British small press comics

Last updated

British small press comics, once known as stripzines, [1] are comic books self-published by amateur cartoonists and comic book creators, usually in short print runs, in the UK. They're comparable to similar movements internationally, such as American minicomics and Japanese doujinshi. A "small press comic" is essentially a zine composed predominantly of comic strips. The term emerged in the early 1980s to distinguish them from zines about comics. Notable artists who have had their start in British small press comics include Eddie Campbell, Paul Grist, Rian Hughes, Jamie Hewlett, Alan Martin, Philip Bond and Andi Watson.

Contents

Small press comics are traditionally sold by mail, using reviews and classified adverts, websites, email lists and word of mouth to reach an audience. There is usually one or more mail order service, commonly known as a "distro", operating in the UK. These will hold a wide range of titles and take a cut of the cover price. The two main active distros are Samu and SmallZone. They are also sold at conventions and festivals, with small groups of like-minded creators often sharing a table at a reduced rate. Specialist small press events included CAPTION in Oxford (produced from 1992 to 2017), and the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing in London (produced from 2004 to 2010). [2] Creators will often make international links to these forms of distribution in other countries and vice versa.

Distribution into comic book stores via traditional distributors (such as Diamond) is rare. Stores will often stock titles by local creators though some, notably Gosh! in London and Page 45 in Nottingham, stock a wider range. In recent times small press titles have sold in larger bookstores such as Borders and Foyles in London.

The traditional format has been a photocopied and stapled booklet, usually at A5 size. This is similar to American minicomics, although other sizes are known. Some creators continue to produce publications in this style, emphasizing the hand-made aspect and often decorating each copy by hand. In recent years the increasing availability of digital printing has made professional printing affordable for short-run publications. Some of the spirit of small press comics can now also be found in webcomics.

History

Background

Traditionally, a small press publisher was simply a publisher who operated on a small scale, often with a manual printing press in-house. They produced limited print-runs of publications that larger, more commercially inclined publishers would reject.

The history of British small press comics is tied up with the underground press of the 1960s, with publications such as Oz and International Times. The British underground comix scene was led by Nasty Tales and Knockabout Comics of the 1970s, as well as the popularization of Punk zines in the late 1970s. The latter had a larger audience from cheap and accessible photocopying. This dramatic lowering of technological barriers to entry meant anyone could produce a publication with a print run, regardless of its commercial potential.

Within the British comics fandom of the 1970s and early 1980s there were many zines about comics, mainly concentrating on American superhero titles. Since high-street retailers of comics were scarce, these zines ran mail order services and relied on the postal service for distribution. The first and most famous of these was Fantasy Advertiser . There were also regular markets or "marts" which served as a social meeting place for artists and fans. This was the backbone of small press comics.

The 1970s

Among the earliest British small press comics was The Tale of Beem Gotelump. It told the story of an aging jazz musician who was tasked by the Archangel Gabriel with playing the last trumpet at the end of the world. It was created and published by Eddie Campbell under the pseudonym "Roland Bunn" in 1975. [3]

Kevin O'Neill and co-writer Jack Adrian published Mek Memoirs in 1976. It was a 12-page "stripzine" about a robot war, which can be seen as a precursor to O'Neill's later work on 2000 AD . [4]

Near Myths was an underground comics anthology published in Edinburgh from 1978 to 1980. It ran for five issues and featured the first professionally published work of Grant Morrison, Graham Manley, and Tony O'Donnell. It also featured the start of Bryan Talbot's seminal graphic novel The Adventures of Luther Arkwright . Teenager Grant Morrison's contribution, Gideon Stargrave, later found his way into Morrison's Vertigo series The Invisibles .

Perhaps the most successful of all British small press comics is the adult humour comic Viz , first published in Newcastle in 1979. It grew out of the punk fanzine scene, and went on to successful newsstand publication, continuing to the present day.

The 1980s

The first flowering of British small press comics centered on Fast Fiction, which began as a stall run by Paul Gravett at the bi-monthly Westminster Comic Mart in London in 1981. It later developed into an anthology, a mail order service, and a news sheet, lasting in various forms until 1990. Artists associated with this scene included Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliott, Glenn Dakin, Paul Grist, Ed Hillyer, Woodrow Phoenix, Rian Hughes, Bob Lynch, Ed Pinsent, and the teenage Warren Ellis. [5] Campbell claims he persuaded his fellow artists to call their publications "small press comics" rather than "fanzines", after seeing the term "small press" used for similar publications at a poetry festival. [6] Gravett and Peter Stanbury published many of the Fast Fiction artists in Escape Magazine from 1983 to 1989. [7]

Between 1983 and 1995 Zine Zone (later Zine Zone International), a Bristol-based company specialising in mail order, comic mart service and publications, focused international attention on UK small pressers and helped a number go on to mainstream comics, including D'Israeli and Duncan Fegredo. [8]

In 1987 Jamie Hewlett, Philip Bond and Alan Martin (then students at from Northbrook College, Worthing) produced two issues of a small press comic called Atomtan. This caught the attention of Brett Ewins, who invited them to contribute to his new comics magazine, Deadline , which began in 1988. Hewlett and Martin created the magazine's flagship character, Tank Girl, and Hewlett went on to work in animation, most notably creating the cartoon rock group Gorillaz.

The 1990s

After Ed Pinsent finished with the last incarnation of Fast Fiction, cartoonist Luke Walsh (later known as Luke Temple Walsh) and reader Mike Kidson took over their mailing list with Zum! their new review zine. The first issue appeared in August 1991. Zum! distributed copies of comics submitted to a panel of reviewers, often cartoonists themselves, who were encouraged to write critical reviews of significant length. It also featured reproductions of the comics under review. Zum! continues as a website run by Paul Schroeder. [9] Caption, a zine-cum-APA devoted to small press comics edited by Jenni Scott, ran from 1992 to 1998, and spawned the long-running Caption small press comics convention, held annually in Oxford from 1992 to 2017.

The 1990s saw the reemergence of fanzines about comics in the Fantasy Advertiser mold. Battleground, edited by Andy Brewer, was at first mainly concerned with American superhero comics, although it also featured reviews and articles on small press comics, and interviews with the cartoonists. Vicious, edited by Pete Ashton, was more free-form, and promised to print all material submitted. Ashton also created TRS (The Review Sheet), collecting capsule reviews and contact details for small press comics, in 1995. In 1996 he set up the BugPowder distribution service, which sold any British small press comics that cared to be listed as well as importing selected books from the US and Europe. TRS was discontinued in 1998, before being revived as TRS2 by Andrew Luke. BugPowder closed as a distributor in 2000, but the BugPowder blog continued to spotlight British small press activity, including the now-online TRS2.[ citation needed ]

Slab-O-Concrete was a mail-order distributor and publisher set up by Australian pavement artist Peter Pavement and also Dave Hanna in the early 1990s. Its first title was Pavement's own Pavement Pizza, and it soon began selling British small press comics (including such titles as Time Warp: The End of the Century Club, by Ed Hillyer; Sugar Buzz by Woodrow Phoenix, and Witch by Lorna Miller) and zines on marts in Brighton and Hove, and importing books from the US, Australia, and Europe. Slab-O-Concrete developed into a full-scale publisher, repackaging small press comics for the bookshop market and originating new work. It avoided the direct market of comic shops and made connections with underground publishers, zinesters, indie record labels, and other subcultural scenes. Slab-O-Concrete ended due to cash flow issues in 2001.

Other groups included Dachshund, run by Andy, aka Andy Konky Kru, which published Graphic Reviews, a review zine featuring reviews in comic strip form by Lee Kennedy and others, and an A8-sized anthology, Itsy Bitsy. Andrew Moreton set up Massive, a small press distributor, in 1992, and also published a zine, The Comics Cut Quarterly. Psychopia, was a zine and distributor set up by cartoonist B. Patson in 1994, which still exists online. [10] Other cartoonists sold their work through classified ads in Comics International magazine.

Notable self-published comics of the 90s included Paul Grist's Kane , Gary Spencer Millidge's Strangehaven , Sleaze Castle by Dave McKinnon and Terry Wiley, and Strange Weather Lately by Metaphrog, all of which received widespread distribution through Diamond Comic Distributors.

The 2000s

From 2000 until 2011 Metaphrog went on to produce the full-colour Louis series of graphic novels which received mainstream media attention and book shop distribution.

Recent creators to have launched through the small press include Gary Northfield, whose Derek the Sheep has gained a recurring slot in the Beano . Writer Jason Cobley, who has been self-publishing his Bulldog comics since the mid-90s, and former Bulldog Empire artist Neill Cameron, now work for The DFC and Classical Comics. Garen Ewing, who worked in small press comics in the 1990s, moved onto the web with The Rainbow Orchid , soon to be published in print by Egmont UK, and also contributes to The DFC. The Etherington Brothers (Robin and Lorenzo), creators of the small press comic Malcolm Magic, have gone on to create "Monkey Nuts" for The DFC, "Yore" for the Dandy and "Baggage" for Random House . PJ Holden, Al Ewing, Arthur Wyatt and David Baillie (comics) emerged from the small press to work for 2000 AD .

One of the current leading distros is SmallZone, founded in 1999 by Shane Chebsey, which also provides a printing service for small press creators. Chebsey and Andrew Richmond also publish comics under the Scar Comics banner. In 2006 the first Scar Comics graphic novel, Falling Sky by Ben Dickson, won "Best Indie Surprise" on Ain't It Cool News.[ citation needed ]

Another activist for British independent comics is writer/artist Barry Renshaw. Founding the Engine Comics imprint in 2000, Renshaw wrote and published the Rough Guide to Self Publishing, which is now in its fourth edition (2007) and was described as 'essential purchase for budding self-publishers' by industry paper Comics International.[ citation needed ] In 2004, Engine Comics launched Redeye Magazine, a news/reviews magazine specifically created to educate and promote small press and self-published comics to the wider public. It has been described as a 'vital read' by SFX magazine and "a must-have" by Ain't It Cool News.[ citation needed ] Other titles include Seven Sentinels and the Fusion anthology.

Accent UK, a collective headed by Dave West (Deva Comics) and Colin Mathieson (M56 Comics), was formed in 2002 and produced themed US-format anthologies featuring contributions from dozens of UK independent creators. In addition to the founding members, regular contributors to Accent UK publications include Andy Bloor, Jon H. Ayre, David Hitchcock, John Reppion and Leah Moore (daughter of Alan Moore), Bridgeen Gillespie (Mr Maximo & Rabbit), Garry Brown, and David Baillie. The 2007 anthology Zombies, included a cover by American artist Steve Bissette.

The Judge Dredd Megazine featured a regular small press spotlight section between the years of 2007 and 2009, featuring columns by Matt Badham and David Baillie and a selection of strips by creators from the small press scene.

FutureQuake Publishing was originally set up to publish the anthology comic FutureQuake. By a combination of launching new titles and taking over existing ones whose owners retire from the scene, they have built up a stable including MangaQuake, Something Wicked and Lost Property, as well as 2000AD fanzines Zarjaz and Dogbreath . Solar Wind has won numerous awards for its long-running series of parodic comics, which pastiche the style of children's comics of the 1970s. The group publishes Solar Wind, Sunny for Girls, Big War Comic, Omnivistascope and is connected to The End Is Nigh (through Solar Wind editor/writer Paul Scott and other creators).

London Underground Comics is both a weekly market stall in Camden Lock Market and a loose collective of U.K. based small press creators whose work is sold and displayed on the weekly stall. London Underground Comics was founded in November 2007 by Camden-based creator Oli Smith who co-ran the stall with the help of a variety of small press creators until 2009. LUC also ran larger one-day events that took up an additional 1,000 square feet (93 m2) of Camden Lock Market such as No Barcodes in April 2008 and Low Energy Day in August 2008. LUC promoted their stall and events via YouTube videos.

The UK Web & Mini Comix Thing [11] was a yearly event in London run by Patrick Findlay that brings the British small press and webcomics communities together to sell and promote their work.

Radio 4 broadcast a series on small press publishing, aired late 2009. One of the episodes focussed on small press comics, reviewing titles from both The UK and from the USA/Canada. One of the titles featured was the cult London small press comic "Eat, Drink & Be Buried."

Recent years[ when? ]have seen the rise of the small press both online and in print [12] with conventions around the UK on an almost weekly basis and vibrant review platforms like Broken Frontier and Slings and Arrows supporting creators’ work.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eddie Campbell</span> British comics artist and cartoonist

Eddie Campbell is a British comics artist and cartoonist. He was the illustrator and publisher of From Hell, and the creator of the semi-autobiographical Alec stories collected in Alec: The Years Have Pants, and Bacchus, a wry adventure series about the few Greek gods who have survived to the present day.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Underground comix</span> Comics genre

Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books that are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality, and violence. They were most popular in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, and in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.

A minicomic is a creator-published comic book, often photocopied and stapled or with a handmade binding. In the United Kingdom and Europe the term small press comic is equivalent with minicomic, reserved for those publications measuring A6 or less.

Derek Graham "Dez" Skinn is a British comic and magazine editor, and author of a number of books on comics. As head of Marvel Comics' operations in England in the late 1970s, Skinn reformatted existing titles, launched new ones, and acquired the BBC license for Doctor Who Weekly. After leaving Marvel UK, Skinn founded and edited Warrior, which featured key works by Alan Moore.

Glenn Dakin is a British cartoonist and author of children's books. He is the author of the Candle Man book series, and he contributed to a number of British comics magazines including Escape and Deadline, and was part of the British small press comics scene in the 1980s. His main creations are Temptation and the semi-autobiographical strip Abe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Gravett</span> British journalist, curator, writer, and broadcaster in the comics industry

Paul Gravett is a London-based journalist, curator, writer, and broadcaster who has worked in comics publishing since 1981.

<i>Escape</i> (magazine) British comic strip magazine

Escape magazine was a British comic strip magazine founded and edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. Nineteen issues were published between 1983 and 1989. Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliott and Glenn Dakin were amongst the many cartoonists published within its pages. Escape Publishing also released a limited number of graphic novels in the period 1984–1989, some co-published with Titan Books.

Fast Fiction was a market stall, magazine, mail order distributor, and news sheet that played a key role in the history of British small press comics. It existed in its various forms from 1981 through to 1990 under the stewardship of Paul Gravett, Phil Elliott and Ed Pinsent.

<i>Wimmens Comix</i> All-female underground comics anthology

Wimmen's Comix, later retitled (respelled) as Wimmin's Comix, is an influential all-female underground comics anthology published from 1972 to 1992. Though it covered a wide range of genres and subject matters, Wimmen's Comix focused more than other anthologies of the time on feminist concerns, homosexuality, sex and politics in general, and autobiographical comics. Wimmen's Comix was a launching pad for many cartoonists' careers, and it inspired other small-press and self-published titles like Twisted Sisters, Dyke Shorts, and Dynamite Damsels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trina Robbins</span> American cartoonist and writer (1938–2024)

Trina Robbins was an American cartoonist. She was an early participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the first women in the movement. She co-produced the 1970 underground comic It Ain't Me, Babe, which was the first comic book entirely created by women. She co-founded the Wimmen's Comix collective, wrote for Wonder Woman, and produced adaptations of Dope and The Silver Metal Lover. She was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and received Eisner Awards in 2017 and 2021.

Robert Kirby is an American cartoonist, known for his long-running syndicated comic Curbside – which ran in the gay and alternative presses from 1991 to 2008 – and other works focusing on queer characters and community, including Strange Looking Exile, Boy Trouble, THREE, and QU33R.

Psychopia is a small press zine featuring reviews and articles on British comic books and small press comics and interviews with cartoonists. Unusually for comix zines it focussed almost entirely on British comics such as The Beano and The Dandy ignoring American superhero comics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comics in Australia</span> Comics in Australia

Australian comics have been published since 1908 and Australian comics creators have gone to produce influential work in the global comics industry,

Ed Pinsent is a British cartoonist, artist, and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael J. Weller</span> British artist

Michael John Weller is a British underground comics artist, political writer, cartoonist, activist and album-cover designer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dennis Eichhorn</span> American writer (1945-2015)

Dennis P. Eichhorn was an American writer, best known for his adult-oriented autobiographical comic book series Real Stuff. His stories, often involving, sex, drugs, and alcohol, have been compared to those of Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and Charles Bukowski.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British Comic Art Convention</span> British comic book convention

The British Comic Art Convention was an annual British comic book convention which was held between 1968 and 1981, usually in London. The earliest British fan convention devoted entirely to comics, it was also the birthplace of the Eagle Awards.

Suzy Varty is a noted British comics artist, writer, and editor. In the late 1970s, she compiled, contributed to and edited Heröine, the first anthology of comics by women to be published in the U.K. Throughout the 70s, she was part of the Birmingham Arts Lab, and she has participated in the Underground Comix and Wimmen's Comix movements in the U.S. Varty remains active in the British Comics scene, frequently appearing at such conventions as Thought Bubble Comic Arts Festival in Leeds and the Canny Comic Con in Newcastle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cartoonists' Co-op Press</span> Comics publishing cooperative

Cartoonists Co-op Press was an underground comix publishing cooperative based in San Francisco that operated from 1973 to 1974. It was a self-publishing venture by cartoonists Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jerry Lane, Jay Lynch, Willy Murphy, Diane Noomin, and Art Spiegelman. Cartoonist Justin Green's brother Keith acted as salesman/distributor, and the operation was run out of Griffith's apartment.

<i>BEM</i> (magazine) British fanzine focused on comic books

BEM, originally known as Bemusing Magazine, was a British fanzine focused on comic books which was published from 1973 to 1982. The brainchild of Martin Lock and billed as "The Comics News Fanzine," BEM featured American and British comics industry news and gossip, interviews, comic reviews, essays, columns, and comic strips.

References

Footnotes

  1. Stringer, Lew (29 December 2006). "We called them stripzines". Blimey! The Blog of British Comics. Retrieved 2 March 2009.
  2. Gravett, Paul (July 30, 2006). "Great British Comics: An Introduction". Interviewed by Joe Gordon. Forbidden Planet International via PaulGravett.com. The medium is as vigorous and fascinating as ever in Britain, as events like Bristol, Caption and the UK Web Comix Thing attest.
  3. Darren Schroeder, "Eddie Campbell: The Oracle" Archived October 4, 2009, at the Wayback Machine , Comics Bulletin, 20 March 2001, retrieved 2 March 2009
  4. Stringer, Lew (17 February 2009). "Kevin O'Neill: The Early Days". Blimey! The Blog of British Comics. Retrieved 2 March 2009.
  5. "Who Knows What Evil Lurks..." Archived from the original on 6 August 2009. Retrieved 2 March 2009.
  6. Eddie Campbell, blog post, 27 October 2008
  7. Ellis, Warren. "Biography". PaulGravett.com. ...Paul, with his longtime partner Peter Stanbury, was running the small press anthology Fast Fiction, the Fast Fiction stand at the bimonthly Westminster Comics Marts where the small press books were sold, and launching Escape - an excellent European-style professional comics magazine whose book-publishing arm led directly to the careers of James Robinson, Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman.
  8. Phil Latter, "Terry Hooper: Keeper of the Black Tower" Archived August 20, 2008, at the Wayback Machine , 2005
  9. Zum!
  10. Psychopia Archived June 28, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
  11. "Matters of Convention: UK Web 'n' Mini Comix Thing". DownTheTubes.net. 16 October 2009.
  12. Cummins, Anthony (2023-07-16). "The indie publishing mavericks shaking up the UK books world". The Observer. ISSN   0029-7712 . Retrieved 2024-08-29.

Bibliography