Back in 1991 I was living in a 1000 foot industrial where house loft space with my girlfriend at the time Michelle. Along with her, and my former roommate and good buddy J.F.Sugerman with whom I had initially started the project, we began to publish a zine of short fiction and art.

We called it Nisrigion [Nice-ridg-on]

I provided the illustration and design work, J.F. wrote some of the contents and edited a little bit, Michelle contributed some stories, as did Manon, J.F’s girlfriend at the time [what can I say, it was a family affair]. And we gathered submissions for the first two issues from friends and friends of friends. Issue one included work from Darren Lockwood, Al Roy and Al Ray [now a host and writer for the CBC].

We got two issues done, sold about 3 or 4 hundred copies of each, maybe more, got a personal phone call from Billy Brag* and even got invited to appear on Imprint on TVO to talk about zines - but then we weren’t suitably antagonistic towards the mainstream press in the pre-interview so they passed in favour of a few more edgy guests.

In the end we failed to attract more submissions, broke up with our girlfriends, lost interest in the project and nothing more came of Nisrigion. J.F. and I have talked about reviving it on and off over the years but J.F. has sadly lost the drive to write much and i've been pretty busy doing comics and crap.

I've wanted for some time now to adapt his story from the book, ‘Drowning’, into a short Graphic Novella, and Michelle’s ‘Tony & Peter’s Restaurant’ I’ve always thought would make a good short comic story. May still take a whack at them yet. I know she made a short B&W movie based on it.

But I’ve had the old ‘plates’ for Issues one and two in storage in my studio all this time and now, in the process of reorganizing stuff and archiving my old, pre-internet days I decided it was time to scan the old buggers and put them up online for the ages before they totally fall apart. So here’s Issues one in it’s entirety as a free downloadable PDF. It's 3.2megs

I’ll upload issue two next week.

A toast to the spirit of small press publishing - cheers!

[*-I had left copies with a memeber of the touring crew after a show in Toronto for Billy Brag and Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy, with whom he was touring at the time, Apparently they all dug the zines on the tour bus and he decided to give us a call and let us know and ask for a subscription to the thing! He was very cool about being on the phone with two clearly shell shocked small pressers who were totally unsure what the hell we were doing and stunned to get this kind of feedback, made our weeks!]