Comic, Zine and Bookfairs, Summer 2026

It's hard to keep up with the flourishing zine, comics and book fairs happening at the moment, which I see as a very positive sign.

This weekend (11th and 12th July 2026) sees the ARC festival of contemporary comics taking place in Copeland Park, Peckham with at least 100 exhibitors.

South London Comic and Zine Fair is coming up at Stanley Arts, 12 South Norwood Hill, SE25 6AB on Sunday 19th July 2026. 

At the same venue on 6th September, the London Radical Bookfair is making a comeback, with its first event since 2023.

Pagemasters, who have held successful events at Stanley St SE8 and elsewhere, have a late summer zine fair coming up at the South London Gallery on 29 August.

This year's London Anarchist Bookfair takes place on 26 September. After last year's successful event at Waterloo (Leake Street) - the first @ bookfair South of the River - it's heading back East to Rich Mix.

On the same weekend inQ!, London's Queer Comics Fair, is taking place at London LGBTQ+ Community Centre on Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September 2025. 

 

Panel Borders in Brockley

Panel Borders is the comics show on Resonance FM, presented by Alex Fitch. In the recent Brockley Max festival he brought together people involved in comics and living in the Brockley area for a conversation at The Talbot, including:


 - Kieron Gillen (Marvel Comics' Uncanny X-Men - he recently set a Mr Sinister scheme in Greenwich Park);
- Sarah Gordon (The Peckham House for Invalids); 
- Howard Hardiman (Badger, The Lengths); 
- Simone Lia (Fluffy/Please God, find me a husband!); 
- Gary Northfield (Derek the Sheep in the Beano) - children's comic illustrator operating from a studio at the Old Police Station; 
- Woodrow Phoenix (Nelson); 
- Julia Scheele (69 love songs, illustrated).

You can listen to it here, with some interesting reflections on the local area and how people have used SE London scenes in their work. Funnily enough in view of my post last week on Quality Comics/Weird Fantasy Comics in Lewisham Way, some of the panellists mention that place too.  Woodrow Phoenix recalls that his first tips in lettering comics came from Weird Fantasy Comics, from Garry Leach (Warrior/2000 AD etc) who used to live in Crofton Park and now lives in Forest Hill. Alex Fitch chips in 'V for Vendetta originated in New Cross'. 


Woodrow also mentioned another lost local comic shop - Skinny Melinks at 66 Loampit Vale.


Lots more to follow up from this programme, but I was particularly interested to hear about Howard Hardiman and Sarah Gordon's The Cooperage, set in Deptford and Brockley (image below)

Quality Comics in Lewisham Way

A pleasant stroll on my 'New Cross and Deptford Radical History' walk a couple of weeks ago, from the Hobgoblin to the Birds Nest and back again. Around 40 people came along, which made the sun come out especially. I don't count a walk or talk like this a success though unless somebody chips in with some new information. So I was pleased when somebody pointed out that a shop in Lewisham Way played a key role in British comics.

Quality Comics was right next door to the Marquis of Granby at 3 Lewisham Way, and seems to have originally been opened in 1975 as Weird Fantasy by Frank Dobson. The rooms upstairs were sublet to Dez Skinn as the base for his emerging comics publishing empire. As Dez recalls, from 1979 he also acquired the shop, renaming it Quality Comics (photos above are from Dez's site).

It was in this period that his Quality Communications launched Warrior magazine as a kind of home grown UK version of a Marvel comic. The 26 issues published between 1982 and 1985 were very influential, featuring among other things the first episodes of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta

Quality Communications also published the Halls of Horror series from its New Cross office. Not sure how long the New Cross shop/office continued - last Lewisham Way address I have found online for Quality Communications Ltd is from 1984.

Anybody know any more or remember the shop?

Update January 2013 - I came across this advert  for Quality Comics 'home of Warrior' today in a 1988 issue of the comics magaazine Speakeasy, so clearly the shop was still going then.

The Invisibles

Here's another Londonist graphic novel: Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. The Invisibles (aka The Invisible College) are an underground movement of time travelling psychic warriors engaged in a centuries long struggle against a conspiracy intent on total control and enslavement of the human race.



Volume One of the series (The Invisibles: Say you want a revolution, 1995) features various radical and libertarian references including Timothy Leary, de Sade, Kropotkin, Shelley and the Situationists (a key character is named King Mob - named after the 1960s pro-situationist group who ironically used to detourn Marvel comics with radical slogans), not to mention an implicit debt to William Burroughs.

Then of course there are the mysteries of London, into which a young Invisibles recruit is initiated by a wise homeless beggar. The latter rants 'Two Londons there are: there's the one you can see all around and there's the other city under the skin of this. The hidden city, sunless and silent, if you really want to learn, I'll take you there. I'll show you things to make your hair stand up'. Later underground they visit 'the buried London... the city's dark twin.... reached by secret processional ways; obsolete subway tunnels, the cellars of long-demolished buildings, lost stations and stairways'.

Vinyl Underground: Watching the Detectives

Vinyl Underground: Watching the Detectives by Si Spencer and Simon Gane (2008) is very much a self-consciouslly Londonist graphic novel. It talks of 'London, city of mobs and murder, massacres and mysteries' and is crammed full of the kind of references that suggest the authors have spent many hours listening to the Robert Elms show.

Harry Beck's 1931 tube map? Check. Fictitious locations in Phyllis Pearsall's London A-Z? Check. Mention of 'psychogeography of London'? Check. Brooding image of the river? Yes, several, for example: 'countless ghosts, teeming like tadpoles in the murky poison of the Thames'.



The tale features a cool gang of 'occult detectives' and avengers hanging out in an abandoned tube station, tracking down child killers in between DJing at Northern Soul nights in Stockwell. Its plot takes it starting point from the real story of the discovery of a child's dismembered body in the Thames, but the suspected ritual killing turns out to be something else involving London gangsters...

Can anybody suggest other Londonist (particularly South Londonist) graphic novels? By this I don't just mean stories set in London, but those in which the city itself - or a particular location within it - is a key element. Alan Moore's From Hell is an obvious example, as to a lesser extent is his V for Vendetta. But there must be many others.

V for Vendetta

I posted a while ago on a panic that gripped Greenwich and Deptford in 1775, with people fleeing in a rainstorm in fear of the area being swallowed up by an earthquake. I was reminded of this when re-reading Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta (1988). The story is set in an alternative present-day London, where war and catastrophe has been followed by a fascist dictatorship. There is a scene where the heroine, Rose, recalls looking out over a flooded London from her home in Shooters Hill.

Deptford also gets a mention as the site of the Deptford Marsh Clearance Project and later of rioting and looting, while 'Brixton and Streatham are quarantine zones'.