The Snake Pit Book

Rating:
Summary: Snakepit a guilty pleasure for the Reverend
Review: Remember when you were a kid and you had those little "flipbooks?" You know the ones that I'm talking about, where they had a different picture on each page and when you fanned the pages, the moving pictures approximated a crude animated story. In many ways, that's what Ben "Snakepit" White's The Snakepit Book reminds me of. Published as a zine since the summer of 2000, Snakepit is a daily three-panel strip describing the writer/artist's day. Taken individually, the rough-drawn strips portray the daily grind of its punk protagonist - work, play, love and loss - in excruciating repetition.

When taken as a whole, however, The Snakepit Book, collecting three years of daily strips, fascinates like the flipbooks of our youth. White is a friendly music fan, musician and punk aficionado, and what he lacks in artistic direction he more than makes up for with unflagging spirit and dedication to the DIY aesthetic. The Snakepit Book is a charming, entertaining read, best experienced by tasting a week or so of White's life at a time. During the couple of weeks that it will take you to digest the book, White's charming autobiographical tales will have fired your imagination, forcing the reader to take a closer look at their own daily accomplishments.

Personally, I also appreciate the song titles listed at the top of each day's strip, White's creative and often times appropriate song choices providing a running soundtrack to the story. A member of punk band J Church, White's extensive musical knowledge and far-ranging tastes mirror my own, his song-a-day approach leading me to dig into my own record collection to rediscover some of the tunes he matches so well to the daily strips. Highly recommended, White's Snakepit strip breathes new life into a stale zine medium, The Snakepit Book an entertaining read that is full of energy and intelligence. (From the ALT.CULTURE.GUIDE webzine)