Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson

Fan/Zines have been getting a lot of coverage over the lastyear, they were featured in theLoud Flash: British Punk on Paper exhibition atHaunch of Venison gallery; were showcased atDazed & Confused magazine’s Dazed Live extravaganza;anarcho-punk band Crass’s collection of several hundredFan/Zines was exhibited recently at Boo-Hooray galleryin New York; Verso have just published a 480 page completecollection of Laura Oldfield Ford’s Fan/Zine Savage Messiah;and there’s even a specialist vintage Fan/Zine store,Goteblud, in San Francisco. At theNew York Art Bookfair it seemed that just about anyFan/Zine produced in the last 40 years had been bagged up andpriced up. And there’re three books which examine different areas ofall this Fan/Zine publishing activity that deserve yourattention: ‘Fanzines’, ‘100 Fanzines/10 Years Of British Punk: 1976–1985’, and ‘Behind The Zines: Self-Publishing Culture’.

But first we need to get a couple of things straight, apologies forinflicting ‘Fan/Zines’ on you, I won’t do it again. Now let’swork at establishing a practical working definition of aFanzine. Fanzine, a term in use since the 1930s, refersto an amateur, autonomous, self-produced publication, made usingreadily accessible production tools and printing methods, sold at anaffordable price and not primarily intended as a profit-makingventure. A Fanzine’s subject matter is usually a specific genreof entertainment or popular culture – for example, science fiction,comics, music, or sport. Zine, a term popularised in themid-late ’80s, simply drops the word Fan and jettisonsthe last sentence of the above definition, thus escaping fandom andgaining the freedom to be about anything whatsoever it chooses as itssubject matter. This column has always used the term Zine inits title.

‘Fanzines’, by design historian Teal Triggs, is thelargest and has the widest viewpoint of the three books underconsideration. Published by Thames & Hudson, it’s designedas a companion volume to ‘200 Trips from the Counter Culture: Graphics and Stories from theUnderground Press Syndicate’ (2006). This oversized volume sensibly calls itself ‘a’ history ofFanzines rather than pretending to be a definitive textbook onthe subject. It looks at Fanzine activity as far back as the1930s, with its main focus on the late 1970s right up to 2009. Most ofthe book is taken up with colour images of Fanzine coversgrouped into thematic, roughly chronological chapters: ‘ADo-It-Yourself Revolution: Definitions and Early Days’, ‘Its as easyas 1-2-3: The Graphic Language of Punk 1975-1983’, ‘Liberated Spaces:Subcultures, Protest and Consumer Culture 1980s-1990s’, ‘Girl Powerand Personal Politics’ (a particular interest of the authors),‘E-zines 1998-2009’, and ‘The Crafting of Contemporary Fanzines’. Eachchapter is introduced with a 3-page essay. Altogether, 550publications are included, predominantly from the UK and USA, thislarge selection of titles allows lots of oddball, one-off andgenerally uncategorisable zines to be included, many of which areunlikely to be given coverage elsewhere. All the Fanzine coversare accompanied with short descriptions, which are useful butsometimes perfunctory, as readers only see cover images. Consideringthe extreme difficulty of accessing original copies, slightly longerdescriptions would be useful. I enjoyed slowly working my way throughFANZINES, as someone who for the last 30 years has Fanzine,sold, collected, contributed to, distributed, curated and reviewedZines and Fanzines. This book parallels a large part ofmy life and interests. Approaching Fanzines from a designhistory perspective is interesting but has its limitations. In TheCity (1977-1980) is commented upon as “being notable for its…standardised logo”, but to someone involved in creating publicationsat the same time its easy to see that they just cut the title off theartwork of the last issue and stuck it onto the paste-up of the nextone! The final chapter, covering 2000-09, seems a bit scrappy, butaccurately reflects the disparity of Zines andFanzines made in this period. Linking these publications to atheory of Craftivism seems spurious, few of the examples shown back itup. Craft values can tend to emphasise materials and construction overcontent, shifting the resulting publication away from any usefuldefinition of ZINES or Fanzines.

‘100 Fanzines/10 Years Of British Punk: 1976–1985’ features 100publications from Toby Mott’s seemingly endless collection ofPunk ephemera. The title tells you exactly what to expect: a short,sharp, shock of 100 Fanzine covers reproduced full size inchronological order. This format lends itself readily to flicking backand forth, comparing and contrasting. It’s notable that many coversare entirely hand drawn, the total cost of materials used would bejust a few pennies. Several covers are hand drawn and augmented withsparingly used rub-down lettering – I can’t remember how muchLetraset cost in the mid ’80s; it was expensive, pricedfor professional use at something like £2.95 a sheet, butW H Smith transfer lettering was just 25p a pack andDecadry was 75p. Only two magazines, both from 1976, areprofessionally typeset, featuring The Crusaders andSteve Hillage on their covers! At this time – years before theavailability of home computers and good quality, affordable printers –typesetting was expensive and largely inaccessible to self-publishersunless you were lucky enough to have friend who worked in theindustry. As well as punk rock Fanzines, mod, new wave,skinhead, Oi, and anarcho-punk Fanzines are included – thefirst anarchy sign appeared in 1981, followed by a British Movementsymbol in 1985. Several of the Fanzines illustrated are free,proudly proclaiming this fact on their covers; a small attempt tocombat capitalism, or maybe the makers were just able to rip offhundreds of photocopies at work. The cover images are accompanied byToby Mott’s memories of making Raw Power Fanzine as a teenager,and an essay by Vic Brand which makes the insightful point that“The zine-makers…generally…represent the consumers of punkculture, rather than its producers”; Fanzines rather thanZines. But then Brand lapses into the tired cliché oflionising the power of the photocopier. Copiers have always beenpowerful creative tools, but the Fanzine covers shown in100 Fanzines are printed using 6 different techniques – most ofthe slightly more proficient-looking examples, with multi-colourcovers, were printed offset litho by Joly at Better Badges.

‘Behind the Zines: Self-Publishing Culture’ from Germanpublishers Gestalten is a survey of recent Europeanself-publishing and small publishers. The publications included areprimarily concerned with art, design, graphic design, drawing,illustration, photography, and art writing. Each title is given anentire page, showing the cover and several page spreads – giving agood overall impression – and accompanied by a brief description andinformation on the creators, edition size, frequency and printingmethods used – Risograph stencil printers are very much inevidence – but cover prices are omitted. Websites, e-mails andcountries of origin are all listed in the index. Compared with thepublications shown in Fanzines and100 Fanzines/10 Years, these are more colourful with carefullycomposed layouts, but there’s little of the passion, politics,urgency, engagement and excitement demonstrated in the other twobooks. A particular strongpoint is that Behind the Zines’contemporaneity allows for the inclusion of interviews with publishersand some interesting behind-the-scenes photographs. The image showingDot Dot Dot #15 underway is instructive, showingsimultaneously, in the same room, an editorial meeting, designersworking on computers shading the adverts and preparing files ready tobe sent direct to the adjacent digital stencil printers, and a printerchanging ink colours. Most of the publications inBehind the Zines seem much more insular and inward-looking thanthose in the other two books; some fit our definition of a ZINE butmost would be more usefully described as artzines, illzines,pamphlets, drawing books, compendiums or maybe just picture books.Showing so much of the publications featured is a laudable approach,but almost reveals too much – there’s only two books shown that I’mtempted to get hold of.

Everybody’s mapping nowadays. I can’t remember reviewing mapspreviously in this column, but a small stack of them have built upwhich deserve a closer look. First up is the elegantly designedThe London Bookshop Map: 87 Independent Bookshops. This foldoutmap covers an enormous area; from Wood Green in North London toStreatham in the South, and from Hackney in the East to Ladbroke Groveout West. The 87 independent bookshops are all listed with contactinformation, opening hours and a brief description. They encompassspecialists and generalists, new and secondhand, antiquarian, occultand anarchist, with a strong showing of art, design and photography,but curiously there’re no pornographers. You’ll discover abookshop/reading room inside an operating railway station – open atpeak commuting hours – and there’s even a bookshop inside agreenhouse. More modest in scope and utilitarian in design isBooksellers In Shoreditch & Hackney, a pocket sized mapcompiled by the Bookartbookshop and printed locally byDitto Press. Covering an East London triangle which spans fromOld Street up to Broadway Market and down to Whitechapel, it includes17 locations, which are all within walking or bus hopping distance ofeach other. These include a bookshop with its own curiosities museumin the basement and there’s also details of weekly market stallsselling books. Both these bookshop maps are independent initiatives.They’re the result of lots of hard work by people who’ve had thevision and energy to go ahead and get their projects off the ground.Hopefully it isn’t a thankless task. They’re both funded mainly by thebookshops listed and are refreshingly free of funding body logoclutter. Both are intended as ongoing projects and invite users tosend in suggestions and recommendations for future issues – it will beinteresting to see how they evolve and grow. A bookshop map is afairly simple idea and could be easily replicated in other locations.

Books are important, but feeding your brain and amusing your eyeballsis not quite as vital to survival as food.You Are Hungry – An Edible Map of South Hackney & Environsby Mikey Tomkins focuses on public space in a small corner ofEast London and maps the locations of actual and imagined food growingactivities alongside each other. Examples of current food productioninclude beehives on top of the Space gallery and studiocomplex, Bangladeshi families creating small ad hoc gardens outsidetheir windows to grow runner beans and dodis (marrows), and there’seven some grapevines growing in the back yard and up the walls of acafe planted by the Urban Wine Company who collect the ripegrapes and make local wine from them. To complement this existing foodgrowing activity Mikey Tomkins proposes using the grassed areassurrounding the local authority housing blocks for vegetable growing,empty garages for mushroom farms, and plenty of beehives on the roofsof taller buildings. He backs up these proposals by measuring theavailable growing spaces, suggesting suitable, easy to grow fruit andvegetables, and working out the potential annual yield of these crops.What may initially seem like a fantasy could only be a few steps awayfrom the ad hoc planting and growing already taking place.You Are Hungry – An Edible Map of South Hackney& Environs overlaps with the area covered byBooksellers In Shoreditch & Hackney.Mikey Tomkins imagines a near future when fresh local sweetcornand tomatoes will be sold at the Saturday market on Broadway Market,on the same day they’ve been picked, with zero food miles, processingor storage. I don’t know if any booksellers in the area are alreadygrowing herbs in window boxes or composting unsold magazines, but Isuspect a few of them would be very interested in planting some grapevines.

Okay, three London maps is enough – I do realise that not everyonelives in London, but thrift is omnipresent. On a recent trip toEdinburgh I luckily stumbled across Raeburn Place, with its rich seamof Charity shops and specialist Charity Bookshops, where I picked up acopy of The Edinburgh Charity Shop And Reuse Map. It’s animpressive resource covering the whole city. The map shows 112 charityshops, furniture projects and a string of Community Recycling CentreReuse Cabins, all with detailed information on the items/services theyspecialise in, what they sell and the type of donations they’llaccept. The main function of this map, published by Changeworks WastePrevention Team, is to actively encourage people to reuse and repairconsumer goods; prioritising reuse and repair over the lessintelligent route of simply recycling things back into raw materials.There’s plenty more information on the back of the map – they’realmost trying to squeeze too much in. There’s a resource list of otherplaces to buy and sell secondhand goods: carboot sales, auctionhouses, gumtree and eBay. There’s also a disappointingly small sectionabout simply giving stuff away to other people, which strangelydoesn’t mention the active Edinburgh freecycle group or Free Stuffevents. I’d really like to see direct unmediated giving, without thirdparties regulating or profiting from the exchange, publicised as muchas other reuse schemes. The Free Stuff Stores must happen. I’ve neverseen anything quite like The Edinburgh Charity Shop And Reuse Mapbefore: it’s a unique, broadminded publication useful for cheapskates,bargain hunters, declutterers, booklovers, and more importantly thosein genuine need and trying to survive on very limited incomes.

If there was a bookshop map for Edinburgh, Analogue Books woulddefinitely be included, in fact they’d probably be the instigators ofsuch a project. This compact shop offers a precisely curated selectionof books and magazines focussing on illustration, design, graphicdesign and the visual arts, together with screenprints by localdesigners and their own publications, including several books by NigelPeake. Analogue Books have a policy of displaying everything in theirshop with the full cover on show. There’s no overlapping magazines orrows of book spines which you have to bend your neck to look through.In retailing this is an approach that takes a lot of conviction and isvery rarely seen.

(December 2011)

Links

Fanzines, Teal Triggs, Thames & Hudson, London, 2010.

100 Fanzines/10 Years of British Punk: 1976-1985, Toby Mott,Andrew Roth Inc., New York, 2011.

Behind the Zines: Self-Publishing Culture, R. Klaten, A.Mollard, M. Hübner, S. Commentz, Gestalten, Berlin, 2011.

Panel Discussion about 100 Fanzines at NYABF 2011:www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEVQvfAh42o

750+ fanzines from the Joly/Better Badges archive:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jYQ2dTLeO0

The London Bookshop Map
www.thelondonbookshopmap.org

bookartbookshop
www.bookartbookshop.com

Mikey Tomkins: Research on food growing
www.mikeytomkins.co.uk

Changeworks
www.changeworks.org

Haunch of Venison – ‘Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper’
http://haunchofvenison.com/exhibitions/past/2010/loud_flash/

Boo-hooray
http://boo-hooray.com

Savage Messiah
www.versobooks.com/books/1022-savage-messiah

goteblud
http://goteblud.livejournal.com

Urban Wine Company
www.urbanwineco.com