SOUL & FLAVOR

This is the intro to the next issue of Die Würst.

Welcome to the relaunched Die Würst! I took a break from this & have come back with something even more crucial! I’m writing this on my birthday. We’re now publishing a mission in each issue (first released on my Patreon), including more lore & interviews with some of the DUNGEON DEGENERATES team. I wanted to discuss Soul & Flavor in an age of shiny plastic! I’ve been railing on about this my whole life! Things have only gotten worse & I’ve gotten less desperate, but I feel the need to share with you. Part of the whole deal of doing this as a proper zine is to show that the true culture isn’t about high production values. I get people who are trained in this era of the highly polished turd, with perfect bound, glossy paged zines, they want really high production values on everything. But, like so many things they lack Soul & Flavor. I come from a culture, an expectation where you’d get a zine printed on some old copy machine in black & white, the prints would barely be burned onto the paper, the thing would be put together by someone who had no professionalism but a lot of spirit & the content would be life changing. I didn’t even own a saddle stapler when I was a teen, I’d use a regular stapler through the paper into the rug & bend the prongs down with my knife! I’ve produced things with those kinds of copiers, this machine that we use “Lil Monstro” is much better. The paper is better & the content isn’t as desperate but is coming from a similar place of Soul, the Flavor comes from a broth which I’ve been making my whole life. I have very high expectations in terms of Soul & communicating the culture with people & doing it right. High production values are ubiquitous & most often there is a soul-sucking nature of the work. Fantasy Worlds are a dime a dozen these days & I feel that it’s my job to clearly communicate the standard for in-depth, flavorful & soulful fantasy with DUNGEON DEGENERATES. Really it’s with GOBLINKO in general, but this isn’t a general GOBLINKO zine. I’ve been completely willing to use whatever vehicles people expect to receive culture in but I’ve got certain cultural values to uphold, that I can’t bend from & one of those is to put substance over presentation, but presentation is pretty important too, I am an artist after all. My point is, don’t be fooled by the polish, don’t be so amazed by the spectacle that you don’t realize how much bullshit is out there.