Koalas & Eldritch Entities: A Homegrown Zine Wants To Help You Survive The Supernatural

With an audacious disregard for convention, Kuzhali Manickavel has created a surreal, subversive universe where Kollywood glamour collides with eldritch horror. Kuzhali's 'You Go Man, Why Me?' is a cultural catalyst in the form of a zine that takes us on a hallucinatory voyage into a surreal, culturally-charged landscape.

This pocket-sized opus is a bold, unapologetic fusion of pop culture, mythology, and the artist’s singular vision. Kuzhali's signature collage technique serves as the canvas upon which she paints a world both familiar and utterly alien. The zine’s aesthetic is a whirlwind of contradictions.

It’s a heady mix of high and low culture, where the glitz of Kollywood item numbers rubs shoulders with the grotesque imagery of pulp fiction. The result is a visual cacophony that is both jarring and mesmerizing. Kuzhali’s mastery lies in her ability to transform disparate elements into a cohesive and evocative whole. Every spread is a visual puzzle that you can read to decipher its hidden meanings.

By layering images from diverse sources - Kollywood posters, pulp fiction covers, and everyday objects - she creates a visual language that is both familiar and unsettling. For instance, a page might juxtapose a glamorous actress with a decaying fish head, or a landscape with a monstrous creature. The zine demands your attention with headlines like "DEATH ORGY OF THE LEOPARD WOMEN", "THE NAKED NYMPHS OF PAKISTAN", and "MODERN INDIA'S SEX-AND-SLAUGHTER BANDIT QUEEN".

Short, punchy statements offer purported "advice" on dealing with supernatural entities, but these often veer into the absurd or the darkly humorous. For example, a section on "Ites Fish" (presumably a type of supernatural being) reads: "People who have not read this useful guide often assume that the Dak Bungalow is a haunted receptacle of negative juju and supernatural beings filled with regret. In actuality, the Dak Bungalow is just a room with a chair and an attractive dresser." This playful and often nonsensical approach to the paranormal disrupts expectations and invites the reader to engage with the text on a purely imaginative level.

Beneath the zine’s dazzling surface lies a deeper cultural commentary. By juxtaposing the hyper-real world of popular culture with the uncanny realm of the supernatural, Kuzhali offers a critique of contemporary Indian society. The zine’s exploration of themes such as gender, power, and identity is both timely and relevant. It also avoids didacticism, preferring instead to provoke thought through visual and narrative provocation.

The inclusion of paranormal entities as central characters is a bold choice. Rather than relying on tired clichés, Kuzhali reimagines these creatures as complex, multifaceted beings. The zine’s 'advice' on how to interact with them is a sly subversion of the self-help genre, transforming it into a darkly humorous exploration of the absurd. It’s a playful wink at the reader, suggesting that the only true way to navigate the complexities of life is through a sense of humor and a willingness to embrace the unexpected.

You Go Man, Why Me? is a zine, yes, but it is also a visual poem, a cultural artifact, and a personal manifesto. This is a zine that demands to be held, touched, and explored.

You can buy 'You Go Man, Why Me?' here.

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