About the Collection

A short film by Jac introducing the collection (9m:34s)

The Beginning

Zineopolis opened in June 2007 after a group zine project from Illustration Degree students at the University of Portsmouth. The zines and comics produced are archived in this site along with zines donated to us and ones specially purchased for the collection. Over the years we have built-up a great collection of zines - we are focussing on zines heavy with visual content, now more commonly referred to as Art-zines.

The collection is curated by Dr Jackie Batey and is located within the Illustration BA course at the University of Portsmouth. Zineopolis is the sister project of The Ministry of Books (artist's book collection curated by Ros Simms and Lee Shearman).

Why Zines?
We wanted to reflect the diversity of thought and talent that exists outside traditional publishing. Zines are one of the few areas left where creative people can speak without censorship. This makes the world of zines new and exciting as well as challenging. Commercial art is changing rapidly, with over-reliance on clip-art images and images that exist to simply dress-up yet another advert, for yet another 'must-have' product.

So, what do visual people make and say when they are given a free-hand?

You'll find it here - amongst art-zines. The nature of production, often cheap and quick, means these zines reflect the thoughts and hopes of the day (quite literally). We are focussing upon image-heavy zines, here in the School of Art and Design (or art-zines). The emergence of zines means that contrary to popular thought, young people (and older ones) have plenty to say about the world they find themselves in, and not as passively as one may expect. The culture of zines shows us that people do still have opinions, it also shows us that traditional conduits for sharing thoughts are probably not as accessible as we'd like within our celebrity-obsessed media. It's great to witness the self-publishing boom!

We would love to hear from other zine makers, library collections or zinefests.

Go on! Make a zine
- draw what's on your mind, then send us a copy...

This site is archived by the Web Archive Project at the British Library, London UK.

This site is archived by the Zine Web Archive - The Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA