Another 100 A5 zines added - see list below. We’re now at 1,745.

Tweaked the contributor pages a bit and I’m happy enough with them to leave it be, at least until all the contributor data is in. I think the Ed Pinsent page is probably a great example of what I’m trying to achieve here. Contributors who are not publishers, and vice versa, will only show one list now.

The Covers by year published is probably not going to stick around - I wanted to see if there was any aesthetic change to the zines over the 15-ish years of the archive, and there kind of is? The pre-90s stuff definitely looks different and you can sort of see when the influence of decent home computing kicks in around the 2000s. Sadly a good quarter of the zines do not have dates and I don’t like how unrepresentative this makes this page.

Something I realised when seeing the zines listed by year was this does not represent when I actually acquired them. A significant number of zines from the 80s and early 90s were bought many years after they were published, as I discovered new people and wanted to get their old stuff. I doubt it would even be possible to date them by when acquired but that would tell a true-er story of the archive.

The Roadmap will stick around. This is how I envisage this project unfolding over the next few years, assuming my circumstances stay the same. Remember, this is a Long-Covid “I have to do something or else I’ll go mad” project so it’s perversely dependent on my Long-Covid not getting better.

I found a strip by Tim Brown recounting him meeting me at a comic convention in 2000 and have added it to the Timeline with a bit of context.

Oh, and I found a copy of my first zine, PDS. It’s as bad any zine made by a bunch of 15 year old idiots might be (there’s more stuff by my mates in there than I remembered) but it’s where I started and I’m hopefully old enough not to be embarrassed by it anymore. See 1989 in the Timeline.

Notable uploads

Allens by Ralph Kidson and Martin Meeks is what I was talking about in this blog post about finding graffiti by Ralph in a pub toilet in January this year.

Obsidian, a very amateur comics anthology from 1988, looked really, really familar for some reason, and then I remembered I bought it at UKCAC 1988 where they’d rented as table. Given the quality of the contents it was definitely a “me and my mates could do this” sort of moment.

Murder Can Be Fun is a neat example of the range of zines that were out there, especially from the USA, and if we want to go with the “zines begat blogs” narrative this could be seen as a precursor to the true crime podcast, being a collection of stories about weird deaths. But also of note is the Tower Records price sticker. There was a branch in Birmingham in the late 90s and they imported zines, a few of which I bought. (cf Azmacourt, a zine about asthma inhalers, also purchased at Tower Records Birmingham.)

Added the following titles: