Site last updated 29 Sep 2024

All the covers added as of 2024-09-29

On this site:

  • The zines - all the items which have been added to the site so far with links to their archive pages.
  • The covers - all the zines on one page (the image above is a screenshot of this page at 10% magnification).
  • Updates - a log of what’s new and how the project is progressing. Also posted to BlueSky and Mastodon
  • Roadmap - the multi-year plan for this project.
  • Timeline - a personal history of how these zines came to be in my possession, contextualising the nature of the collection.

From 1988 to the mid 2000s I amassed a collection of roughly 3,000 self published comics and zines, mostly from the UK small press comics scenes but also from across the world covering all manner of subjects. Most of them are photocopied or printed in very short runs, often under 100 copies. Many of them are hand-assembled and finished with personal touches.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s I ran a review zines and a mail order distro for self published stuff. This meant that on top of the many zines I was buying for myself, hundreds of people sent me unsolicited copies of their zines for review or sale. I drifted away from the scene from around 2003 but kept all* the zines in boxes. Because while my interest had waned and I rarely looked at them, and while their quality may vary from the sublime and gorgeous to the unfortunate and regrettable, they are unique objects that emerged in specific circumstances, and I felt that makes them valuable and of historical interest. So I was obliged to keep them.

In mid-2024, while signed off work with Long-Covid-related stuff, I needed a distraction and decided to start scanning them, starting with the first box of A5 zines and working through a handful each evening. And thus began the long, slow process of turning a load of boxes into a usable (and hopefully useful) archive.

* It seems a couple of boxes have been lost along the way as there are notable gaps, but the vast majority are still here.

A two hour video slideshow of all the covers scanned as of 17 September 2024. Cover illustration by Frazer Irving for a 1998 BugPowder distro catalogue.

There are currently two explicit goals for this project which are outlined on the roadmap.

The first is to have a public database of these publications available online. As I scan the covers they are being uploaded here with some very basic metadata. The first pass should be completed by the end of 2024 and will be the seed of a proper database driven site.

The second goal is to scan the entire contents of each zine for research and posterity. These scans will not be made public without permission of their original creators, but will aid with fleshing out the database and defend against the inevitable fragility of the zines. I scanned the contents of a few hundred zines in summer 2024 but put this on hold to focus on the covers and metadata pass. It will probably take two to three years to scan the entire archive. Once this is complete the physical zines will be submitted to the British Library’s archive for long-term storage.

As I’ve embarked on this it’s become clear there’ll be a third goal – to make sense of it all, both the phenomena of the zines themselves and my personal involvement with them. I am a preternaturally tired, middled-aged man squinting at what evidence remains of my half-remembered youth, and that, my friends, is a recipe for memoir. These will be published on the site as they are written and should be seen as “eternal drafts”, updated, re-written and edited as the archive itself is processed. It will take a long time to get my thoughts straight and there are currently two works-in-progress:

  • Defining a zine - in which I attempt/fail to draw an informed yet still hugely subjective line on what is and isn’t a zine.
  • Pete’s zine timeline - as I open these boxes memories have come flooding back and putting then down in order will hopefully give the collection some context.

While the archive is physically substantial it is barely a slither of zine activity during the 1990s. If you were active in that period you will doubtless spot huge gaps and see countless titles you’ve never heard of. The zine network was vast and unknowable, its undefinable nature being it’s most defining feature. This is merely what passed through my node on the global network and while of great importance to me and my peers at that time (it delights me that publications with such low print runs had such profound influence on our lives) I’m under no illusions that represents the totality of what was actually going on.

As I said, some of these zines are glorious objects that deserve to be remembered while others are… not so much. But I think they are all worth preserving. People decided they needed to organise their thoughts and art on paper, make multiple copies and distribute them through the postal service in the hope that they found likeminded folk. It doesn’t really matter if I think their zine is awesome or terrible - the simple fact that they needed to make it is enough for me to record that it existed.

Pete Ashton
pete@peteashton.com

More info about the project

Other archiving projects

Of course I’m not the only middle-aged nerd who’s revisiting their pre-internet zine life. As I come across other projects I’ll list them here, and if you know of any, please let me know.

  • Ed Pinsent’s UK small press galleries - “Covers from my personal collection of small press UK comics. Most of these were bought, sold and distributed through the Fast Fiction table and mail order service. The collection will build into a fairly representative sample of the unusual and imaginative small press comics and stripzines published in England in the 1980s and early 1990s.”
  • Fanscene - “Celebrating over 50 years of uk comics fandom & comics fanzines.” Most of the covers link to PDFs of the full issues, which is awesome. He’s also produced 8 issues of a PDF zine with articles and interviews. Overlaps with this archive a bit, but barely, and I find that lack of overlap fascinating. (I suspect these were the older guys sitting at the other tables at the UKCAC bar!)
  • Dark and Golden books - An publishing project “dedicated to charting a less travelled course through the history of British comics, finding and celebrating mislaid and forgotten classics for the audience of today in new high-quality editions.”

Charts

Please remember that, at this time, I am still entering titles into the big spreadsheet so these charts will change. But they still give a reasonable notion as to the shape of the collection.

(These charts are taken directly from the spreadsheet which is a few days ahead of any updates to the site, if you’re wondering why the numbers don’t tally.)

Zines grouped by the year of publication

Not all zines have a date printed in them (which is really annoying, tbh). The narrative behind this chart is explored in Pete’s zine timeline.

Zines by country

This is where the “from all over the world” claim will stand or fall. I would ask you to remember that being sent an unsolicited zine from, say, Slovenia was a really big deal.

Zines by format

Zines are in four main formats, A4, A5 (half A4), comic (between A4 and A5) and mini (A6 or smaller). Given their hand-made nature there’s a lot of wiggle room and a few that just don’t fit these categories. Note that the zines are being processed in batches of formats and the comics are the last to be done.

Distribution of page counts across scanned zines.

This is just the zines where the contents have been scanned which is mostly A5 zines at this point. This chart will be more useful in a couple of years.

The zines on show

Photos taken from an exhibition put on in 2018.

Pete Ashton