50 pages 29.5 x 20.5 cm Language: English, German Paperback 1999
The second issue of JVS, a short-lived but sharply distinctive Swiss graffiti magazine of the late 1990s, built entirely around illegal train writing. Under the banner Are We Really Vandals? and an editorial masthead of pseudonyms, the issue moves from Swiss steel — SBB whole cars and panels — outward to Heidelberg's burning trains and an Allover survey spanning Sydney, New York and London, closing on a SwissTrainz feature with the VTO and GTK crews. Throughout, the magazine keeps to its own subject: the panel in motion, the layup at night, the run rather than the finished flick.
What sets this issue apart is its voice. The opening first-person narrative — a writer stopped by police at a legal Hall of Fame at half past one in the morning — turns into a pointed reflection on names, belonging and being treated as a third-class citizen in Switzerland, printed in both German and English. Wrapped in a deliberately provocative, fetish-styled cover, it is a genuinely transgressive DIY document of its moment: European train culture at the turn of the millennium, self-published on the margins and rarely surfacing today.
