GOOD BYE!
The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries

What a great idea for a zine. Obituaries like they ought to be written, with a nice sense of perspective and the willingness to be critical if not downright nasty in spots. Steve Miller has been publishing Good Bye! for a while—it's approximately bimonthly and the issue I read was #16—and I guess, when there's no foreseeable end to your subject matter (ba-dump-bump) you can sustain this kind of thing for a long, long time.

This issue had an interesting mix of obituaries, including Carlos Castanada (". . . one wishes that after, say, Journey to Ixtlan, Castanada himself had been more cognizant of the power of silence."), Richard McDonald, one of the two founding brothers of McDonald's, Harold Butler, ("Like the McDonald's brothers, Harold Butler made his mark by scarring America's roadways with obnoxious restaurant signs. His were for Denny's, the franchised sit-down restaurants that became famous in recent years for discriminating against black customers"), Roy Rogers (complete with a hilarious section on the "Eleven Ways of Looking at a Cowboy"), and Reg Smythe ("It's difficult to come up with a more fitting epitaph for cartoonist Reg Smythe than the compliment Homer Simpson gave to Smythe's famous creation: "Ah Andy Capp, you wife-beating drunk.")

There's also a host of anonymous obituaries a la the Darwin Awards or News of the Weird. High points of this issue included "'70s REBELLION: Birmingham, England—A bartender killed himself because his bar was converted into a '70s theme pub, and the man could not stand the idea of wearing flared trousers and a wig at work", "SKY SURFER: Quincy, IL—Jerry Loftis, who helped pioneer sky surfing, was killed during a sky dive," and "TITANIC REDUX: Oslo—A Norwegian woman died while attempting to imitate the heroine of the movie Titanic when she leaned over the edge of a ferry railing and lost her grip . . . The victim, possibly drunk, had talked about the Titanic scene before setting out to imitate it, witnesses said."

I'm sure some people would or will find this morbid, but my overall experience was rather cathartic.

goodbye.

Reviewed by Brian Brasel