Going through these boxes of zines after twenty years has dug up a load of forgotten memories and a realisation that my mind often had stuff in the wrong order. This timeline is to help me get stuff straight, but also should contextualise and explain the nature of the collection and how it came to be.

As always, this is an eternally unfinished document which will be continuously updated and revised as I pull zines out of the boxes which unearth memories long buried (sometimes for good reasons…).

Pete Ashton

Last updated 7 Sep 24

1987

I’m 13 going on 14 and a copy of 2000AD catches my eye in the WH Smiths on West Wickham high street. I’m hooked and buying it every week.

The Sherratt & Hughes bookshop in Croydon’s shopping centre (one of many chains that eventually got absorbed into the Dillons/Waterstones empire) starts stocking comics, because comics are suddenly a viable business model, and has all the Titan Books collections of 2000AD stories. I spent most Saturday afternoons there sitting on a stool reading them cover to cover. For some reason the staff never bother me.

I’m not interested in the rest of the comics on sale but I spot a copy of Speakeasy, a fanzine which had professionalised into the main source of information for British fans. I think my first was issue 74. I didn’t know it was a fanzine - I valued it for the listings of what was coming up in 2000AD. Eventually the rest of the contents became of interest to me too.


Cover scan taken from Fanscene. Hopefully he’ll upload the contents (no rush!) so I can be sure it was this one.

I must have told my school friend Lawford about my 2000AD habit because he then properly got me into comics. He’s long been into DC superheroes, so I read a few of those, but he was also getting Bryan Talbot’s Adventures of Luther Arkwright which was being serialised by Valkyrie Press. This was an independently published black and white comic with its roots in the 70s underground and I’d not seen anything like it before. He also pointed me towards the Alan Moore-led “mature readers” comics DC was putting out and the first American comic I buy with my own money was Hellblazer. Start as you mean to go on, I guess.

1988

I am 14 going on 15 and my friend Phil is into fantasy roleplaying. I’m more into comics but there’s enough of an overlap so he gets a bit into comics while I join him at the West Wickham gaming club. Phil is buying GM Magazine which has a couple of pages of zine reviews. I’m intrigued by the concept and send off for a few. Vollmond was a classic zine with all the requisite features, while Fat Knite had more comics and appealed to my juvenile sense of humour. There were others but what I saw in those two probably influenced the direction my life would take more than any other piece of media. (Issue 7 of GM is on Internet Archive. It’s not the specific issue that changed my life but it has that zine reviews page.)

I stop getting my comics in a bookshop when I discover Phantom Zone, a proper comic shop off the beaten track in Croydon town centre. The people who work there are weird and cool and not a little scary at first, but within a few months it’s my home from home. The owners publish their own comics anthology, HB, featuring work by their mates. It’s amateur at best and that’s important because so I am.

Lawford and I went to UKCAC, the main (only?) British comics convention. As a pretty solid comics fan by this stage I’d been going to signings at the various comic shops in London and spent the weekend collecting sketches and signatures. I was very indiscriminate, asking anyone with a guest badge to sign the cover of my convention booklet, regardless of who they were.


Click for a high-res version and see how many names you recognise.

1988 was a banner year for British comics. Possibly the biggest influence for me was Deadline which launched at UKCAC. Editors Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins were both 2000AD veterans, which gave me an in, and the ziney, counterculture vibe was a bit of a gateway to a new world. A significant number of comics zines from the early to mid 1990s can be attributed to their creators reading these early issues of Deadline at a formative age.

Forbidden Planet opens a new superstore on Oxford Street. Notable is a section downstairs called “Slipstream” which has very odd counterculture and weird books. This is definitely my first exposure to a “Bob” Dobbs face. I consider these bookshelves to have made a lasting impression on me, even if I was too young / scared to buy anything from them at the time.

I decide I’m going to do my own zine. I name it PDS after a band my mate Barry had started and swiftly abandoned as I liked the name. It never stood for anything, and I liked that too.

1989

Over the start of the year I work on my new zine, PDS. It was a mix of role-playing games and comics, very much inspired by Fat Knite. It was not very good but that was OK. First zines are never any good.

That summer I was staying with my dad who’d been living the USA for the last decade after a pretty messy divorce and had recently gotten back in touch. I was spending time in his office which had a photocopier which I used to run off a few copies, albeit on that weird paper size they have there. (I later did a reprint at A5 which is what’s in the archive.)


PDS v1 1, my first zine.

That September I took my first zine to UKCAC 89, paying for a table in the zine section of the hall which me and my mates used it as our base for the weekend. I remember Philip Bond bought a copy because he asked about the weird paper size.

Oh yeah, there was a Neil Gaiman interview in that first issue. He was signing copies of Black Orchid with Dave McKean at Phantom Zone and the owners arranged for me and Phil to interview him. I kept the tape and uploaded it to Archive.org a while back.

1990

(Switching to bullet points because otherwise this is going to turn into a memoir)

  • Since last September I’ve been living with my mum in Winchester and going to 6th form where I meet Dave Early who can draw a mean Judge Dredd. We become friends.
  • Atomic, Inkling and Nightfall anthologies probably bought at UKCAC and I get a sense of what’s out there and how I might fit in with it.
  • Start reading Cerebus because Neil Gaiman mentioned it in an interview. It’s that period where Dave Sim is advocating self-publishing as a viable way to preserve creators rights. It’s heady stuff.
  • I decide to relaunch PDS as a comic anthology. First issue a bit ropey, of course. (Although I haven’t found a copy of it…)

1991

  • I publish PDS v2 issues 2, 3 and 4 and they’re not that bad really.
  • Met Rik Hoskin and fall in with the scene around his Defective Comics comics.
  • Went to a small press comics gathering in Reading.
  • Find a copy of Savoy’s Lord Horror in the back of a comic shop, possibly in Camden. I’m always checking out the dusty corners for weird, transgressive stuff. Comic shops are great for this.
  • I finish 6th form with no qualifications and get odd jobs, winding up in a bookshop.

1992

  • I move to Eastleigh, near Southampton, and continue working at the bookshop in Winchester. Fall in with some hairy bikers for a few years and learn about community and stuff.
  • I think the zines take a bit of back seat for a while.

1993

  • Small press comics peer group expands to the community around Rol Hirst’s The Jock and other “indie” style publications.
  • Get copies of Battleground 3 and Zum 6 which open up doors to whole new communities.

1994

  • Quit the bookshop to do an Access to Higher Education course at the local college so I could go to University as a “mature” student at the ripe old age of 23.
  • Was frequenting a comic shop in Southampton managed by Paul Davies who pushes a lot of interesting indie stuff on me like Paul Pope’s self-published THB.
  • Was sending letters and the occasional article to zines like Caption and Battleground. Having been failed by school thanks to undiagnosed autism (it was the 80s…) this was pretty much where I taught myself to write.

1995

  • Decide to start a comics discussion zine like Battleground. As I send out a flyer asking for contributions, Andy Brewer announces he’s ending Battleground. Vicious, my new zine, mops up a portion of his audience. I published three issues. (The name came from the Lou Reed song for no reason.)
  • Because I want Vicious to be contributor-run and have no editorial control (I published everything I was sent) I wanted to keep the reviews separate, so I included an insert sheet called The Review Sheet or TRS. This soon became an autonomous thing where I would send other zinesters bundles to distribute with their mailouts, getting the reviews out to hundreds of people.
  • Annoyingly I kept no copies of TRS and the disks have long been lost. If you have any please send me a scan or photo!
  • Completed the Access course and was accepted to Birmingham University to study Philosophy. Moved there in September.
  • I’m not sure which was my first Caption convention in Oxford but this would be the earliest possible year.

1996

  • Published two more issues of Vicious and take them to UKCAC.
  • At some point prior to this had become friends with Jez Higgins who was living in Coventry and eventually moved to Birmingham. With some others we started the Birmingham Comics Pub Meet which aimed to recreate the UKCAC bar each month. It ran for a good decade.
  • This year’s is the earliest Caption convention programme I’ve found in the collection, so might be my first attendance. I’m pretty sure I was there the year before though.
  • TRS is getting distributed far and wide and I start getting send zines from abroad for review.
  • Nostalgia and Comics becomes my local comic shop. I befriend Rich Bruton who works there - he’s a strong advocate of stocking zines and small press comics and I keep him well stocked. There’s a natural drift from reviewing to selling and I start a small mail order service with the regrettable name “Leather Angel Distro” (I am terrible at naming things…).
  • Scenes from the Inside send me a box of their books on consignment and include early issues of Top Shelf, an anthology which will soon spawn one of the important small publishers of the 2000s. I get in touch with Chris Staros at Top Shelf which opens a whole new door.

1997


The Birmingham banner from UKCAC, photographed when it was subsequently auctioned at Caption the next year.

  • In March the Birmingham comics gang hire a bunch of tables at UKCAC and set up a base-camp there under a massive banner painted by Chris Askham.
  • This year’s UKCAC was pretty gonzo for me. I wrote a rambling report of the wild times. Living the dream.
  • The Birmingham lot run our own mini comics convention, BrumCAB (Birmingham Comics and Beer), taking over the upstairs of a bar in 6/7 September. It clashes with the weekend of Princess Diana’s funeral which is rather inconvenient as the whole country seems to shut down, but we go ahead and it’s a lot of fun, carving out a pocket of relative sanity while the normie world loses theirs.
  • Around this time I decide to ramp up my mail order service for zines and comics, mixing the grassroots stuff I’m being sent for review with more established publishers and imports from the US and Europe. I call it BugPowder Dustribution for stupid reasons. (I’d been given a club flyer using comics imagery and reasoned if music was going to rip off comics I’d do the same back and Bomb the Bass must have come on the radio. The Naked Lunch reference was nicely underground, but mostly it was a stupid joke I ran with. I continue to be bad at naming things…)
  • Co-incidentally Pete Pavement has decided to stop running the distro side of Slab-o-Concrete and focus on publishing. I mop up a portion of his business. Yes, that’s a pattern.
  • I start a reviews zine called Strands, spinning off from TRS to allow me to do longer reviews about more things. It runs for a couple of issues and I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s one of my better names for a thing too. My apotheosis, maybe.


Jez and I sitting in front of the Slab-o-Concrete zine table at Caption 1997. I am definitely not thinking “all this could be mine”. The other photo is me wearing my much coveted “I love toner” t-shirt from Mark Pawson’s Disinfotainment distro.


The listing for the t-shirt in the Disinfo catalogue.

1998

  • I’m flailing and failing at University, academia and me proving to be incompatible once again (autism still not diagnosed - it’ll be another two decades before that happens and the mental fuckery of these decades starts to make sense) but on the plus side I’ve grown BugPowder into a fairly substantial mail order service from my student house and I’m working at the photocopy shop on campus with access to all the machines. So things could be worse?
  • I’m taking suitcases of zines on trains to conventions and zine fairs across the country and making a pretty good turnover. Never a profit, but that’s not the point.
  • I leave Uni with no degree and not knowing what to do with my life return to bookselling on the academic floor at the big Dillons bookstore in Birmingham (now the Apple store).
  • One summer at Caption I have a really good conversation with Mike Kidson which I fondly remember to this day. I’m going to take a punt and say it was this year.

1999

  • I’m a full-time bookseller now running BugPowder from home and taking the zines to events, including on in Dublin which is a lot of fun. This might be the year I go to the small press books fair at the Barbican where Slab-o-Concrete and I both clean up because we’re not selling dour books of poetry and politics. People like colourful minicomics!
  • Chris Staros of Top Shelf is coming over to the UK comic conventions with loads of stock and I’m taking some of his unsolds. As well as their publications he’s distributing a load of zine-y stuff from the US. He’s my gateway to what we’ve come to call the “Highwater Books era” of zine-based cartoonists moving into the alternative comix/cs world.
  • Eddie Campbell, a significant figure in the 80s UK comic-zine scene, has been self-publishing and is distributed by Top Shelf so I have access to his catalogue. He publishes the first collection of From Hell by Alan Moore and himself which I sell through BugPowder, something I would not have seen coming when I first read it in Taboo a decade ago.
  • Jez, a computer engineer by trade, shows me Slashdot and introduces me to the concept of weblogs. He acquires the bugpowder.com domain and I teach myself HTML to put together a rudimentary online catalogue.

2000

  • I move to London with my then girlfriend, working at a bookshop in the City. London is where all the comics action is and I’m keen to get involved again. I make contact with Paul Gravett at the Cartoon Art Trust and have big plans to join his plans. Sadly the nature of living and working in London means I have no time to actually do any of them. Things were much easier in Birmingham. Still, lots of talking even if not much action.
  • I start blogging on bugpowder.com before moving to peteashton.com.
  • BugPowder distro is going great guns. I’m wheeling large suitcases of zines to comics and zine events.


This photo of the BugPowder stall at Caption taken by Andy Luke is probably from Caption 2000 because I’m photographed wearing the same t-shirt when Dave McKinnon inducted me into the Church of the Subgenius later that evening.

  • I become quite good an introducing people to other people at events, further cementing the usefulness of my node on the network. I soon realised however that this was mostly because I was uncomfortable talking to new people, and introducing them to someone else was the fastest way to get out of that situation. Thankfully this was mostly beneficial for the people I didn’t want to talk to as it got them in touch with new people, who did want to talk to them. But it was also sometimes a bit weird and awkward, as shown in this self-deprecating diary comic from Tim Brown’s Part Time Lights 24.


I did enjoy these events and I’m sure I was happy to meet Tim whose comics I enjoyed a lot. When the zine arrived I was quite shocked at how badly I evidently came over to him. Undiagnosed autism, what a laff!

2001

  • There’s a spike in the number of zines in the archive from this year and I don’t know why. I’m not doing reviews (Jez and Andy Luke have taken that on) and I think I’m winding down the distro (or maybe that comes later?) My memory says my focus is more on blogging these days, but maybe it wasn’t? Maybe I’m just buying loads from the zine section at Gosh - there’s certainly a few with their price stickers in the collection. More research needed.
  • The BugPowder.com blog is pretty active around this time. I have no real memory of what was going on there but it should be all on archive.org.
  • Phil Hall’s Borderline PDF-zine thing happened around now, which he roped me into writing for. Lots could be said about this, very little of it worth saying I fear, but it does represent something of a changing-of-the-guard from print zines to blogs. On the plus side, Jez got to interview Glenn Dakin and Tom got to interview Jodorowsky.
  • Tom Devlin edits an issue of The Comics Journal and it feels like “my people” are storming the castle gates.

2002 - 2003

  • I think I’m pretty much an elder on the zine scene now with most additions to the archive coming from my own purchases.
  • The UK blogging scene (just London really) emerges from the detritus of the post-dotcom boom and I find myself and my personal blog on the periphery of it, attending a couple of meetups. It all seems exactly the same yet totally different from the zine scenes. They think they’re changing the world, and unlike the zinesters a few of them will actually go on to do just that. I wonder if anyone has documented this period..?
  • At some point the BugPowder distro stops. I hesitate to say “wound up” as I’m sure it just ground to a halt. 2002-3 was not the best of times for me personally.
  • Around April 2003 I leave London under a bit of a cloud, work on a farm on the Isle of Wight for the summer on the WWOOF scheme and, after couch-surfing with my mum and sister for a bit, move back to Birmingham in the autumn where I’ve lived ever since.
  • I’m still paying attention to what’s happening on the fringes. The zine network might be fading but there’s still lots going on. The Comics Journal devotes an issue to Fort Thunder and I remember this being epochal.
  • USS Catastrophe is a US-based mini-comics distro run (I think) by Kevin Huizenga, Ted May and Dan Zettwoch. I ask them to send me something like $50 worth of stuff of their choosing. It’s a wonderful package.

2004 onwards

  • I’m basically a blogger now, blogging about my weird temp jobs and local gigs in Birmingham. I’m convinced blogging is a natural evolution of zines - people publishing on a network. Not many of the my 90s zine people seem to have followed though.
  • I go to Caption for a couple more years pick up zines here and there, but I draw a line on getting involved with the scene.
  • I stay in touch with some of the good friends I’ve made over the years and occasionally wonder what’s up with the others, but this period of my life is pretty much over.
  • And every time I move house (which I do a lot until settling down with Fiona in 2009) I have these bloody boxes of zines with me…