Again with the black pages. Sure, everyone (except me) thinks it’s cool and slick. Add a beret and a clove cigarette and it might be downright hip. But when the trend passes all you’re left with is a grab-bag of silliness. Don’t believe me? Remember Desperately Seeking Susan and all those Madonna wannabes?

Back to the point . . . .

The poetry inside of Galapagos is fairly decent, though the selection is slim. There are a couple of Net “regulars” in the current issue. By regulars, I mean those whose names seem to pop up in every Internet magazine from here to Zimbabwe and back (where do they come from?).

Exotic Esoterics is somewhat interesting. Each month the editor lists five words considered by them to be “the best in the English language,” then follow that list with five bogus definitions. Or, as the editors ask, are they “the real ones hidden under irony and sarcasm?”

The fiction section (alas) was very, very thin. One piece. So, to all of you fiction writers out there, I’m guessing these guys need submissions – and lots of them.

The layout isn’t altogether unappealing. I mean, it’s fairly simple and straightforward, but there is really very little else here. The zine as a whole didn’t grab me. I sat there looking, trying to find something unique, something that would set this zine apart from all the others, but just couldn’t find it. In a strange way Galapagos is this Darwinian example of how a zine, if left to its own devices, can evolve into a new sub species that holds no resemblance to it’s ancestor.