Hot Tea, Cold Water #1

From the Random Stack of Unread Comics.

Title: Hot Tea, Cold Water
Issue: 1
Date: 2009
Publisher:Leann Leake (leannleake@gmail.com)
Editor: Leann Leake
Contributors:Ygril Blop, Dad (the editor's Dad), Amanda Faith, KC Green, Erin Griffin, Hooroo Jackson, Leann Leake, Andrew Lorenzi, Melissa, Rob Nussbaumer

I reviewed the third issue in this series (which my wife contributed to) eight years ago. That review is here. Finally found issues 1 and 2 in the Random Stack of Unread Comics.

Hot Tea, Cold Water is a zine, although it does feature come comics content alongside essays and prose poems. Each issue features a variety of contributors, and each issue is based around a theme. The theme of this issue was jobs and joblessness.

I was expecting something unrelentingly anticapitalist, but there was actually quite a variety of viewpoints and approaches to the theme, covering a wide range of experiences with jobs, job searches, employment, and unemployment.

I was also pleased to find several different voices from the education field, which ended up being my favorite pieces. School speech therapist Amanda Faith's collection of journal entries on her work was heartfelt and powerful, and elementary music teacher Melissa's prose poems did a wonderful job of capturing the rhythm of the school year.

There was a fun selection of wordless comics by Erin Griffin, featuring a running theme of pigs and work.KC Green's two page comic about finding his favorite job was good lighthearted fun. Editor Leann Leake also contributed a journal comic about a summer job in food service. And Andrew Lorenzi had a good one-page comic capturing the stress of the job search out of college with the looming pressure of student loans and other financial woes.

Hooroo Jackson's essay on insects was rambly, and a bit of a stretch to fit the theme, but it had a couple of wonderfully outrageous lines. And Ygril Blop's "The Beast" was the anticapitalist rant that I had expected the whole zine to be (and a really good, intense rant at that).

Sprinkled in between the essays and comics were some serious bits of job search advice from the editor's Dad, along with a nice selection of book, movie, and zine reviews, all on-theme.

It's been about ten years since this was published, but it all still felt very timely in today's economy, and I particularly appreciated the teaching experiences that were represented.

Rating: 7.5/10