Giz’s Cheap Toys reads like Cometbus if half the issue happened to be in French. This issue—which I think is already a few volumes back as of my writing—is part travelogue, part scene report, part music review sounding board, and part-obscurist progressive history lesson. Although I had to skim over half the articles due to my inability to read more than a few French words, the articles in English were quite enjoyable. Perhaps my favorite section was the brief history and critical review of the methods of the Bread and Puppet Theater, a radical puppet theater troupe initially out of New York in the ‘60s, but is still around into the present. It felt very much like a punk take on some of the research that happens at the art history library I work at, so I may be a bit biased. The scene report out of Dubai was also interesting for putting a little light on a section of the world which does not immediately spring to mind as a breeding ground for any kind of underground scene (although the preponderance of Filipino-led bands covered leads me to believe that Dubai punk/metal scene may secretly be an outpost of Manila). I won’t lie; a couple of the articles where kind of hard to read due to the “Google translate” style of broken English, but, overall, not a bad way to catch up on some punk goings on from abroad. –Adrian Salas (Giz, 7, rue mazagran, 13001 Marseille, France, [email protected])