Thankfully their story does not dominate the book, being presented as just one musical direction that was followed, among many others.

While it may turn away the uninitiated, this egalitarian approach is perhaps Krautrock’s greatest strength.
Simon Charterton

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The first, untitled, poem of Dwang: Issue One is an editorial statement of purpose, demanding that honesty be the foundation of a poem. Death, humour, beauty, fear, human weakness – both moral and physical – and the violence that people do to others are all threads that run through Dwang. With 50 contributors, and dedicated to the poet William Wantling, this limited-edition, hand-bound anthology of outsider poetry, prose and graphics is a thing of beauty. And darkness.

Violence is explored in the immediacy of Jim Burns’ "Kelly’s Story" and with it, the unfathomable nature of man. The narrator in Fred Voss’s "Machinist Wanted" is haunted by the idea that his machines will go on to kill, while at the same time describing the alienating nature of his work and the lack of choice he has in his tasks. Nothing in life or death is simple and ambiguities and unanswered questions confront and unsettle the reader.

Billy Childish’s poem "the person sometimes known as billy childish" gives an account of dying in which the narrator eases the passing of another person with "a good lie, a true lie". Whitney Woolf’s quietly measured "Racetrack Red" and Ben Myers’ "She’s So New York", describe beauty, mediated by an atmosphere of aloneness, bringing to mind an Edward Hopper portrait.

There is black humour in Geoff Hattersley’s "Breathless" and "Rump Poem" – the latter painting a brilliant picture of the physical frailty and decline of a third husband – the previous two having been suffocated by a wife employing unusual means. Meanwhile, Salena Godden’s excellent "I’m Gonna Move to Hastings" is funny and fast paced, with a great hook and some dark plans. There is also a warmth for people in the poems – in Christopher Twigg’s "Barry" and Jim Burns’ "The Number", a poem about the elusiveness of particular childhood memories along with a sense of fondness for others.

Issue one of Dwang ends with William Wantling and his poem "Of This World" which serves as a powerful postscript on futility – a piece of haunting rhetoric to conclude this interesting and diverse collection of poems.
Benedict Newbery
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Inspired by Jack Kerouac and Huck Finn, Garth Cartwright’s latest musical travelogue began as a search for vernacular music, the sounds that built America. Like his previous Princes Amongst Men (2005), in which he explored a Balkans scoured by civil war for the spirit of a people captured in song, when Cartwright starts to wander, he takes neither the comfortable nor the conventional route. Instead, he spends long hours on Greyhound buses crawling with homicidal meth-heads, or weaving a tiny hire car between thundering juggernauts down the Lost Highway.

When he gets to his destinations, he often passes out at the wheel, or in flophouse motels reminiscent of slasher flicks. He takes
in the tourist hotspots – Beale Street, Graceland, The Grand Ole Opry – but then quickly departs for those places that are way off the map: the Navajo reservation in the shadow of Monument Valley, the Watts Towers of South Central Los Angeles, the East Side of Chicago, still unreconstructed after the riots of 1968.

Sometimes, the things he sees there make you wonder if you are reading about America at all – it seems more like some desperate
Third World failed state, ravaged by an insane despot. George W Bush was still in power when Garth made his trip, and the legacy of 30 years of "free economics" has left a blight of poverty, crystal meth addiction and devastating gang culture across the "Land of the Free".

Yet the people themselves remain tough, funny and brilliant. People like reformed gangbanger-turned-author Luis Rodriguez; former beauty queen-turned-gangster’s moll-turned Native American singer Radmilla Cody; chicken-coop-dwelling, cowpunching poet Kell Robertson; country boys Dale Watson and Billy Joe Shaver, soul legends Mable John and Deanie Parker, and in Cartwright’s most treasured coup, the last ever interview with Mexican legend Lydia Mendoza, who died in 2007 aged 91.

He has a moment of transcendence floating down the Mississippi with an old blues singer, just like his hero Huck, and hears firsthand a litany of stories that would make a Great American Novel in themselves. And that, really, is the point of this wonderful book. The late, great American oral historian and music lover Studs Terkel has, in this restless New Zealander, a worthy heir.
Cathi Unsworth

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Skin Deep is a reprint comprising some of Charles Burns' early work going as far back as his days in RAW magazine. Mostly, it's a repackaging and redelivering of Burns' Big Baby, a weekly syndicated strip that ran from 1988 to 1991.

Fans of Burns (and if you like comics, you should be) will be happy to pick up a quality reprint in large format, which is faithful to Burns' amazing inkwork. The primary stories, "Dog Days", "Burn Again" and "A Marriage Made In Hell", are classic Burns shorts that represent the very best of his style – funny, witty, disgusting, quirky and beautiful.

Perhaps not quite as developed in terms of both narrative or illustration as his magnum opus Black Hole, Skin Deep is lighter in tone, with a real playfulness, even in the most haunting and shocking stories. Burns' love of 50s-era love and horror comics is ever-present. From the back cover homage to the fine little details in each character's wardrobe, the loving attention to hairdos, sun glasses, and collared shirts is a real treat.

"Dog Days" is more or less a running gag (a good one at that) but there's a genuine tenderness to the story that makes it more than a cheap laugh. "A Marriage Made In Hell" is maybe too much a direct tribute to the aformetioned wacky horror/ love genre of the golden age. There are plot twists galore, but a lack of any real punch. "Burn Again" certainly stands out as the most interesting strip, but perhaps with rushed deadlines and maybe not enough inspiration, it leaves a real wanting for a more developed story.

Burns isn't one who is particularly heavy on plot or narrative development, letting his illustration do much of the talking. If there could be a comparison, Burns is very much the Quentin Tarantino of the comics world, celebrating the genre fiction of his youth by creating his own – albeit much more fucked up – version of it.
Adrian K. Sanders