moorereppion

DODGEM LOGIC: THEY SAY THINGS HAPPEN IN THREES…

With only its third issue just about to be released, Alan Moore’s mystifying neo-underground magazine Dodgem Logic has evidently forced a General Election, brought a government to its knees and secured the release of Twin Peaks Season Two on DVD. Those are the kind of results you can’t argue with and which completely justify hiking our cover price to £3.50, even without our generous increase in size to eighty ad-free pages of wall-to-wall solid content in spectacular full colour.

With a beautiful but nightmarish wraparound cover provided by its increasingly unfathomable founder and this issue’s free gift of a tantalising iron-on T-shirt transfer both delineated and designed by the sublime Melinda Gebbie, Dodgem Logic #3 is our most sumptuous and substantial offering yet. We’ve got more bubblegum-card bios in our series of Historic Hipsters, we’ve got rowdy rationalist Robin Ince exploring the futility of trying to reason with mouthy reactionaries and a genius examination of town planning and its various iniquities by urban spaceman Gary Mills. Britain’s foremost self-defacing comedy darling Josie Long provides some excellent advice, but only if you’re her about ten years ago, while hilltop hierophant Steve Moore serves up a comprehensive absinthe-scented guide to the degenerates, dandies and demi-gods collectively known as the Decadents.

Fulfilling Dodgem Logic’s remit of unhelpful crazy talk, Alan Moore offers a straightforward user’s guide on how to practice hellish sorcery in your own living room, and frowning boy-king Steve Aylett’s sobering Johnny Viable concludes with a display of octopi and flirting Chinese warlords that maybe, just maybe, shows us how to love again. Melinda Gebbie takes us on the first leg of a two-part tour through the delinquent dreamtime of Beat-era San Francisco, the immensely civil but post-civilised Margaret Killjoy walks us through her blueprint for a scavenger economy, and self-sufficient-ish Dave Hamilton sows some genetically modified seeds of discontent. The awestruck reader will discover flavoursome yet frugal recipes, advanced guerrilla gardening gambits and a first-time voter’s unimpressed appraisal of the democratic process. There are trackside chats and snaps from the electrified-rail frontline of graffiti, diatribes from doctors, a cacophony of columnists, the esoteric etchings and embellishments of cryptic Kevin O’Neill or the mighty Savage Pencil, and instructions for the manufacture of those Joy Division oven-gloves you’ve dreamed of.

Currently funding much-needed school holiday crèche facilities in the mistreated but majestic district that it hails from, Dodgem Logic once again delivers on the promises it never made you in the first place, a refreshing contrast to what you’ll be getting elsewhere during this election period. We know that if our preternatural publication were a little human boy and not a magazine made out of paper, you’d appoint him to rule wisely over you in preference to all the flimsier and less coherent options on display. Frankly, thanks to you, we’re looking at a landslide moral victory.

Dodgem Logic ~ the incompetent paranoid despot of people’s hearts.