24.15.12.6 #2

23.15.12.6 #2 looks less like a zine with a title than a packet whose designation must be decoded before it can be safely opened.

The numbers translate into WOLF. Twenty-three is W, fifteen is O, twelve is L, and six is F. The title is a password, but also a warning about the social structure waiting inside. Nearly every page concerns packs, predators, hunted bodies, shared insignia, coded speech or the transformation of individual people into members of a private order.

The cover is made from brown, fibrous stock with visible staples along the left edge. Four black symbols resembling double-barred crosses or improvised runes occupy the corners. Between them, several dark human and animal forms have been cut apart and recombined into an airborne struggle. A wolf’s head appears near the center. Human limbs tumble around it. One figure seems to be attacking, another falling, another barely distinguishable from the torn shapes surrounding it.

Below the collage is a command:

KEEP THEM.

COVER THEM WITH THE BLOOD OF

JESUS.

The sentence carries the rhythm of evangelical protection, but “keep them” is unusually ambiguous. Keep them safe? Keep them contained? Keep them as possessions? The blood of Jesus may be a holy covering, camouflage, inherited guilt or literal gore. Before the first page is turned, religion has already become difficult to separate from violence.

The photocopied image and inexpensive cover stock prevent the command from feeling like polished occult merchandise. It looks closer to something received from a fringe church, detention center, basement collective or frightened person who has invented his own theology.

Inside, an abstract black collage resembles a crucifix, architectural plan and human figure collapsing into one shape. An email address is printed underneath it. The opposite page contains a hand-drawn geometric sphere, issue number, photograph of a hooded figure standing among white cross-shaped boards, and a list of contributors.

The Danish heading says, in effect, “the magazine is made by.” Elias Bender is named first. Specific pieces follow: a centaur by Jakob, “Oriental Village” by Loke, a contribution by Dan whose handwritten title is difficult to read, and skulls by Johan.

That small credit list changes the object immediately. What first appeared to be one person’s sealed cosmology is actually a group construction. The friends do not write essays introducing themselves. Each places an image, organism or visual system inside the shared enclosure.

The zine is a pack before it is a publication.

The first major spread contains the images that would later produce the greatest controversy. On the left, a hooded figure wears a white garment marked by a dark cross. Only the eyes and teeth remain visible. On the right, similarly hooded people restrain or attack a kneeling figure.

Viewed in the United States, the resemblance to Ku Klux Klan imagery is impossible to miss. The pointed hoods, covered faces, white garments and assault upon an isolated person activate that history whether or not it was consciously intended. The cross insignia also carries military, fascist and extremist associations that cannot be made neutral merely by keeping its exact meaning unclear.

Rønnenfelt later said the drawing was not intended to depict the Klan. He described it as two members of a gang stabbing another man and acknowledged that his distance from American history may have prevented him from anticipating the resemblance.

That explanation is useful, but it does not cancel what the picture does.

Images carry histories beyond their maker’s intention. A hood may begin as anonymity, menace or improvised gang clothing, then arrive before another audience wearing the memory of racial terror. The drawing’s uncertainty is not blankness. It is densely occupied territory.

The page is also an early demonstration of a habit visible throughout the zine: moral position is withheld while visual force is intensified. There is no caption explaining whether the attack is feared, admired, condemned or presented as a vision. The viewer receives insignia, posture and domination without instructions.

This makes the image powerful and irresponsible at the same time.

The next spread moves from human packs to animal identity. A young man is shown from behind wearing a heavily textured jacket whose surface resembles fur, feathers or a pelt. He holds a dark object in one hand and a knife or long tool in the other. Faces or masks appear on the rear pockets of his trousers, so that even the clothing seems capable of looking back.

Four hand-drawn wolf heads occupy the facing page. They have been drawn on lined notebook paper, each one attempting a different solution to the same animal. One wolf is skeletal and agitated. Another is all teeth and radiating fur. Another has been built from tight circular patterns. The last is frontal and strangely calm, its face marked by symmetrical ornament.

The sequence resembles a young artist studying how many emotional states can be fitted inside one emblem.

The wolf is not merely wildlife. It offers a ready-made identity containing loyalty, hierarchy, violence, wilderness and pack belonging. It can represent the solitary outsider while simultaneously promising membership in a chosen group. That contradiction has made wolves irresistible to adolescent subcultures, military units, sports teams, mystics and political movements.

Here the animal becomes a mask that does not need to be worn on the face. It can appear as a title, drawing style, jacket texture, social arrangement or way of moving through the city.

The zine then begins contaminating its private drawings with found public material.

One spread combines photographs of an older suited man with pieces of medical or anatomical imagery. Bodies are rotated and divided by black strips. The facing page uses an advertisement for Oriental Village, apparently a massage business, alongside cropped photographs of women, exposed flesh and figures taken from other printed sources.

The original advertisement offers fantasy as a service. Its women are posed, priced and made interchangeable. The collage does not correct that commercial gaze. It cuts the material apart again, turning a body already used as an advertisement into another fragment inside someone else’s visual system.

The section attributed to Loke seems to understand the ugliness and absurdity already present in the source. Telephone numbers, promises of availability and photographic poses become part of the composition. Desire has been processed into local commerce before the scissors ever arrive.

The zine repeatedly moves between handmade marks and material stolen from newspapers, notebooks, advertisements and institutional print. This gives it the texture of a mind feeding upon everything within reach. Nothing is too sacred, stupid, personal or disposable to enter.

A small photograph of a burning car appears almost alone on the next page. It occupies only a fraction of the available white space. The image is bordered in black, making it look like a tiny nighttime television through which a private catastrophe is being watched.

The enormous drawing opposite it explodes in the other direction. A hybrid animal opens its mouth beneath feathered or flame-like forms. An eagle, wolf, bear and ceremonial headdress seem to have been merged into one unstable creature. Cross symbols, tiny figures, foliage, commercial packaging and architectural pieces accumulate around its neck.

The drawing does not merely represent an animal. It behaves like one.

Lines reproduce until they become fur, smoke, feathers, nerves and weather. The page consumes recognizable objects and incorporates them into the beast. A carton or container remains partially visible beneath the organic material, as though an ordinary product has begun producing mythology.

The following spread expands this method. Soldiers, women, weapons, pornography, uniforms and torn figures collide on the left. A masked person aims or carries a long weapon above a gathering of female faces and bodies. The collage has no stable horizon. Every figure is either emerging from another image or being swallowed by it.

On the right, an enormous animal head is built from thousands of short marks. The face nearly disappears inside its own texture. It may be a wolf, bird, dog or combination of several creatures. The image looks less drawn than grown through obsessive repetition.

Together the pages suggest two different forms of violence.

The collage uses cutting. A body is separated from its original setting and forced into a new relation.

The drawing uses accumulation. A body disappears because too many marks have been placed upon it.

One destroys identity by removing context. The other destroys identity by overwhelming it with attention.

Then the zine becomes unexpectedly personal.

A Danish death notice for Henrik Bender Mortensen is reproduced beside a photograph of a church interior. The announcement identifies a father, father-in-law, grandfather and friend who died in September 2009. His exact relationship to the principal maker is not stated inside the zine, but the shared Bender name makes the placement feel intimate rather than randomly harvested.

The memorial is not treated with the visual vandalism applied to advertisements and news clippings. It remains readable and centered. The church photograph beneath it is severe and nearly empty: altar, cross, benches, geometric supports.

After pages of invented violence, a real death enters quietly.

The facing drawing shows a large bison or bull lowering its head toward a rabbit. The larger animal’s face is tired and heavy rather than aggressive. Its mass fills the page, while the rabbit occupies a small pocket near the bottom.

This encounter is unlike the attack on the cover. Predator and prey are replaced by two unequal creatures sharing space. The bison looks mournful, almost protective. The rabbit does not flee.

For a moment, the animal world stops performing brutality and becomes capable of tenderness.

The next pages build a secret language. Long passages have been written entirely in handmade symbols, each character combining lines, circles, hooks, branching forms and the recurring double-barred cross. A circular diagram on the facing page contains rifles, blades, animal parts, geometric sectors and another sphere at its center.

The composition resembles a ceremonial wheel, military insignia, magical seal and board-game mechanism at once.

A later page supplies the key. Each symbol is paired with a letter, including the additional characters used in Danish. The coded writing is therefore not decorative nonsense. It is a substitution alphabet that can theoretically be read.

This changes the reader’s role.

Until this point, the zine can be consumed visually. The cipher makes passive looking insufficient. Anyone who wants the concealed language must return to the earlier spread, compare each mark with the key and slowly translate it.

The zine does not simply contain a secret. It manufactures the labor required to receive one.

That choice is central to the issue’s psychology. A private alphabet allows ordinary thoughts to acquire ceremonial importance. A sentence becomes heavier when it must be excavated symbol by symbol. Even if the decoded message proves simple, the act of concealment has already changed its emotional scale.

Teenage subcultures often invent names, marks and internal languages not because existing language has stopped working, but because ordinary language feels insufficiently charged. A coded alphabet makes friendship resemble conspiracy.

The drawing beside the key is among the issue’s most excessive images. Bodies, tongues, teeth, hollow eyes and hooded forms knot together inside a mass of black lines. The recurring insignia appears on white disks embedded throughout the organism. A central human figure seems crushed or absorbed by the surrounding matter.

It is impossible to determine whether the creature is protecting, digesting or worshipping the person.

The image could be read as the zine’s entire visual system made biological. Symbols become cells. Hoods become tissue. Mouths reproduce. Group identity becomes a body large enough to consume its members.

After this density, the next spread becomes almost comic.

The left page reproduces illustrations of prehistoric skulls and evolutionary stages, accompanied by Danish scientific captions and heavy black bars. Human development is presented as measurement: cranial volume, age, bone shape, classification.

On the right, a childlike centaur stands on notebook lines wearing a patterned cap and shirt. Its human arms are raised. A thought bubble contains bottles or small objects. Loose anatomical details hang beneath the horse body.

The credit page identifies the centaur as Jakob’s contribution and the skulls as Johan’s.

The pairing punctures the zine’s solemnity. Human evolution and an awkward fantasy creature occupy equal pages. One carries the authority of scientific illustration; the other appears to have wandered out of a school notebook. Both attempt to imagine a body assembled from history.

The centaur is funny, but it is also perfectly at home. Nearly every creature in the zine is already a hybrid. Wolves become men, men become uniforms, birds become flames, bodies become emblems and diagrams become rituals.

The final spread before the back cover returns to newspaper reality. Danish articles refer to murder, violent crime and mass animal sacrifice in Nepal. A small clipping about a band or local cultural event sits nearby, visually reduced to the same gray grain as the reports of death.

The facing page presents a dangling arrangement of limbs, animal heads, ropes and spiked clubs. It resembles a butcher’s display, trophy rack and heraldic crest. The drawing converts the newspaper’s factual violence back into mythology.

This completes the object’s circuit.

Reality enters through a clipping. The zine digests it. Violence emerges as symbol.

On the rear cover, four knives point inward. A large tooth floats above a vertical collage of mouths, flesh, fingers and animal parts. Another mouth-like cluster sits near the bottom. Beneath it is the identifying mark:

DOGMEAT

2010

The title of the small publishing operation feels like the final ingredient. Dogmeat suggests what remains after the wolf has been stripped of romance. The noble pack animal becomes flesh, refuse or food. The mythic creature and the degraded material are two conditions of the same body.

Dogmeat was not simply a logo attached after the work was complete. Its small catalog included zines, cassettes, a homemade film, a magazine and shows. 23.15.12.6 #2 was catalogued as DM04. It emerged from a Copenhagen network in which publishing, music, performance, drawing and social life had not yet been divided into professional departments.

The people credited inside make the object historically startling.

Elias Bender Rønnenfelt was the principal maker. Jakob, Dan and Johan were his bandmates in Iceage. Loke Rahbek was part of Sexdrome, co-founded Posh Isolation and would collaborate with Rønnenfelt in War, later called Vår. What looks at first like an anonymous occult pamphlet is a handmade artifact created by the central figures of a Copenhagen music community shortly before international attention arrived.

It should not be mistaken for an official Iceage manifesto. It contains different hands, private jokes, borrowed images, grief, visual experiments and attractions that may not align into one ideology. Its value lies partly in that lack of alignment.

This is not branding perfected by adults around a conference table.

It is branding being discovered accidentally by teenagers and friends who do not yet know which marks will follow them into the wider world.

The later controversy surrounding the hooded figures demonstrates the danger of that process. A symbol chosen for menace can carry historical meanings its maker has not considered. Once reproduced publicly, it no longer belongs exclusively to the private pack that selected it.

The zine’s ambiguity is therefore both its power and its limitation.

It refuses to tell the reader exactly what to believe. That creates atmosphere, uncertainty and space for interpretation. It also allows historical violence to be borrowed without taking responsibility for what the image may awaken in others.

Youth does not make the imagery meaningless. It helps explain the appetite behind it.

The makers appear drawn toward symbols that feel older, larger and more dangerous than their immediate lives: crosses, wolves, knives, guns, skulls, codes, religious blood, evolutionary diagrams and ritual wheels. Each offers access to intensity without requiring a complete explanation.

The zine is an engine for generating seriousness.

A burning car is not merely a car. It becomes a tiny apocalypse.

An advertisement is not merely commercial trash. It becomes evidence of corrupted desire.

A notebook wolf is not merely a drawing. It becomes a tribal emblem.

A friend is not merely a friend. He becomes the keeper of one organ inside a shared beast.

That is why 23.15.12.6 #2 remains compelling beyond the later fame of the people involved. It captures the moment when art is still inseparable from social invention. The contributors are creating images, but they are also creating one another as artists, musicians and members of a world whose rules have not yet hardened.

The result is ugly, beautiful, alarming, immature, obsessive and occasionally tender.

It contains imagery that deserves criticism, especially where borrowed menace collides with histories of racial and political terror. It also contains extraordinary evidence of young people understanding that music alone could not hold everything they wanted to build. They needed paper, codes, emblems, films, cassettes, drawings, shows and a name for the thing releasing them.

They called that thing Dogmeat.

They called this issue WOLF.

Between those two names sits the entire zine: the pack and the carcass, loyalty and appetite, the fantasy of belonging and the material damage left behind when belonging becomes predatory.