Zine Madness!

For various reasons, STML has been reading around the old zine scene for a few days, and interesting connections have been unearthed.

My first contact with zines was the oversize compendium Zines! Vol. 1 published by RE/Search, possibly the greatest independent publisher of weird shit of all time, which chronicled the emergence of the zine, self-publishing and small press scene through interviews with such legends as Lyn Peril of Mystery Date, and Noel Tolentino from Bunnyhop. As the cover said: "Surrender to the incredibly strange urge... to create your own Zine!" - and I did. Several times.

Being far away from such centres of hipness as Dover, Tennessee and Detroit, Illinois, my greatest influence were the homegrown queerzines and minicomics of the mid-90s: Rachael House's Red Hanky Panky, Sina's Atomic Boy and especially Jeremy Dennis' 3 in a bed. These were roughly photocopied booklets I used to get from the wonderful 30th Century Comics in Putney SW15, and I still feel that, compared to independent bookstores, comic shops are not given their fair dues as disseminators of the radical, the rare and the dirty. The first time I took a queerzine to the counter was up there with buying Gay Times in W.H.Smiths, or condoms in Boots (Now on 3 for 2!), but I soon learnt that comic shops, like indy bookstores, were havens for sallow-faced misfits. And me, of course.

I was very pleased to stumble upon Jeremy Dennis and Damian Cugley's current website, the excellent Alleged Literature. Among various other minicomic projects, Jeremy is busy doing bad things to the bible in The N Testament, a page of which is reproduced above, continuing the theme of book abuse from the last post.

The advent of the interweb pretty much killed off the zine movement, as discussed, coincidentally enough, on Sunday, when a large number of people, including Iain Sinclair, Tim Wells of Rising and 3AM Magazine's Richard Marshall, turned up to watch STML listen to them discuss Self-Publishing and DIY Culture, the final event of this year's Clerkenwell Literary Festival. The CLF's own blogger captures the salient points here, and if you look carefully, you might catch STML in the audience. If you didn't make it to the Fest this year, keep your eyes open and your ears peeled for next year. It's worth it, not least because almost all the events take place in pubs.