Small press galleries update

Added a second gallery of A5 comics, covering titles E-L. This includes six issues of Fred Herring by the very wonderful Russell Christian. Russell is more of a painter and a poet than he ever was a comics artist, and as I recall UK fandom generally found his stream-of-consciousness works hard to understand. Russell moved to New York at some stage in the 1980s; I think this is Russell Christian’s current blog.

Also in this gallery is an item by Merv Grist, an English artist who sent his eccentric comics and booklets from Trowbridge in Wiltshire. I wish I could reproduce the whole of The Melvin Moments Story here; it’s a fine pastiche, illustrating the life of an imaginary rock singer from the early 1960s. All the ‘clippings’ from old magazines are lovingly created and hand-drawn by Grist, and packed with spot-on parodies of adverts and movies from the era. More covers from Merv in future galleries. His recent paintings are for sale here.

I decided to include two issues of Bagnall’s Hairy Hi-Fi even though (technically) it’s a music zine and not a small press comic. In same vein, the Harlan Ellison interview by Reynolds and Harvey is all prose, but it’s a part of the Mauretania publishing output.