Fanzines

This is a high-impact visual presentation of the most interesting fanzines ever produced. Ephemeral and irreplaceable, many have been lost to all but a few passionate collectors.

Fanzines have been one of the liveliest forms of self-expression for over 70 years. Now a new generation of graphic designers, illustrators, artists and writers combines self-expression with a rediscovery of the handmade, crafted object.

Their subject matter is as varied as the passions of their creators, ranging across music, comics, typography, animal rights, politics, alternative lifestyles, clip art, thrift shopping, beer drinking.

Produced in small quantities, fanzines were the original medium of super-niche interest groups and the cultural underground. Many of the most exciting zines have been made with very basic tools: scissors and glue, a photocopier, staples or string, yet their collaged photos and hand-drawn type and illustrations explode across the pages.

From the earliest examples created by sci-fi fans in the 1930s, now incredibly rare, the book takes us through the decades. Superhero comics inspired a flush of zines in the 1950s and ’60s. In the 1970s, the DIY aesthetic of punk was forged in fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue and Search and Destroy, while the ’80s saw political protest zines as well as rave and street style. The Riot Grrrl movement of the ’90s gave voice to a defiant new generation of feminists, while the arrival of the internet saw many fanzines make the transition to online.

Obscure or prescient, subversive or downright weird, fanzines have an energy and style that shows grassroots social and cultural movements at their most explosively creative moment.

The book has been reviewed to critical ‘scholarly’ acclaim by The New York Times, Time Out, Print magazine, Wire, Eye and others.

Teal Triggs, an avid collector of fanzines, is Professor of Graphic Design and Director of the research network for Information Environments at the University of the Arts London. Her other publications include The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovation in Contemporary Type Design, Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics From 1976 to Now and Communicating Design: Essays in Visual Communication.