Local Color

Summer’s here: the sun is shining, the kids are playing, the West Nile mosquitoes are hovering in clouds of death. For many, the Summer is a time for travel, whether it is to a far off location or just to one’s “happy place”.

At Local Color, we asked our readers to send in their stories about travel. We left the interpretation of the word “travel” to the discretion of the authors.

In response, we got Grays by Christian Verotik, a journey through the relationship between us and our alien overlords; Kelly L.’s Wayworn City, a trip through the remains of a past age; and J. Robert Novak’s (I Believe in) Travelin’ Light, in which the narrator prepares to venture far from home.

These stories can be found here.

We’d like to thank the contributors, and to remind everyone that we are always accepting fiction, as well as essay submissions.

By Charlie Kondek

I want to tell you about this new web-based “zine,” Local Color, and to do so I want to invite you inside my head for a moment.

It’s a colorful place at times. Several of my fantasies are colliding at once with my realities. First of all, I am thinking of this as an “origin story.” Any nerd knows that in the origin story, you start out as an ordinary person who falls into a vat of radioactive yogurt or is sucked through a quantum straw and comes out the other side with fabulous super powers, abilities that perhaps you yourself don’t understand yet. But this is a “team book,” which means that when each member of the team meets, they at first mistake each other for villains and have a tremendous, building-leveling, non-lethal brawl before realizing, oh, wait, we were on the same side the whole time. That makes me Professor Xavier to the zine’s X-Men. No, wait, I’m Batman. No, Captain America. Doc Savage? (more…)