On its 20-year anniversary, I chatted with Marc Lecompte of the Princess Cafe about his community zine from the 2000s, CTRPLLR, and KW music culture of the time.
Lecompte first came to KW at 17, performing with his band Decilbully at the now-defunct Circus Room in Kitchener. Impressed by the area’s thriving music scene, he chose Wilfrid Laurier University for his studies.
While studying, working at Jane Bond and performing in bands, Lecompte began to meet like-minded, creative people. He enjoyed collaging concert posters together, toying with the texture and sheen of different materials.
Influenced by the Toronto zine Wavelength Music and Montreal’s VICE, Lecompte began work on a zine of his own: a music-scene companion piece that assembled his friends’ art, writing or whatever they cared to submit—CTRPLLR.
Between 2005 and 2008, Lecompte published thirty-two issues of CTRPLLR. It was an entirely analogue production—each issue was painstakingly handcrafted by Lecompte in a fragmented collage style.
But this is the crux: CTRPLLR maintained a completely open submission policy. Whatever people sent to Lecompte was published with zero editing—even if he didn’t like it.
The zine functioned like an anarchic community noticeboard: thoughtful essays and provocative underground comics shared space with recipes for peanut butter & vinegar sandwiches. One staggeringly detailed panel illustration just asks the community to help the author find their stolen longboard.
While this sounds like a potentially bloated format, browsing through, I am struck by the quality of the contributions. Many people took their art seriously and submitted great work each month without expectation of pay or reward.
There is a fundamental playfulness to the project: for every sullen piece of teenage poetry there is a double page spread reviewing pirate jokes. It reads like a manifestation of community spirit in all its wild, irreverent excess.
While Lecompte is coy about the content (“a lot of it was nonsense”), the quality of the covers is undeniable. Each cover was made by a local artist commissioned by Lecompte. Some are minimalist and twee; others look like the splintering self-portrait of a dissolving mind—all eye-catching and compelling.
Each month, five hundred copies were printed and distributed for free across the KW area. The first copy was printed after-hours at Blackberry’s RIM offices, thanks to a friend who worked there. Their printing didn’t go to plan, and ink ended up all over the company’s floor:
“One of the biggest tech companies in the world at the time basically paid to print the first issue, […] and we left a giant mess.”
CTRPLLR was a hit, popular across KW, but local media did not know what to make of it. Lecompte shows me a particularly unflattering interview with the Waterloo Record where he is depicted as a scruffy stoner dropout and the content of the zine is hardly described.
“It is a handmade, low-budget, cut-and-paste collection of folded, stapled pages with no discernible mandate, theme, or point,” the article states.
This distain for the zine’s scrappy appearance misses the point. This handcrafted passion project is special because of its looseness, its imperfections worn on its sleeve.
Lecompte is bashful about CTRPLLR’s importance but admits it had a cultural impact.
“For me, it really helped build my own community. […] And, I like to think, the culture of the city for a brief period,” he said.
Every month, Lecompte read each submission, formatted them into the zine and organised the printing and distribution. What is remarkable is that he did not earn any income from this intense workload. While advertising was peppered through for local businesses like Old Goat Books and Ethel’s, these only covered the costs of creation.
Local graphic designer Jon Johnson was another key figure in CTRPLLR. Johnson was the sole contributor to publish work in every issue, and he helped Marc with designing and formatting the zine.
Johnson believes there was “magic in the air” in the mid-2000s Ontario music scene. With indie bands like Arcade Fire coming to global prominence and a strong DIY music community in KW, there was a momentum building that CTRPLLR tapped into.
Working on CTRPLLR together marked the beginning of a long friendship between Marc and Jon; Marc was Jon’s best man at his wedding and the two have collaborated often in the two decades following.
“Marc likes to downplay things, but […] being involved in that had a bigger impact on my life than probably anything else.” Johnson said. “I ended up being a designer and printing stuff because I just liked doing stuff for CTRPLLR.”
Besides Johnson, several contributors went on to forge successful careers in art and creative disciplines like Liam Crocker, Ellie Anglin, Jon Kutt, Ryan Dodgeson and Drag Race alum Jimbo the Drag Clown.
Lecompte finished publishing CTRPLLR in 2008. Getting older and fathering more responsibility, the zine was simply no longer financially viable to put such time into.
I came away from the CTRPLLR archives impressed—and a little envious at the creative energy of the period.
While zine culture has seen a resurgence, nothing seems to have touched the local zeitgeist the same way.
But the passion and creative talent that made CTRPLLR special are still abundant in KW. Reading it ultimately makes me hopeful at the possibilities of community art projects.
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