8 - Battery

January 2007

PRINT EDITION: Sold out

Original blurb:

Powered by Battery, Bek Galloway lingers after the party, Andrea Tallerita reads under the covers and Gerard McKeown compares kung fu and karate. That's just for starters. Contents all laid under duress and in cramped conditions by long-suffering artists.

By now, submissions had begun arriving from a range of sources, and conseqently the number and range of interpretations of the keyword were multiplying at a fair old rate. At the magazine’s 5th birthday party in 2010, I read aloud Irish poet Gerard McKeown’s Battery submission, ‘The Practical Advantages of Kung Fu Over Karate’ as one of my personal favourites of all Fuselit time. It includes the magical line: “This is me having sex / with your girlfriend / while you still love her.” Mike Stone’s gorgeous ‘Battery Baby’ artwork also featured, and I wrote about a disgruntled bat.

There's lots to say about Battery. It was our first issue after moving to London, and the print shop seemed to have terrible trouble getting it right because they weren't used to printing A6 booklets. This is what prompted us to go into the business of making the things ourselves. The borders this time were a column of flying feathers on the right, and a stack of empty cages (with bars broken) on the left, with the contributor name in an egg. These were all visual allusions to battery farming. I'd also started learning stenography as part of my job, so this issue included a section of Shelley's 'Ozymandias' written in steno as a code to crack. The cover was by Cliff Hammett again, and we included three pages of his preparatory sketches, something I'd like to bring back for future covers. As well as Mike's piece, there was also some lovely artwork by Bek Galloway and a sketch of my own based on the Henry Fuseli (get it?) painting 'The Nightmare', but with the goblin attaching clamps to the sleeping woman's nipples so as to use her dream energy to start a car.