Birmingham Zine Festival 2010 Talk

In 2010 there was a Zine Festival in Birmingham. Zines and self published magazines were a very important part of my early adulthood and inform pretty much everything I’ve done since, so I was intrigued to see how this pre-internet form of non-mainstream communication would be celebrated in an era when they weren’t so vital and necessary. Is it simply nostalgia for a more ‘real’ media, like vinyl aficionados, or is there something else going on?

I also felt it would be nice to bring some history to the table and chose to talk about the era that came before my 90s activity and which influenced me in a manner my work might influence the next generation. So I talked about The Emergence of the British Small Press Comics Scene in the Early 1980s to a rather bemused but polite audience of folks who probably saw zines as being for activist politics, not weird comics.

A decade later I would show my comics and zines at the Open Zine Archive.