This page needs a re-write since the major update to the site. But the spirit described below still pretty much stands.

It's a web site, albeit it one with quite a lot of history that makes it a bit muddy. The history is nicely contained in the sidebar so you can hopefully read on without too much mud.

What is BugPowder. I ask myself this question often, especially when people ask me. Truth is, it's about comics from my perspective, but that's a perspective I share with many other people. It's heart is in the UK small press comics community which, for the uninitiated, is about self published comic books, normally photocopied but also printed, with circulations ranging from 30 to a few thousand with distribution often by word of mouth or limited to selected shops.

What makes it important is the fact that the small press is out of the loop. It's not about financial need - no-one ever got rich doing small press comics. But a lot of people got happy. And a lot of people created great art that would never have appeared from a mainstream publisher. And a lot of people made friends, some for life.

The UK small press (and it's contemporaries around the world) therefore lays the template for what BugPowder is about. It's about comics that are free from such unimportant trivialities as money and power. It's about comics for the sake of comics. Not just "for the sake of comics" in the sense of "what the hell, let's do comics", although that is a very important and undervalued reason, but also "for the SAKE of comics". We know comics are important, that they're a vital medium still coming out of adolescence. A misunderstood art form not accepted by the mainstream society and all the more powerful for that.

While the comics industry collapses in on itself, regurgitating the same old shit over and over again desperately chasing that bottom line, we know there's more to comics than that. We know comics deserve better because comics have given us so much. It's a love thing.

BugPowder is not exclusively photocopied small press. It embraces good, groundbreaking comics no matter where they come from, be they published by a multinational media company or published by a guy in his bedsit. But at the end of the day I know that the guy in his bedsit is much more likely to produce the goods than the big company, and that the chances are the people producing the books for the company started out doing comics in the bedsit.

BugPowder by no means claims to be some kind of comics nexus. The whole site is geared around external links and you're encouraged to visit them and see where they lead. And then when you run dry, come back and find another one. And should you find anything cool, let me know and I'll tell everyone else. (One day we'll have the technology to bypass me completely...)

So I guess that's what BugPowder is. You like?

Pete Ashton
12th June 2001

BugPowder.com follows on from BugPowder Mail Order which started out as a small press and mini comics distro for photocopied comics and grew to sell a range of independently published comics, mainly from Top Shelf. At it's height it held over 500 titles and was so successful I had to shut it down so I could regain my life.

BugPowder in turn grew out of a small press review sheet I ran called TRS - The Review Sheet (inventive names a-go-go) which was revived by Andy Luke as TRS2 18 months ago and survives to this day and is archived on this site. TRS reviewed around 30 small press comics a month and up to 400 copies were given away free.

TRS came about because I was running an open access comics fanzine called Vicious which, because of it's odd editorial policy of printing anything sent in, didn't have room for a structured reviews section. I passionately believed that all zines and comix (especially those with letters pages) should have a reviews section, so I did mine as an insert, which went on to be an insert in pretty much all the zines going around at the time.

Prior to Vicious I wrote a lot of letters to various zines including Andy Brewer's Battleground and Jenni Scott's Caption. In fact, credit where credit's due, without Battleground's inspiration there would have been no Vicious, and without Pete Pavement's Slab-O-Concrete mail order there would have been no BugPowder. But who knows what they might not have been without BugPowder.