In the first of a semi-regular series, we talk to independent zine and comic producers and publishers to pick their brains on creating, printing and publishing at a grass roots level. First up, and keeping the punk DIY spirit going full steam is Penge-based Colossive Press.
Colossive Press, run by our pals Tom and Jane are based just down the road from TheNeverPress Command Centre in Penge. Regulars at zine fairs all over the country and responsible for keeping the Croydon Space Programme at the forefront of the public consciousness (where it demands to be) with their publication Ad Astra Per Croydon, Colossive produce fun, enlightening and eclectic work. We love them and we hope you love them too. So, let's go...
Helloooo - first things first! Tell us about the ethos of Colossive Press
Jane: Whatever your story is, it’s worth telling. Lots of people – us included – spend too much time overthinking things, doubting ourselves and waiting for others to give us ‘permission to create’. But if you’ve got a story – and, let’s face it, all of us have tons of them – it deserves to be heard. Now more than ever, we need to get our stories out there. It’s what keeps us connected.
Tom: The beauty of DIY culture is that we can just do whatever seems like a good idea at the time. The small press world is a wonderfully open and accessible environment for self-expression or experimentation. There are no gatekeepers and there’s an incredibly supportive sense of community.
How did you come into zine producing?
Tom: Back in the 1990s, I was on the fringes of a very lively small-press comics scene and published a couple of things under my own Bliss Comics imprint. Then life got in the way, and I drifted away from the scene for a while before getting re-energised in the 2010s. I was looking for a creative outlet and realised it was time to stop making excuses.
I came up with a few photocopied ashcan issues of High Precision Ghosts (a Faustian narrative in an experimental format – my first foray into book arts) and Ad Astra Per Croydon (the unofficial history of the largely forgotten Croydon Spaceport). I sold them from the communal table at wonderful local events, including the Catford Comic and Zine Fair and South London Comic & Zine Fair in South Norwood – and Colossive Press was born.
As Jane is a professional writer and editor, it made sense for her to get involved too – and it was a good vehicle for a couple of projects she was working on…
Why are you called Colossive Press?
Tom: ‘Colossive’ was a word my dear old dad came up with to describe something that was ‘awful big altogether’. It’s always stuck with me and seemed like the perfect name for a teeny-tiny press.
Tell us about the types of work you create and publish…
Jane: Anything and everything! Our catalogue includes photobooks, handsewn riso-zines, humour, satire, ghost stories, memoir, book arts and oral history. It’s just the two of us working out of our tiny house in Penge in our spare time. It’s kind of a kitchen table set-up – except we don’t even have a kitchen table! We’re not a ‘proper’ publisher in the sense that we don’t have the time, contacts or budget to publish other people’s long-form projects – as much as we’d like to. But collaboration is a huge part of the small-press scene, so we try to find ways to make it work. Speaking of which…
Tom: Since mid-2020, we’ve published 64-and-counting issues in our handmade Colossive Cartographies series, based around the Turkish map-fold. It’s an A6 format that pops up very pleasingly into a one-page A4 zine. I came up with the idea for the project during the first lockdown and approached a small bunch of creators (including Jane!) whose work I admired. It all just took off from there. It’s always great to see what inventive and surprising things people have done with the format – and we’re never disappointed.
The Colossive Manifesto really inspires us at TheNeverPress – how did it come about?
Jane: By accident really! Early in 2022, we were asked to do a short presentation for LDComics – a wonderful women-led comics forum – at their monthly online meet-up. We’d never done anything like that before, but – after the initial terror of public speaking had subsided – we managed to come up with a few core ideas about what we do and why. The main theme of our talk was: if we can do it, anyone can. Just to wrap things up, we produced a summary of the key points and jokingly called it the Colossive Manifesto.
Tom: We were pleasantly surprised when people told us they found it useful and inspiring. We had it printed on postcards and started popping them in with orders and giving them away free at fairs. Everyone who passes our table seems to pick one up and it really seems to resonate. It’s very rewarding because we were sincere about the points we were making.
You've used the immediacy of zine publishing to produce some wonderful and personal books about Jane's father, Gordon, and his love of photography. Can you tell us more about these projects?
Jane: Dad was a very keen – and accomplished – amateur photographer. He was always out and about with his camera, taking pictures of anything and everything that caught his eye. Later in life, despite serious health issues, he focused on photographing graffiti and street art. He got to know all the artists and became a regular fixture on the scene. Even when he was an inpatient at St Christopher’s hospice in the last few weeks of his life, we had to take him out in a wheelchair to see the new street art in Penge.
After he died in April 2017, we inherited 33,000 graffiti pictures alone. I had no idea what to do with them, but I wanted to tell Dad’s story and get his photography to a bigger audience. So that’s how How Graffiti Saved My Dad’s Life (At Least For A While) came about. We’ve since published two books of Dad’s weird and wonderful London street photography: Things My Dad Saw (But Never Bothered Mentioning) and its inventively titled follow-up, More Things My Dad Saw… All profits from these books go to St Christopher’s, and we’ve raised more than £5,000 and counting…
Gordon's work, his mural in Penge and Jane with him.
And we've just published Time Capsule, a book of Dad’s colour slides from the 1960s and 1970s. We’ve had such a wonderful response to these books – and I’m more proud of them (and him) than I could ever really express.
Who are zines for? Broadly speaking and more specifically with Colossive?
Tom: Zines are for everyone. We just need to get the message out there. It's always great to see 'newbies' stumbling across a zine fair by accident and discovering this kind of DIY culture for the first time.
Jane: People come to our zines through so many different routes – for example, the small-press comics community, the street art scene or because they live in Croydon and never knew it used to have a spaceport...
You’re a small outfit, but with a big reach. How do you manage organisation and production in and around life’s other commitments?
Jane: It can get tricky. Tom works full-time but I’m freelance, so can be much more flexible. I tend to deal with most of the postage and correspondence. We try to set aside ‘project time’, when we can both work on our own stuff, in the evenings and weekends. That means we have fewer spontaneous trips to the pub nowadays – which probably isn’t a bad thing.
I’m naturally cack-handed so for the best part of four years, Tom was single-handedly (well, double-handedly – but you know what I mean) folding and sticking all the Colossive Cartographies. It was just about manageable when we only had a few titles, but then it got silly. We’d suddenly get a big order for every single title – and that would be Tom’s weekend gone! So, I’ve finally learned how to do it, too. Hopefully nobody can tell the difference…
In our ultra-fast digital-first world, how important or relevant is independent zine producing? What alternative can it offer?
Tom: There's definitely an increased appreciation of tactile, 'artisanal' stuff. There are things you can do with physical formats that you can't with digital – as the Colossive Cartographies demonstrate, for example. The, ahem, zine scene also provides a chance to get together and socialise with interesting and creative people.
Jane: Zines offer something different that you can't get anywhere else. There's a place for digital downloads and mass-market paperbacks, and there's a place for one-off or limited-edition zines. I know what I'd prefer to spend my money on...
What advice would you give to someone who wants to make and distribute zines?
Tom: Grab a pen and a piece of paper and off you go – it's as simple as that! Access to a photocopier is a bonus if you're producing a few copies of the same title, but digital printing is now fairly cheap and accessible. To get your work out there, check out zine fairs and zine libraries for communal tables and swaps. It's also a good idea to contact people whose work you admire and maybe send them copies or arrange swaps.
Jane: We sell through our website and use Instagram and Bluesky to promote our titles, although there’s the growing issue of Gen AI companies harvesting people’s creative work, which is a worry. We also send out a regular newsletter, detailing new launches and events. It's an organic, two-way thing, though. Your job is to make the work. Your audience will find you eventually!
And there we go - really wonderful stuff from our friends Tom and Jane. They weren't lying when they said that their manifesto resonated with people. When TheNeverPress visited the Pagemasters Zine fair back in September '24, that little white postcard pulled us in like a tractor beam. We wrote about it here, in fact. Just a humble postcard and a few lines of black text - put together quickly, but powered by years of experience and a lifetime of belief that whatever your story is, it's worth telling.
We really hope the manifesto speaks to you, and we hope that all the wonderful creations Colossive produce entice you to pick up some copies and inspire you to just have a go. As Tom said above...
Grab a pen and a piece of paper and off you go – it's as simple as that!
Further Reading
And a wee little tutorial from Youtuber Karen Elaine on Turkish folding...
Be wild, be free.