Small-press and comics-related items from Ed’s personal collections of flyers, greetings cards, sketches, articles, xeroxes, and printed ephemera.
Glenn Dakin drew and hand-lettered this flyer for an amateur production by the Travelling Theatre, of this well-known Victorian melodrama The Red Barn, Or The Murder of Maria Marten. He also played the part of Tim Bobbin, a rustic simpleton. I saw the play and have fond memories of it. Undated; probably around 1984-1988.
Here we have scans of Sun Jam, which was an improvised comic strip made by Darryl Cunningham, Paul Schroeder, and myself. Drawn very quickly in one single session. No pencilling, just inking right onto the page (though some TippEx afterwards!) The rules were that each artist would start a page with the first two panels,…
I received this hand-drawn message from David Hewie of Dundee in January 1993. I seem to recall he was a regular reader of small press comics and a frequent customer at the Fast Fiction mail order service. I always like to receive mail-art and we don’t seem to see so much of it these days….
John Watson was commissioned to draw a series of comic strips that appeared on the back of the box for Kellog’s Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes. Evidently, I managed to save one of them, “A monstrous oversight at Loch Ness”. This is a charming little story told with a “fixed camera” viewpoint much like a Buster…
Woodrow Phoenix created these colourful and stylish cards for the comics shop Meanwhile, which had a short but eventful run in Camden Town in the early 1990s. Meanwhile was notable for trying to create a vibe or an image that departed radically from the “traditional” comic shop, and wanted to make the shop look colourful,…
John Watson was the creator of SPY and other well-loved mini-comics, and contributor to later issues of Fast Fiction magazine. He also drummed for an indie band, Hackney Five-O. Midnight Music was Nick Ralph’s label in the 1980s and 1990s, and home to This Mortal Coil, cindytalk, and Robyn Hitchcock. This flyer probably dates from…
Here you may download the complete text of a 1996 interview I conducted with Mark Robinson. The interview was published in Zum magazine. This was after Mark and I had created our Silver-Age Superman comic, and his work took a sudden departure into a very bold, heavy-outlined style of drawing, along with compressed storylines with…
I received this great postcard from Montreal cartoonist Julie Doucet in August 1988. I guess then she would have just started her comics career and was doing the first issues of Dirty Plotte as self-published mini-comics. Soon after this she found success with Drawn & Quarterly and then Weirdo magazine. The front of the card…
