Knapsack Magazine Vol. 1 Review: The cassette is a portal to back when

Lucky Pocket Press has published a marvelous anthology of music-loving memory.

When I say Dreamcast era, do you know what I'm talking about? An exciting digital world that comes out of a CD case. The Suncoast mallrat understands. Counting BPM and extra lives leads to a club kid fever dream of dangling plastic jewelry. An ad in this imaginary magazine is for the Tamagotchi of your fantasies. The medium moved from making a mixtape to burning a CD to creating a playlist, but the reason remains the same: Totally crushed out. Knapsack Magazine Volume 1: Cassette evokes all of the above, pure nostalgia, and Lucky Pocket Press does it with pointed purpose. The first volume of Knapsack is a comics anthology on music, yes, but also memory.

There's a culture shared with comics. It occupies the same tables in Artist's Alley, adjacent crafts with practices that overlap into sequential art. The illustrators and designers who make stickers, charms, prints, figures, stuff — they often think about art the same way comics people do. Just behind the scenes. What am I printing this on, what is it capable of looking like, how will the process affect the finished piece? Their roll call is technically skilled artists who know how to make it look good.

Pocket takes the Magazine part seriously. Editors Sara Hagstrom and Steph Bulante peppered Cassette with work from everybody in the Alley. There are fake advertisements between the comics, features, outfit sheets, bios, everything but the subscription card insert (though mine did come with stickers). The illustrators really know how to make a complex color printing process pop. In sharp contrast are the comics, printed in a straight monochrome of blue or pink. A throwback — all of it is, really — but the color of the comics specifically is a nod to the manga Jump anthologies printed like that in the early 2000s.

Visually, the influence is straight-up manga with a healthy dose of Giant Robot Magazine. The comics come off as raw and, at first glance, more unpolished than the composed interstitial art, hitting a broad variety of art aesthetics one would mostly associate with Japan a decade or two ago. Read them, though, and the single-color side of Cassette recalls the kind of work you'd see in early 2000s anthologies, but from Highwater Books, Alternative Comics, old-school Top Shelf Productions. The feeling coming across to the reader is more important than the story coming to a resolution. 

Anthologies should be hard to describe. Contradictory, like this one is. The differences between the entries complement each other. Having a central theme that can be widely and loosely interpreted gives Cassette a healthy variety of stories and overall cohesion, pieces that reflect upon each other. The manga flashback/Jet Set Radio Future vibe unites the issue in the concrete way one expects from a themed anthology, yet there's an esoteric common ground between stories that puts them in conversation with one another.

The young scavenger dances across the page and back through time. This story, the angel in the music box, is set post-apocalypse, not at all like the introvert-tries-karaoke comic (except for their channeling the power of music, of course). I liked the Cassette comics all for different reasons, but the bait-n-switch of "The Luthier's Son" working on me makes it my favorite of the bunch. It takes the act of playing the violin so seriously; the ribbons of flying sheet music emerging from and encircling the symphony as they perform is so majestic, I forgot how goofy the boy in the terrible t-shirt has been up until this point.

Music and memory. How a song can take you back. Feeling like you can't articulate the question but know music is the answer. 

These artists are reflecting on an age where music helped you embrace yourself, your desires, the emotions that you keep under wraps around everybody else. So a lot of romance and friendship drama and the music pushing it through, the catalyst for growth, or at least change, is sometimes the source of laughs or wonder. Cassette is the feeling of back when music was a big mystery you'd only begun to discover as you were discovering things about yourself. With that comes the trappings of the times, though Cassette scores big because it resembles without being a copy. Knapsack's contributors understand that music and art come together as style.

Knapsack Magazine Volume 1: Cassette is available now. For ordering information, click this.

Lucky Pocket Press / $35.00
Written and illustrated by Amanda Castillo, Sunmi, Theo Stultz, Reetz, Inder, Pa Luis, Nichole Shinn, Mogumu, Kelly Ficarra, Janet Sung, Gica Tam, BOXERBUN, Em Allen, Diansakhu Banton-Perry, Chelsea Akpan, Billie Snippet, Angie Hewitt, and Ally Gonzalez.
Cover art by Lyle Lynde.
Edited by Sara Hagstrom and Steph Bulante.