Review: MyMag part 2, Hey Olivia!

This is the second MyMag review. The first is here.

Hey Olivia! is the curated selection of Olivia Munn, an American model and presenter of Attack Of The Show, a sort of gadget show with comedy sketches on cable channel G4. She’s the only woman in the initial MyMag selection, but her magazine’s intended audience seems firmly rooted towards a testosterone-heavy demographic. As with the other magazines, the cover contains a list of the publications inside, in this case handwritten by Olivia herself.

Where AOKI‘s first spread was a Diesel ad, here we get an image of Munn in frilly panties, with her shirt pulled up her back. The same image is repeated in an insert poster, ideal for adorning a teenage bedroom wall. As with AOKI, there are stickers too.

Though the colour is pink rather than magenta, the same pattern as AOKI is followed – one main colour on the cover, an opening one-colour contents page, and then a letter from the guest editor. It’s a good aesthetic and a decent opening, too.

In Hey Olivia!, our editor’s letter talks candidly about her “asshole stepfather”, before thanking her dedicated fan group. It seems that she has a committed following, and that she looks after it well, making her a good choice for MyMag.

Where AOKI contained ads for his own record label and clothing line, Munn has no such commercial activities, so ad spaces are given to charities Kiva and the Wounded Warrior Project, with the back cover taken up by Bing – not a terrible choice for someone who makes her living presenting a gadget show.

In AOKI‘s exclusive content opening, there were party photos and few words. Hey Olivia! is a little more revealing, starting out with a spread containing 25 facts about by and about her, a selection of blurry, semi-raunchy ‘polaroids’ (“I turn my camera on for you”), a Twitter Q&A, and finally extended excerpts from her forthcoming book, ‘Suck It, Wonder Woman!’, pages from which have been blown up to match the magazine’s larger format (unless it’s actually a large-print book for the hard-of-seeing).

The book seems to be a collection of short anecdotes, mostly about male fantasies and how to ask a girl out. The magazine then follows that with 20 pages of a (exclusive?) fashion shoot of Munn in various items of lingerie. In one of them, she’s brandishing a light pink lipstick, most likely the explanation for the choice of cover colour and style.

So far, so Maxim (in whose pages Munn was recently featured), except it’s then followed with a selection from Flaunt, a thoughtful art-fashion-and-culture magazine from LA. What we get from Flaunt is a strange and wonderful Willem Dafoe interview and photoshoot, a fascinating piece about how one woman built the world’s first online music strategy, and a typically awkward interview with Daft Punk.

It’s a little uncertain how old the pieces are – they don’t seem to be from the same year – but they read well. I wouldn’t mind knowing what issues they were taken from – as long as Munn was reading the magazines then, it doesn’t matter if they’re not from last month. (And if she wasn’t reading the magazines then, they seem to be an odd choice.) Overall, the change in tone from a sexy photoshoot to an offbeat cultural read is a little jarring, but it certainly brings some weight to the whole publication.

A helium-esque mindset returns, however, with spreads from geek, a kind of younger cross between T3, Wired and Total Film. A piece on Jim Henson is not as strong as its subject matter (admittedly quite a big ask), and is followed oddly by a geek editor’s letter that refers entirely to articles not included in Hey Olivia! Then we get a fairly superficial Q+A with Seth Green, and an entirely incongruously tough read on the philosophical issues surrounding biological matter transporters.

The best piece from the geek selection is about a group of documentary makers trying to track down Breakfast Club director John Hughes. As with AOKI, though, I feel I’m missing something – why did Munn pick these pieces in particular? Does she like Hughes films? Does she know Seth Green? What’s the connection, other than they all were published by the same magazine? (By the way, geek‘s photo captions are execrable.)

Last of the three magazines featured (Munn’s book counts as one of the publications in Hey Olivia!) is Wizard, “the magazine of comics, entertainment and pop culture.” The opening feature is a very strange choice, being a summary of the best colleges to study illustration and comics.

Highly niche, and also quickly dated, it’s a bizarre piece to include, let alone open with. A short Kevin Smith Q&A is next, then a selection of reader-made, and mostly badly photographed costumes, and a piece on Disney’s takeover of Marvel, mostly based on guesswork and tweets.

And then the whole thing ends, abruptly, and unsatisfactorily. As with AOKI, it feels that they’ve missed a trick or two in not getting much insight or connection between the features and the guest editor. While the first half of the magazine will certainly delight the OMFG (Olivia Munn Fan Group), the second half feels a bit too unnecessarily heavy, without much reward.

Hey Olivia! gives us a mixture of articles from magazines that she reads, but no insight as to why these features in particular were chosen, or what Munn thinks of Willem Dafoe, Jim Henson or anything else – which is surely what the fans would want more of.

Finally, Munn has said that she will sign and return any copies that is mailed to her. Details here.

Next: by far the most curious of the three, Ratmag.