Ouroboros: A Plural Zine by R.O.S.C.O.E.
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transcribedcomicszinesOuroboros: A Plural Zine about why being plural has made it hard to make a plural zine etc.
By R.O.S.C.O.E.
Front Cover: Ouroboros is written in wiggly bubble letters, and the O is a rattlesnake chomping its own tail. The byline is in non-wiggly block letters.
This zine’s body text is primarily written in three different handwritings: curly script, all caps, and sentence case block print, from here on out called “curly,” “caps,” and “block.” Art style and self-depiction changes, as you might expect!
Pg. 1
Caps: We have wanted to make a zine about our plurality for a long time. (A noodly-armed Roswell-styled alien, with curly dark hair and glasses, holds a pencil over paper, but it looks discontented and its thought bubble has an ellipses in it: writer’s block!”)
(Encased in another, independent thought bubble is…
Curly: A quick note on Pronouns:
Block: The ROSCOE system uses both “I” and “we,” depending on context. Sometimes we don’t know who exactly any given “we” includes!)
Caps: It seemed like it should be natural, easy, therapeutic. Fun.
(A bunch of zigzaggy speech bubbles, enclosed with zigzagging lines.)
Block: Explore your feelings!
Block: Give guidance to people earlier in the process than you!
Block: Practice art!
Block: Refine your self conceptualization!
Block: Gain confidence in making things!
Block: Connect with other, cooler plural folks whose art you like!
Caps: Validation!
Pg. 2
Curly: I mean, how hard can it be?
Caps: (1) Observe self. (A bug eyed humanoid figure with a clipboard and pencil observes a tiny, irate stick figure in a corked bottle. The stick figure has its hands on its hips and are glaring out at the observer.)
Caps: (2) Build model based on observations. (A bespectacled human figure, with squiggly dark hair much unlike the previous observer, hammers away at a keyboard, making Venn diagrams, flow charts, and other very impressive looking data sheets.
Caps: (3) Alter behavior according to what I’ve learned for maximum impact. (Bar graphs with whiskers, pie charts, line grafts, all getting poured via arrow into an all-caps declaration of “Ideal Life!”)
Pg. 3
Caps: As you can see, it wasn’t even really about the zine anymore. The zine was just a tool to—
Block (with a squiggly underline): —Define Ourself, Once And For All, Finally.
Curly: So how it usually went down was:
Block: (1) Consume some media item that riles up our feelings—making us want to put ourselves on paper.
(A bespectacled curly-figured stick figure with a mouse, drawn differently than others previous, looks up with an inspiration-struck expression. In a new style, a cartoony face with big shiny eyes, no glasses, a straight hair, has a chain of thought bubbles filled with their own thought bubbles, branching off into yet more thought bubbles)
Block: (2) Start to create, begin to decide how to depict myself in the project.
(Drawings in various styles. A cartoony rattlesnake! A running stick figure! A flaming eyeball! A more realistic face with buzzed hair, square glasses, and a determined expression! A symbol resembling a gothic Y with five little equal signs around it in a circle!)
Caps (bold and tall): Let’s find the true me!
Pg. 4
A ball-jointed faceless doll with the word “Narrator” across its face says via speech bubble: “Curly: Fun fact: Block: There is not actually a “true” Roscoe.”
Caps: But it’s so easy to forget that. The illusion of a singular self keeps sneaking up on me.
(A four-legged, two-tentacled-armed, eyeball-headed being wields a paintbrush in front of a painting of a more humanoid figure with straight hair and glasses, which, according to the block print note, resembled the form that started the painting. The eyeball being, however, is a different form, one of many forms and it looks frustrated.)
Eyeball being (in block): #!$@% That doesn’t look like me at all!
Curly: Clearly I am either:
Caps: Not a skilled enough artist to express myself well.
(The eyeball being squints dubiously at a scribbly portrait of itself, thinking, in caps, “Is that me?”)
Caps: Or (big arrow pointing to) wrong about who I am.
(The eyeball straps on a spooky flimsy human mask and thinks, in caps, “There, is that right?”)
Caps: Or maybe both!
Pg. 5
Caps: This leads to: (3) Lose all confidence in the project and begin to avoid it.
(A big flowing arrow points to a finished zine, but it sprouts off smaller arrows like branches off a tree.)
Trunk (in caps): I should finish my zine…
Branch (block): But I’m not good enough at drawing.
Branch (block): But I don’t know how to structure it.
Branch (block): But I’m scared what I’m writing isn’t actually “true.”
Branch (block): But no style I try seems to represent all of me.
A smiley-faced fried shrimp pops up, declaring (in caps) “Hold it!” (in block) “Let’s zoom in…”
It pulls out a telescope, which zooms in on the words “to all of me.”
Caps: “All of me.” What does that even mean? What is “me,” when I’m simultaneously one and many, and only able to perceive that self (those selves) through one “lens” at a time, and only aware of even the existence of any lens a fraction of the time, and and and and and and and
Pg. 6
(A cartoonish face with straight black hair, spiraling dizzy eyes, and a drooling mouth, clearly overwhelmed.)
Curly: As you might imagine, spiraling about inner experience is not terribly compatible with trying to put together a zine. (“Spiraling” has spirals dotting each I.)
(A spinning wheel, ala Wheel of Fortune, spins, an arrow running through the wedges in succession. Each wedge has a different picture: a capital N, an hourglass, the rattlesnake, a spiral galaxy, a mushroom, a fried shrimp with a happy face, a struck match, an eyeball.)
Caps: Contemplating inner existence that deeply can activate defense mechanisms or trigger rapid switching. That kind of system instability is often (for us) unpleasant and/or disorienting.
(A bunch of disjointed rectangles, some containing sad faces, some containing words. The text is broken up, scattered across the rectangles, and purposely hard to follow, written in a small block print different from the others prior.)
Small: My head becomes a hall of mirrors, where I can’t tell who I am or what about me is actually true and what’s just a story I tell myself.
Pg. 7
Block: But lately, we’ve been working on collaborating more effectively and deliberately.
Fried shrimp grins and says, in caps, “Yay! Teamwork!”
Caps: It’s easier to communicate now, and our relationships have improved. (Heart doodle.)
Curly: Being nice to all of the parts of ourself is sometimes challenging.
Block: And it requires a lot of unlearning ways of thinking and behaving that have been drilled into us for decades.
Caps: That’s hard work. But now, we’ve all decided to show up and do that work as much as we can, because it is so worth doing.
(A big heart, containing many smaller hearts, some of which encase smaller hearts in turn, or a series of smaller hearts.)
Pg. 8
Curly: So this is us, doing the work.
Caps: Nothing changes if nothing changes, so we’re letting ourself/selves change. (in the paper version, Our is in big text, and self/selves are in smaller text, stacked on top of each other.)
(A big steep staircase goes across the page, and a bunch of figures work their way up and down it. At the top, a stick figure holds a ladder and declares in caps, “Look what I found!” Down at the bottom, but flying, is a tailed, spiky-haired humanoid figure who declares in all lower case, “I can bring it down to them!” Between them in the air is the fried shrimp, which has grown butterfly wings; its speech bubble has a happy face and an exclamation point in it. Meanwhile, on the stair beneath the stick figure with the ladder, is the cartoony rattlesnake, extending its tail down to a blobby eyeball-headed being on the stair below, which in turn is extending a tentacle down to a black stick figure on a stair below that. A series of three-dimensional cubes is making their way up from the bottom step, using a smiling mushroom to stack themselves upon.)
Block: And so far, it feels really
Big bold caps: Good.
Back Cover
(The Y figure surrounded by five sets of whiskers, and the words “Manyfold Press.”)
By R.O.S.C.O.E.
Front Cover: Ouroboros is written in wiggly bubble letters, and the O is a rattlesnake chomping its own tail. The byline is in non-wiggly block letters.
This zine’s body text is primarily written in three different handwritings: curly script, all caps, and sentence case block print, from here on out called “curly,” “caps,” and “block.” Art style and self-depiction changes, as you might expect!
Pg. 1
Caps: We have wanted to make a zine about our plurality for a long time. (A noodly-armed Roswell-styled alien, with curly dark hair and glasses, holds a pencil over paper, but it looks discontented and its thought bubble has an ellipses in it: writer’s block!”)
(Encased in another, independent thought bubble is…
Curly: A quick note on Pronouns:
Block: The ROSCOE system uses both “I” and “we,” depending on context. Sometimes we don’t know who exactly any given “we” includes!)
Caps: It seemed like it should be natural, easy, therapeutic. Fun.
(A bunch of zigzaggy speech bubbles, enclosed with zigzagging lines.)
Block: Explore your feelings!
Block: Give guidance to people earlier in the process than you!
Block: Practice art!
Block: Refine your self conceptualization!
Block: Gain confidence in making things!
Block: Connect with other, cooler plural folks whose art you like!
Caps: Validation!
Pg. 2
Curly: I mean, how hard can it be?
Caps: (1) Observe self. (A bug eyed humanoid figure with a clipboard and pencil observes a tiny, irate stick figure in a corked bottle. The stick figure has its hands on its hips and are glaring out at the observer.)
Caps: (2) Build model based on observations. (A bespectacled human figure, with squiggly dark hair much unlike the previous observer, hammers away at a keyboard, making Venn diagrams, flow charts, and other very impressive looking data sheets.
Caps: (3) Alter behavior according to what I’ve learned for maximum impact. (Bar graphs with whiskers, pie charts, line grafts, all getting poured via arrow into an all-caps declaration of “Ideal Life!”)
Pg. 3
Caps: As you can see, it wasn’t even really about the zine anymore. The zine was just a tool to—
Block (with a squiggly underline): —Define Ourself, Once And For All, Finally.
Curly: So how it usually went down was:
Block: (1) Consume some media item that riles up our feelings—making us want to put ourselves on paper.
(A bespectacled curly-figured stick figure with a mouse, drawn differently than others previous, looks up with an inspiration-struck expression. In a new style, a cartoony face with big shiny eyes, no glasses, a straight hair, has a chain of thought bubbles filled with their own thought bubbles, branching off into yet more thought bubbles)
Block: (2) Start to create, begin to decide how to depict myself in the project.
(Drawings in various styles. A cartoony rattlesnake! A running stick figure! A flaming eyeball! A more realistic face with buzzed hair, square glasses, and a determined expression! A symbol resembling a gothic Y with five little equal signs around it in a circle!)
Caps (bold and tall): Let’s find the true me!
Pg. 4
A ball-jointed faceless doll with the word “Narrator” across its face says via speech bubble: “Curly: Fun fact: Block: There is not actually a “true” Roscoe.”
Caps: But it’s so easy to forget that. The illusion of a singular self keeps sneaking up on me.
(A four-legged, two-tentacled-armed, eyeball-headed being wields a paintbrush in front of a painting of a more humanoid figure with straight hair and glasses, which, according to the block print note, resembled the form that started the painting. The eyeball being, however, is a different form, one of many forms and it looks frustrated.)
Eyeball being (in block): #!$@% That doesn’t look like me at all!
Curly: Clearly I am either:
Caps: Not a skilled enough artist to express myself well.
(The eyeball being squints dubiously at a scribbly portrait of itself, thinking, in caps, “Is that me?”)
Caps: Or (big arrow pointing to) wrong about who I am.
(The eyeball straps on a spooky flimsy human mask and thinks, in caps, “There, is that right?”)
Caps: Or maybe both!
Pg. 5
Caps: This leads to: (3) Lose all confidence in the project and begin to avoid it.
(A big flowing arrow points to a finished zine, but it sprouts off smaller arrows like branches off a tree.)
Trunk (in caps): I should finish my zine…
Branch (block): But I’m not good enough at drawing.
Branch (block): But I don’t know how to structure it.
Branch (block): But I’m scared what I’m writing isn’t actually “true.”
Branch (block): But no style I try seems to represent all of me.
A smiley-faced fried shrimp pops up, declaring (in caps) “Hold it!” (in block) “Let’s zoom in…”
It pulls out a telescope, which zooms in on the words “to all of me.”
Caps: “All of me.” What does that even mean? What is “me,” when I’m simultaneously one and many, and only able to perceive that self (those selves) through one “lens” at a time, and only aware of even the existence of any lens a fraction of the time, and and and and and and and
Pg. 6
(A cartoonish face with straight black hair, spiraling dizzy eyes, and a drooling mouth, clearly overwhelmed.)
Curly: As you might imagine, spiraling about inner experience is not terribly compatible with trying to put together a zine. (“Spiraling” has spirals dotting each I.)
(A spinning wheel, ala Wheel of Fortune, spins, an arrow running through the wedges in succession. Each wedge has a different picture: a capital N, an hourglass, the rattlesnake, a spiral galaxy, a mushroom, a fried shrimp with a happy face, a struck match, an eyeball.)
Caps: Contemplating inner existence that deeply can activate defense mechanisms or trigger rapid switching. That kind of system instability is often (for us) unpleasant and/or disorienting.
(A bunch of disjointed rectangles, some containing sad faces, some containing words. The text is broken up, scattered across the rectangles, and purposely hard to follow, written in a small block print different from the others prior.)
Small: My head becomes a hall of mirrors, where I can’t tell who I am or what about me is actually true and what’s just a story I tell myself.
Pg. 7
Block: But lately, we’ve been working on collaborating more effectively and deliberately.
Fried shrimp grins and says, in caps, “Yay! Teamwork!”
Caps: It’s easier to communicate now, and our relationships have improved. (Heart doodle.)
Curly: Being nice to all of the parts of ourself is sometimes challenging.
Block: And it requires a lot of unlearning ways of thinking and behaving that have been drilled into us for decades.
Caps: That’s hard work. But now, we’ve all decided to show up and do that work as much as we can, because it is so worth doing.
(A big heart, containing many smaller hearts, some of which encase smaller hearts in turn, or a series of smaller hearts.)
Pg. 8
Curly: So this is us, doing the work.
Caps: Nothing changes if nothing changes, so we’re letting ourself/selves change. (in the paper version, Our is in big text, and self/selves are in smaller text, stacked on top of each other.)
(A big steep staircase goes across the page, and a bunch of figures work their way up and down it. At the top, a stick figure holds a ladder and declares in caps, “Look what I found!” Down at the bottom, but flying, is a tailed, spiky-haired humanoid figure who declares in all lower case, “I can bring it down to them!” Between them in the air is the fried shrimp, which has grown butterfly wings; its speech bubble has a happy face and an exclamation point in it. Meanwhile, on the stair beneath the stick figure with the ladder, is the cartoony rattlesnake, extending its tail down to a blobby eyeball-headed being on the stair below, which in turn is extending a tentacle down to a black stick figure on a stair below that. A series of three-dimensional cubes is making their way up from the bottom step, using a smiling mushroom to stack themselves upon.)
Block: And so far, it feels really
Big bold caps: Good.
Back Cover
(The Y figure surrounded by five sets of whiskers, and the words “Manyfold Press.”)
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Date: 2021-11-05 03:00 am (UTC)Not sure they're subscribed to this, but I have thoughts. Just can't articulate them right now.
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