The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

It’s been developing over the last few months, with a Facebook group and word of potential dates and venues but it looks pretty confirmed now, with artist James Nash putting this up on his blog:

So that’s definitely a date for the diary. Organised and administrated by various talented folks including FPI blog fave Lizz Lunney.

As far as I know Birmingham has had various little zine things going on for a while, but nothing like a full day event for many years. In fact, the last full Zine Festival thing may have been back in 1997. BrumCAB’97 (Comics and Beer) was an event organised by Pete Ashton (now a social media expert, then a small press distributor). I was still working at Nostalgia & Comics and we decided to get involved, hosting a few signing sessions and running promotions for the weekend.

All was planned, organised and barring a calamity of unprecedented proportions keeping the population of the country indoors we expected a wonderful weekend – September 6th & 7th 1997. Unfortunately for us, that turned out to be the weekend of Princess Diana’s funeral and Birmingham had turned into a ghost town meaning that just a handful of comics fans and comic creators spent a weekend drinking and talking about comics. It was great fun, but nothing like we were expecting.

Hopefully, the new Birmingham Zine Festival will have nothing so dramatic!

(For more on that particular disastrous weekend, part of a series of hopefully entertaining thoughts on working at Nostalgia & Comics for so many wonderful years, see my recollections on my personal blog. Pete added his own thoughts here)