Help! Shark was a small press comics imprint based in Chester in the North-West of England. I suppose the main man behind the operation was Chris Flewitt, a talented and self-effacing artist who approached me to submit a strip of his own to Fast Fiction magazine in early 1985. He was also the designer behind…
Our thanks go to David A. Simpson, a long standing reader and collector of UK small press comics, who kindly sent us scans of the covers of Fast Fiction #1 from his own copy. He also provided the catalogue description of the contents. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this artwork, an early…
We were absolutely delighted to hear from Russell Christian last month. “Check out my World In Disarray“, he suggests. “Mostly old comics, but stuff you’ve never seen. Putting them up on the blog might even encourage me to start drawing comics again (when I’m not spitting fire at the Big Bankers, or teaching little kids…
To our great delight we were recently contacted by Tim Budden who got in touch by email from Taiwan. In the 1980s, this Welsh artist contributed his extraordinary badger stories to issues of The Wimp, which he co-published with Mike Hemsley and other art school friends, sometimes working under the alias of T.N. Neddub. He…
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…
Many thanks to Russell Willis, the editor of a fanzine called Infinity in 1984-85, who sent us a link to his Facebook galleries of UK small press cover art from his personal collections. “Feel free to use whichever ones you feel fit,” he adds encouragingly. I’ve added a few of his images to the first…
We’re starting to build a gallery of UK small press cover art from the 1980s (and 1990s). The first gallery (A5 titles A-D) opened today and further galleries will be added over time. I hope the collection will build into a fairly representative sample of the unusual and imaginative small press comics and stripzines published…
