Ektopia

After two and a half years in the making, Issue 01, “All These Years,” has finally been released. Consumption Manual, or {cm} as it’s known, is a new quarterly free publication all about art street art and street inspired art. I got hold of my copy this week and I’ve got to say it’s amazing, I can’t believe that people can just decide to create this kind of project and for them to end up with such a high quality mag.

Editor and publisher, Austin Allsbrook, along with one of my favourite artists, Blaine Fontana (in a role as editor and creative director) have teamed up to create an astonishing magazine. It’s beautifully laid out in 8.0″ x 8.0″ format made of “heavy matte stock, 96 pages of content and a great artist line-up” including Joe Ledbetter, Buff Monster, Erik Groff, Asbestos, Pars Kid, Andrew Pommier, Erik Otto, Blaine Fontana, Mike Gallegos, Stuter, Abe Lincoln Jr., D.wrail Foundation, Travis Millard, Jon Lee, Downtimer and Public ad campaign. Each artist get their own few pages with pictures of their work and an interview undertaken by Austin. Some of the interviews are insightful, some bits are strangely interesting and some bits are completely off the wall! What you always get is entertaining though.

It’s a real cut above the other free publications you can normally pick up in stores. Apart from the fact that the line up of guests is constantly great, it doesn’t seem to be packed with advertising. Sure there are a few adverts here and there but you hardly notice them as there are so few and they are all seem to be directly related to the publication you’ll be forgiven for thinking they’re an artistically integral part of the mag. At the moment {cm} is being distributed at loads of places of the US and a handful of places elsewhere in the world, hopefully more distributors will be found to fill in the gaps soon. If you can’t get to one of the outlets that supply the mag you can always get them direct from {cm}. All it’ll cost you is the postage and packing, bargain! Each issue of {cm} is going to be a limited run of 10,000, so get it while it’s hot. Issue 02 “Ninja’s Sailing Pirate Ships” (what a great title) should be out mid September, I can’t wait to see it. Congratulations on getting the first issue off the ground guys.