“They were kind of obsessive and kind of compulsive and had a fair amount of mental disorders.”
It seemed slightly weird at first that Pete Ashton, big cheese in the Nineties small press comics scene, should choose to focus his Birmingham Zine Festival talk on the Escape/ Fast Fiction crowd of the Eighties. But, true to form, Pete turns in a good talk, and he’s surely right to suggest that pretty much everything since has moved in their slipstream. (It would certainly be true of my efforts.)
The emergence of the British Small Press Comics scene in the early 1980s from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.
Heh - glad you picked up on this. I used your "Comics And My Life" piece from Vicious as the inspiration for the FA stuff.
ReplyDeleteI think the reason for talking about the early 80s was it's something that interests me rather than something that's about me. One can find oneself tiring after a while...
So if there's a Birmingham Zine Festival next year we need someone who came after you to write about you? "I never met Pete Ashton, but apparently he'd only sleep for half an hour on a concrete block outside conventions, then go back in the next day for some more collating."
ReplyDelete"Comics and My Life" was a bit of a gag thing, really, though it all felt that way at the time. I wrote something for the first ever 'Zum!'about the Fast Fiction crowd which had a bit more bite to it, maybe I'll post that one day.