Battling Knights

A superior product to the Executioner! The pieces for the Executioner had to be cut out by hand, while the pieces for this are pre-cut and just need to be pressed out of the sheets of card. Also, a thicker card is used for the horses and the mechanism, while a thinner card is used for the knights, making them much easier to bend into position. Construction photographs after the cut.

Comics Unmasked at the British Library

Entry: Between free and £10.50 depending on where you fit into the British Library's hierarchy of concessions

The British Library currently has an exhibition on British comic writers and artists called Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK. I went last weekend and have been grappling with this review for the last week. The experience was actually very reminiscent of the Barbican's animation exhibition: a high entry fee, material arranged thematically and a superficial look at the subject. Again, I went in with high expectations, (Dave McKean was the art director!), but overall I was a bit disappointed.

Stack: June

This month's Stack delivery was the dual-language magazine Perdiz. Perdiz is about happiness, or more accurately, some of the things that make some people happy: karaoke, drugs, shoelaces, photography and storm-chasing are some of the things covered by this issue alone.

Each Stack delivery arrives with a letter from the founder of Stack that introduces the magazine and tells you how great it is. I haven't really felt the need to mention them until now when this month's letter described Perdiz's content as "slightly unhinged", which is a pretty accurate summary of how I felt reading it. It skips between wildly disparate subjects with manic glee, perfectly capturing the fine line between enthusiast and obsessive. It even looks pretty strange. Check out the exposed spine:

All text is in both English and Spanish, with Spanish being the first language of the Perdiz staff. The occasionally clunky English translations just add to the general sense of delightful oddness. The whole experience was endearingly weird. Perdiz is definitely something very different.

Would I buy it again? It's quite expensive, so probably not. That said, I found myself thinking about it quite a bit afterwards. I mean, I learnt that I tie my shoes in the same way as the world's foremost expert on shoelaces! (We both favour the Over Under style of lacing, in case you wondered.) That made me pretty happy actually...

Executioner

This took a long time to put together! (After the cut are some photos from its month-long construction.)

Stack: May

I've been carrying this month's Stack around for two weeks, reading it from cover to cover and wondering what on earth I'm going to write about it. This month's delivery is Offscreen, "a print magazine about the people behind bits and pixels". Broadly speaking, it looks at people who have founded or are running technology businesses, and that covers people from the CEO of moo.com, which prints business cards, to the founder of Kickboard, a program to help schools track students' progress. The contents are a series of interviews, some pages long and some only a few paragraphs long, and this issue profiles at least 25 people.

I've been struggling with what to say about it because I found myself a bit ambivalent about Offscreen. It's fascinating – reading it from cover to cover wasn't a chore by any means – but it also feels so aspirational that I kept thinking it was trying to sell me something. This is despite the fact that it has no traditional adverts! (Companies can sponsor Offscreen, and if they do they get a page in the sponsors section of the magazine. All the sponsor pages are black with white text so it's very clear that they're separate from the rest of the magazine and I really enjoyed this clear distinction of content and advertising.) There's obviously a lot of success in the interviews, but there's a lot of emphasis on happiness and personal fulfilment too. There's a repeating narrative about founding and running a successful business that also gives something back to the world or changes it for the better in some way and helps you grow as a person. As well as photographs of their subjects at work, the longer articles also include photographs of their subjects relaxing: gardening, cycling through the streets of Portland, sharing a coffee with laughing co-workers.

Aspiring to start a personally-fulfilling business is a great thing, but I doubt it's as easy as these profiles make it sound. Offscreen is not a how-to guide for launching a business or developing a new technology, but if you want to do those things you'll find a lot of inspiration in its pages – stories of people who did those things and succeeded. If you don't, you might find its evangelical passion a bit offputting. It's an interesting magazine, but I found myself wondering who its audience is, who reads it regularly. Two weeks later I'd still love to know.

Would I buy it again? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure. It's another one that I might buy for somebody else – maybe if any of my programmer friends ever launch their own start-up I'll send them a copy!

Chloe Early: Suspended at The Outsiders Gallery

Entry: Free

As promised back in February I did go to the Chloe Early show at the Outsiders Gallery. This is the first time I've been to this gallery and it is a weird space. The upstairs looks pretty much as you'd expect, apart from having a front door that looks like it belongs to an old-fashioned pub, but the basement consists of two oddly-shaped rooms, one of which you have to duck to get into, with unpainted walls. It basically looks like its owners haven't finished it yet, but it's been there for some years.

The Chloe Early show was as beautiful as I expected. Her paintings of women falling/flying/jumping are full of life and motion. The photographs online don't do them justice at all; in person, the shimmer of metallic paints, the splatters of bright colour and the texture of the brushstrokes give the impression of movement. It's as though these women could plummet back down to earth or escape even higher at any second.

In addition to the paintings there's also a short film playing in the low-ceilinged basement room. It intercuts shots of Early painting with close-ups of swirling washes of paint and shots of her models leaping. Everything is in slow-motion, set to a haunting instrumental soundtrack. Here it's Early herself we see suspended, frozen in the midst of creating these paintings. It's a lovely counterpart to the rest of the exhibition.

Stack: April

This month's Stack was another double whammy: Printed Pages and Your Days Are Numbered.

Printed Pages
Printed Pages is the print spin-off of online magazine It's Nice That. It is indeed nice. Its tagline is "championing creativity across the art and design world" and its scope is just as broad as that suggests. This issue includes an interview with Jon Link and Mick Bunnage of Modern Toss, a conversation between Tavi Gevinson and Minna Gilligan of Rookie, photographs by Bruno Drummond and Gemma Tickle, and profiles of people who work in various galleries and museums across London.

It's all very pleasant, with high production values and people talking about how great it is making things. It also felt a little bland, although some of my indifference might have stemmed from comparing this to the other magazine in April's delivery...

Would I buy it again? Probably not. It was an enjoyable read on the Tube, but it didn't grab my attention.

Your Days Are Numbered
Printed Pages looks just a little too staid and earnest alongside Your Days Are Numbered. This slim, free magazine about comics is published four times a year and, based on the strength of this issue, it's bursting with energy and irreverence. It's a mixture of short interviews and even shorter reviews, and the team behind it have had loads of fun with the layouts, which obviously incorporate lots of illustrations. It's clearly going to be a drain on my bank balance though, I have eight books to add to my wish list as a result of reading this magazine.

Would I buy it again? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, although it's free so this would actually be unnecessary. You can supposedly pay to have a year's worth of issues delivered to your house - which I was going to do! - but there's nothing in their online shop. Get it together, guys, I would give you some money if I could.