Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi10.1093jdhepk00.docx

Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1
doi:10.1093/jdh/epk006
© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on
behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. 69
Scissors and Glue:
Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic
Teal Triggs
The fanzine producer Chris Wheelchair (sic) remarked in the
editorial of Ruptured
Ambitions (1992) that his Plymouth-based fanzine is ‘ all about
helping promote the DIY
punk/alternative/underground movement, which is, at present,
extremely healthy in many
areas, and certainly improving. ’ From the early 1930s, fan
magazines or ‘ fanzines ’ have
been integral to the creation of a thriving communication
network of underground culture,
disseminating information and personal views to like-minded
individuals on subjects from
music and football to anti-capitalism and thrift store shopping.
Yet, it remains within the
subculture of punk music where the homemade, A4, stapled and
photocopied fanzines
of the late 1970s fostered the ‘ do-it-yourself ’ (DIY)
production techniques of cut-n-paste
letterforms, photocopied and collaged images, hand-scrawled
and typewritten texts, to create
a recognizable graphic design aesthetic. The employment of

such techniques and technologies
has had an impact on an overall idiosyncratic and distinctive
visual style affi liated with
punk fanzines. For fanzine producers, the DIY process critiques
mass production through
the very handmade quality it embraces, but also in the process
of appropriating the images
and words of mainstream media and popular culture. Arguably,
the DIY approach
reached its peak in the 1990s and still continues today, having
been co-opted into the
worlds of commercial mainstream lifestyle magazines and
advertising which trade on its
association with punk authenticity. The intent of this essay is to
explore the development
of a graphic language of resistance and to examine the way in
which the very use of its
DIY production methods refl ected the promotion of politics and
music of 1970s’ punk and
DIY underground activity. In addition, this piece will, through
interviews with fanzine
producers, attempt to recover from history an area of graphic
design activity that has largely
been ignored. This will be achieved by focusing on three punk
fanzine titles that were
initiated during the fi rst wave of the punk period: Panache
(Mick Mercer, 1976 – 1992),
Chainsaw (Charlie Chainsaw, 1977 – 1985) and Ripped & Torn
(Tony Drayton,
1976 – 1979). These examples will be measured against a
discussion of Sniffi n’ Glue
(Mark Perry, 1976 – 1977), which has been acknowledged by
the punk community as the
fi rst punk DIY fanzine in Britain.
Keywords: fanzines — graphic design — popular

culture — publishing — punk — typography
‘ privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your
own culture and stop consuming that which is made
for you ’ . 2 For Duncombe, fanzines represent not
only a ‘ shared creation ’ of a producer’s own, often
alternative, culture but also a ‘ novel form of commu-
nication ’ . 3 In particular it is worth noting Duncombe’s
Introduction
What is a fanzine? 1 The American writer and aca-
demic Stephen Duncombe describes fanzines as ‘ little
publications fi lled with rantings of high weirdness and
exploding with chaotic design ’ where the producers
Teal Triggs
70
reference to the ‘ chaotic design ’ of the fanzine page
and use of the term ‘ chaotic ’ in relationship to the
development of a graphic language of resistance. Later
he refers to the layout of the fanzines as ‘ unruly cut-
n-paste ’ with barely legible type and ‘ uneven
re production ’ , drawing comparisons between
‘ professional-looking publications ’ and the fanzine as
amateur, falling somewhere between ‘ a personal letter
and a magazine ’ . 4
A plethora of fanzines emerged during the fi rst
wave of punk in Britain (1976 – 1979). This was a
period of substantial cultural, social and political
change where punk reacted against the ‘ modern
world ’ and the absorption of ‘ hippy culture ’ into the

mainstream. According to the cultural historian
Roger Sabin, ‘ Although punk had no set agenda like
its hippie counter-cultural predecessor it did stand for
certain identifi able attitudes. Among them an empha-
sis on working class “ credibility ” . A belief in various
hues of class politics [notably anarchism] and an
enthusiasm for spontaneity and doing it yourself ’ . 5
Punk also reacted against the mid-1970s ‘ hit parade ’
rock music scene. The writer Henry Rollins refl ects
in his introduction to one punk musician’s memoirs,
The Andy Blade Chronicles , that at this time ‘ rock was
boring, rock was damn near dead ’ . 6 Punk music was
seen as an alternative to the mainstream music indus-
try and provided something new and liberating
through its independent and ‘ do-it-yourself ’ approach.
In addition, Julie Davies, writing in her 1977 book
Punk , argues that ‘ Punk Rock is a live experience; it
has to be seen and heard live. Playing a record at
home just doesn’t communicate the sheer energy,
excitement and enthusiasm which are the hallmarks
of the music ’. 7 Punk fanzines attempted to recreate
the same buzz visually — an ethos encapsulated by the
Sex Pistols who famously remarked in the New Musi-
cal Express ‘ We’re not into music … we’re into
chaos ’ . 8
Fanzines adopted the DIY, independent approach
that punk musicians had espoused. With the rise of
newly formed bands came the establishment of
impromptu clubs, small, independent record labels
and record stores, including the London-based shop
Rough Trade (which also distributed fanzines). In the
same way, fanzines offered fans a ‘ free space for
developing ideas and practices ’ , and a visual space
unencumbered by formal design rules and visual

expectations. 9 As one member of the community
refl ects ‘ our fanzines were always clumsy, unprofes-
sional, ungrammatical, where design was due to inad-
equacy rather than risk ’ . 10 As the plethora of
punk-inspired fanzines materialized, a unique visual
identity emerged, with its own set of graphic rules
and a ‘ do-it yourself ’ approach neatly reinforcing
punk’s new found ‘ political ’ voice. The Sex Pistols
single release of ‘ Anarchy in the UK ’ (1976) summed
up punk’s radical position where Malcolm McLaren,
the self-proclaimed punk creator and Sex Pistol’s
manager, was quick to point out, ‘ “ Anarchy in the
UK ” is a statement of self-rule, or ultimate indepen-
dence, of do-it-yourself ’ . 11 As if to punctuate this
point graphically, the producer of Sideburns (Brighton,
1976) famously provided a set of simple instructions
and a diagram of how to play three chords — A, E,
G — alongside the punk command ‘ Now Form a
Band ’ . As with its music and fashion, punk advocated
that everyone go out and produce fanzines. As inde-
pendent self-published publications, fanzines became
vehicles of subcultural communication and played a
fundamental role in the construction of punk identity
and a political community.
As cultural mouthpieces for punk bands, fanzines
disseminated information about gig schedules,
interviews with bands and reviews of new albums
alongside features on current political events and per-
sonal rants. They fostered an active dialogue with a
community of like-minded individuals often
evidenced through the readers’ pages of fanzines and
also at the gigs themselves. As the American writer
Greil Marcus suggests, punk was ‘ a moment in time
that took shape as a language anticipating its own

destruction … it was a chance to create ephemeral
events that would serve as judgements on whatever
came next ’ . 12 Fanzines formed part of this fl eeting
cultural performance. Each in their own way contrib-
uted to the development of a distinct and enduring
DIY graphic language of punk.
Sniffi n’ Glue
The fi rst punk fanzine to refl ect the punk movement
visually in Britain was Mark Perry’s Sniffi n’ Glue
(1976 – 1977) [ 1 ]. Mark P.’s Sniffi n’ Glue is credited
as the first British punk fanzine amongst punk
his torians such as Jon Savage, who writes: ‘ Perry’s
achi eve ment was to unite for a brief time all the
tensions — between art and commerce, between
Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY
Aesthetic
71
avant-garde aesthetics and social realist politics — that
eventually tore punk apart, and write them out in a
sharp mix of emotion and intention that still makes
his words fresh ’ . 13 Others writing at the time, includ-
ing Charlie Chainsaw, producer of the punk fanzine
Chainsaw , who altered the form of his production
just to differentiate his fanzine from the multitude of
Sniffi n’ Glue ‘ look-a-likes ’ that had appeared so soon
after its fi rst issue. 14 These attributes were the way in
which the typewritten text was used with mistakes in
spelling as well as cross-outs, all caps, handwritten
graffi ti text, photographs of bands used on two-
thirds of the cover, and so forth.

Tributes to Mark P.’s success were even witnessed
in the way the fanzine itself was referenced graph-
ically. Murder by Fanzine Nr. 2 ( c .1983, Ross-Shire,
Scotland) for example, pastes a fl yer promoting issue
6 of Sniffi n’ Glue and overlays it on the head of a gui-
tar player thereby rendering him anonymous [ 2 ].
Despite this Mark P. is ‘ clear about refusing the “ fi rst
fanzine ” tag and is careful to credit earlier rock-n-roll
publications such as Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp!,
Crawdaddy and Brian Hoggs’ Bam Balam . He com-
ments, ‘ I would like to claim that the idea of doing a
fanzine on this new music was my own, but I can’t
because it wasn’t. At the time there were loads of
fanzines knocking about. Mostly on country music,
R&B and the like ’. 15 Sniffi n’ Glue soon established
itself as part of the evolutionary line of fanzine
publishing by taking on what would become a char-
acteristic approach to fanzine production with its
A4, stapled, photocopied pages and layouts using
handwritten and typewritten texts.
The title, Sniffi n’ Glue: And Other Rock’n’roll Habits
was inspired by the Ramones’ London gig and song
‘ Now I wanna sniff some glue ’ — a verse that is
reprinted in Issue 1 (1976). Mark P. remarks that ‘ In
this issue we lean heavily towards being a Ramones
fan letter ’ and promises in future issues to cover ‘ other
punks who make and do things we like ’ . 16 Sniffi n’
Fig 1. Cover. Sniffi n ’ Glue , Nr. 5, November, 1976,
London
Fig 2. Cover. Murder by Fanzine Nr. 2, c.1983, Ross-
Shire,
Scotland

Teal Triggs
72
Glue was often abbreviated to SG and, while drawing
upon earlier formats and content of the rock’n’roll
publications, it did differ from its predecessors in that
it defi ned itself from an insider’s and working-class
perspective on the burgeoning punk music scene in
Britain. Issue 1 defi ned itself as ‘ for punks ’ , as a
mouthpiece for their music and anger. In Issue 4 he
signs one review as ‘ Mark “ angry young man ” P. ’ .
Also in Issue 4, collaborator Steve Mick writes
‘ … punks have been telling us we’ve got the best mag
around. Well, of course we have ’ cause we’re broke,
on the dole and live at home in boring council fl ats,
so obviously we know what’s goin ’ on! ’ Mark P. left
his job as a bank clerk and home in Deptford to start
the fanzine. In true punk spirit, Mark Perry even
shortened his surname to the letter ‘ P ’ in order to
avoid the attention of the dole offi cers (as did many
other fanzine producers at the time, including Tony
Drayton (Tony D.) of Ripped & Torn ). Produced
initially in Mark P.’s back bedroom, Sniffi n’ Glue
found a gap in the ‘ market ’ with an audience of like-
minded punk music enthusiasts. His initial photo-
copier run was 50 but by the end of Sniffi n’ Glue in
1977 up to 10,000 were in circulation. Perry stopped
producing Sniffi n’ Glue with number 12 (August/
September 1977) about the same time that he
suggests punk had been assimilated into the music
industry. 17 Like punk itself, fanzines moved from
positions of independence to rapid co-option into

the mainstream.
Sniffi n’ Glue was a true DIY production. Mark P.
fi rst put together the fanzine using a ‘ back to basics ’
approach with the main text typed out on an ‘ old
children’s typewriter ’ — a Christmas present from his
parents when he was ten. 18 Texts were used as they
were written with grammatical and punctuation
corrections made visible in crossing outs. This stressed
the immediacy of its production and of the informa-
tion, but also the transparency of the design and
journalistic process itself. Mark P. advertises subscrip-
tions at ‘ £1.40 for four issues and paid with postal
orders only ’ (Issue 3 ½: 4), although this was not a
cost effective measure when the cover price of each
issue was 10p. At the time the cost of photocopying
was 3 pence per sheet and most issues average 12
pages. Mark P. and other producers obtained free
copies by using copiers found in their workplace or
through friends’ jobs. Sniffi n’ Glue , for example, was
produced on Mark P.’s girlfriend’s offi ce copier. 19
Unlike publishers of some of the later fanzines, Mark
P. kept production simple, using only single-sided
copies, with an occasional inclusion of a pin-up page
of punk band members (e.g. Chelsea or Brian Che-
vette of Eater), double-sided and backed by an adver-
tisement for a Sex Pistols gig or an independent
record shop.
Mark P. had developed his own brand of DIY
‘ punk journalism ’ and encouraged others to partici-
pate actively in ‘ having a go yourself ’ . Sniffi n’ Glue ’s
readership was primarily other fans who purchased
copies, amongst other places, in London’s Compen-
dium bookstore (Camden) and through Bizarre Books

(Paddington). Mark P. was also very much aware of
his new found position as punk provocateur and of
the infl uence he had on other fanzine producers.
Even in Issue 3 of Sniffi n Glue , Mark P. comments
that the back issues had already ‘ SOLD OUT!
Collectors items already? ’ In a special edition of
Q magazine (April 2002), Mark P. refl ects that ‘ Sniffi n ’
Glue was the best rock magazine in the world bar
none, because it was so connected to what it was
writing about’. 20 Mark P. also speculates that his
fanzine was successful because it was unlike other
fanzines, in that Sniffi n’ Glue was ‘ more discerning
than the others ’ . He felt that other fanzines said what
was fashionable rather than being honest and telling
readers exactly what they thought. 21
A Graphic Language of Resistance
But what does the DIY aesthetic that emerged in fan-
zines such as Sniffi n’ Glue actually represent? Before
turning to a more detailed discussion of other punk
fanzine titles, it is worth exploring what a ‘ graphic
language of resistance ’ in contemporary Western cul-
ture means: is it even possible to characterize it in any
systematic way? Language, according to cultural his-
torian Mikko Lehtonen, is essentially abstract and
exists only through certain material forms such as
‘ writing, photographs, movies, newspapers and mag-
azines, advertisements and commercials ’ . 22 These are
conduits through which meaning is conveyed and
where signs which stand for ‘ mental concepts’ are
arranged into languages . Just as grammars and syntax
are created through written or spoken language so
too might be the structures of visual language. The
semioticians Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen
observe a shift taking place in the ‘ era of late

Aesthetic
73
modernity ’ from a dominance of ‘ monomodality ’ , a
singular communication mode, to ‘ multimodality ’ ,
which embraces a ‘ variety of materials and to cross
the boundaries between the various art, design and
performance disciplines ’ . 23 Language may be
communicated through verbal or non-verbal means,
or a combination thereof. The grammars of design
operate in the same way as the grammars of semiotic
modes and may be codifi ed. The music historian
Dave Laing, for example, comments that punk lan-
guage drew upon discourses found in the areas of
pornography, left-wing politics and obscenity.
Explicit sexual words such as ‘ cunt ’ and swearing such
as using the word ‘ fuck ’ permeated the lyrics of punk
songs, performances on stage and in the pages of
fanzines. 24 All these facets incorporated an explicit
and violent use of language as part of a general shock
tactic strategy meant to offend and draw atten-
tion to punk itself. The DIY approach to fanzine pro-
duction ensured the menacing nature of the words in
the use of cut-up ransom note lettering.
For punk fanzines, language is communicated
graphically through a system of visual signs and spe-
cifi cally in the conveyance of a message of ‘ resistance ’ .
In the essay ‘ Retheorizing Resistance ’ , Beverly Best
examines the way in which the popular cultural text
functions on ‘ behalf of oppositional cultural and
political practice ’ . Best argues in a similar way to

Michel Foucault that there ‘ cannot be power rela-
tions without resistances, and that the latter are real
and effective because they are formed at the point
where power relations are exercised ’ . 25 Punk fanzines
are sites for oppositional practice in that they provide
a forum for cultural communication as well as for
political action, which should be included in any
broader political discourse. George McKay observes
that British punk may be considered as a ‘ cultural
moment of resistance ’ and part of a DIY culture that
‘ activism means action ’ . 26 It is the self-empowerment
component of a do-it-yourself culture where direct
action begins.
Yet, what of a ‘ graphic language of resistance ’ ? The
Oxford Modern English Dictionary defi nes ‘ resistance ’ as
the ‘ act of resisting ’ ; a ‘ refusal to comply ’ , for example
as might be defined as in resisting authority. 27
Duncombe, editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader ,
suggests that through the process of resistance we are
freed from the ‘ limits and constraints of the dominant
culture ’ . In turn, ‘ cultural resistance ’ allows us to
‘ experiment with new ways of seeing and being and
develop tools and resources for resistance ’ . 28 This
may be represented either through content, graphi-
cally or both, where rules and prescriptions are disre-
garded intentionally. Michael Twyman establishes
that the ‘ language element in graphic communica-
tion ’ is the relationship between information content
and visual presentation, which he suggests must take
into account a number of factors including the ‘ users
of language ’ and ‘ the circumstances of use ’ . 29 Twyman
is also clear in his argument about the role techno-
logical developments have in relation to the ‘ language
of the messages that need to be communicated ’ . He

suggests that the three major means of production —
the manuscript age, the printed age and the electronic
age, provide different forms, and, ‘ we have, there-
fore, to ask ourselves how each of these different
forms can be made to respond to our needs ’ . 30
Such a distinction is useful for a study of fanzines.
In this case, the use of handwriting or typewritten
texts maintains a similar function in terms of language
while the ‘ graphic treatment responds to the particu-
lar technology being used ’ . 31 ‘ Graphic language ’ is a
visual system incorporating not only image-based
symbols but also a typographic language. The way
in which graphic language is depicted will add value
to its intended meaning. For example, Stuart Mealing,
writing in Visible Language , has observed that ‘ font
styles and parameters such as size and color are selected
to lend additional interpretive potential to plain text
message. ’ This is formalized by using salient elements
including italics, bold, underlined, capital letters,
fonts, size and weight, etc., but also through the way
images and texts are juxtaposed and presented in
order to extend visually ‘ the semantic potential of a
message ’ . 32 Such acts of resistance are normally
‘ shared ’ and in the process provide a ‘ focal point ’ and
help to establish a community of like-minded in -
dividuals. Such a community is often considered as
subcultural, borne out of a resistance to a domin -
ant or parent culture, and seen as ‘ subordinate, sub-
altern or subterranean ’ . 33
The ‘ Art ’ of Punk
Punk arguably represented the politics of the working-
class experience, 34 but also the more ‘ artful ’ ‘ aesthet-
ics of proletarian play ’ , and was also middle-class in
that there was signifi cant art school input. 35 Malcolm

Teal Triggs
74
Garrett, for example, states that he was introduced to
techniques of collage, stencilling, use of Letraset and
the photocopier while at college. His own fanzine
Today’s Length (one issue, 1980), concocted with Joe
Ewart and others, refl ects this. He was also associated
with punk performer and artist Linder, whose own
collages were profi led on the cover of the Buzzcock’s
fi rst single Orgasm Addict (1977), and Peter Saville
whose own references were visible on OK UK Streets ,
a single for Manchester-based punk group The
Smirks (1978). Garrett remarks ‘ punk really stood
out, there was a sense of hostility on the street, and
you felt a sense of energy which was aggressive in
expression ’ . 36
Out of this connection emerged a language of
graphic resistance steeped in the fi rst instance in the
ideology of punk and its anarchical spirit and in the
second instance, that which emerged from their posi-
tion in a continuous timeline of self-conscious Dada-
ist and Situationist International ‘ art ’ practices. 37
According to Guy Debord, Situationist International
promoted the notion that contemporary society had
become the ‘ society of the spectacle ’ , opposing this
by employing strategies such as that defi ned by détour-
nement (diversion) and of ‘ recuperation ’ (recovery)
including commandeered comic-strip imagery and
other popular culture forms. This is exemplifi ed by
fanzine producer and Pogues’ frontman Shane

MacGowan, who admits in his publication Bondage
(Issue 1,1976), ‘ this whole thing was put together …
with the help of a box of safety pins. All the photos
are ripped out of other mags ’ . 38
The Sex Pistols’ art director Jamie Reid had an
interest in Situationist International and its anteced-
ents including Dada and Futurism. Along with self-
proclaimed punk historian Malcolm McLaren, Reid
was a member of the English Situationist group King
Mob while an art student at Croydon College of Art
in the late 1960s. His early affi liation with Situationist
International writings was established and, in 1974,
Reid and McLaren helped to publish Christopher
Gray’s anthology Leaving the 20 th Century. Reid’s
own publication (co-produced with Jeremy Brook
and Nigel Edwards) titled Suburban Press (Issue 1,
1970) played tribute to the agit-prop collage-style
illustrations, cartoons and DIY production techniques
he had been exposed to in the fl yers, handbills and
early Situationist works. Such techniques had become
synonymous with the radical politics of student pro-
tests of 1968. Reid’s approach, and those of subse-
quent punk fanzine producers drew upon these
techniques in order to establish a specifi c visual imme-
diacy to their message. Ultimately this process pro-
vided an identifi able DIY aesthetic unapologetic for
its raw and amateur production quality.
Many producers, whether knowingly or not, often
combined a graphic language of ‘ resistance ’ instigated
as a result of Situationists’ King Mob Echo ( c .1968),
Jamie Reid’s Suburban Press (1970) and Mark P.’s
Sniffi n’ Glue ’s seemingly fresh punk attitude. Richard
Reynolds, for example, in his ‘ post punk poetry ’ fan-

zine Scumbag (1980 – 1981, 1988) drew on Sniffi n’
Glue as well as Wyndham Lewis’ BLAST! and the
language of concrete poetry. 39 On the other hand, it
would be misleading to suggest that all fanzine pro-
ducers were aware of these specifi c traditions. Panache
(London 1976 – 1991) producer Mick Mercer com-
ments, ‘I started in ‘ 76. There was only Sniffi ng [sic]
Glue and Ripped and Torn, and I hadn’t seen either.
I just kept it simple and did what I liked ’ . 40
Panache
Writer and fanzine producer, Mick Mercer was nine-
teen years old when he began Panache in 1976 as a
twelve-page, A4, stapled, photocopied fan publica-
tion whose audience comprised like-minded indi-
viduals with interests in punk bands such as Siouxsie
and the Banshees and The Adverts [ 3 ]. Copies of
Panache sold for 20 pence. Fifty-fi ve issues of Panache
were produced by the time Mercer discontinued
its irregular publication in 1992. This was despite its
growing popularity with larger print runs numbering
in the thousands. Mick Mercer worked with regular
contributors Neil Sherring and Jonathan Rawlings
who ‘ helped with writing photography and sales ’ . 41
From 1982 – 1988, Mercer produced the publication
by himself with occasional contributions from Kim
Igoe, bassist for the punk band Action Pact. Panache ,
according to Mercer was ‘ Not like any other fanzine ’
and was also considered the ‘ King of the Fanzine
Frontier ’ . These slogans ran on the front covers of
Issue 13 and Issue 20 respectively.
In addition to its feature articles, Panache published
interviews with band members, critiqued club gigs
and reviewed the current album releases. Although
Panache was distributed primarily in London, Mercer

was acutely aware of the lack of press coverage for
Aesthetic
75
bands based outside main cities including Stanwell-
bred band Dead Man’s Shadow and Action Pact from
Bristol. Mercer felt these bands were on a trajectory
to becoming well known nationally and that Panache
could not ‘ pass up a chance to document such suc-
cess ’ . 42 As a producer of an alternative press mouth-
piece and as an enthusiast for punk rock music,
Mercer negotiated a mutual ‘ trust ’ between himself as
a fan writer and the bands he featured. This, he sug-
gests, gave him access to ‘ better and more natural
interviews ’ . He explains, ‘ the question of interest in
particular bands that often gets called favouritism is
often that. Ha ha — it is why fanzines have those fi rst
three letters as inspiration. I can write about bands but
still be objective. I am an objective fan ’ . 43
Although this is an oxymoron, Mercer and other
punk fanzine producers were often critical of a band’s
performance or album recordings. The cultural critic
Thomas McLaughlin proposes ‘ that in zines we can
fi nd the fans seeing through the ideological operation
itself, practising a vernacular cultural criticism. ’ In
addition, he suggests that it is producers (makers)
working at the local level and with local concerns
who provide a valid line of questioning and critique
of the dominant paradigm. Punk fanzines operated

against the mainstream. They were self- regulated
with complete editorial control that made ‘ theoretical
refl ection ’ possible. 44 Ironically, it is such an approach
to fanzine writing where many producers who wanted
to write about music professionally could practise
‘ fringe journalism ’ . This often led producers such as
Mercer to move into the mainstream publishing
industry, where he eventually became a freelance
journalist for Melody Maker and Record Mirror and later
editor of the popular UK music magazine Zig Zag .
While this provided professional success, Mercer
writes that for him Panache was ‘ integrated into my
personal worldview. It was what kick started my
brain, which lay dormant at school ’ . 45
As amateur DIY publications, fanzines were pro-
duced on an irregular basis, without concerns for for-
mal publishing conventions. This ‘ do-it-yourself ’
punk ethos manifested itself visually through low-
budget graphic techniques enhanced by the produc-
tion qualities offered by the use of the photocopier.
Mick Mercer explains his methods used in creating
Panache : ‘ It was exciting enough to eventually learn
about reduced type on a photocopier!! I always kept
it simple but tried to cram each issue full. Type it up,
reduce it, loads of cut-outs (relevant to a theme) and
as many photos as possible ’ . 46 The use of the photo-
copier as a means of production further strengthened
the visual relationship between fanzines and the fl yers
as did the lyrics of punk bands [ 4 ]. The photocopier
Fig 3. Cover. Panache Nr. 10, c.1978, London
Fig 4. Flyer from Adam and the Ants ‘ Zerox ’ tour, 1979

Teal Triggs
76
and the subversion of copyright was recognized by
Adam & the Ants in their song ‘ Zerox ’ (1979),
‘I may look happy, healthy and clean
a dark brown voice and suit pristine
but behind the smile there is a
Zerox machine’. 47
In the process of drawing upon low-value produc-
tion techniques, such as photocopying and Letraset,
employing the graphic elements including ransom
note cut-outs, handwritten, stencilled, scrawled or
typewritten texts, or collage images, a specifi c graphic
language began to emerge which shared similar visual
characteristics from fanzine to fanzine. This approach
went some way to establish a set of commonly used
principles and a way of creating a distinctive graphic
language, which ultimately mirrored the particular
aesthetic of punk music.
Mercer, along with the other fi rst wave British
punk fanzine producers including Mark Perry (Mark
P.) of Sniffn’ Glue and Tony Drayton (Tony D.) of
Ripped & Torn , was among the fi rst to break the rules
of conventional practices in the use of grammar and
punctuation. He fl aunted typographic mistakes and
employed an eclectic mix of typographic styles, pre-
ferring the visual aggressiveness of the ‘ punk attitude ’
created by visually overcrowded pages and grainy
black and white photocopied images. For Mercer,
such an approach mirrored visually the fanzine’s punk

content. He remarks, ‘ The punk attitude prevailed, in
so much as the editorial tone was always, if you’re not
enjoying this there’s something wrong with you ’ . 48
One element of the graphic language of punk fan-
zines may be defi ned by the way it featured the co-
option of popular media images and typeset texts from
national newspapers and magazines. In a similar way to
the Situationist’s notion of ‘ recuperation ’ , co-option in
this context means to knowingly take from one source
and reposition the image and/or text in a new context.
Margaret Thatcher’s cut-out head, for example, was
collaged on top of a buxom female body [ 4 ] while cut-
out newspaper headlines were re- contextualized and
ironically juxtaposed with new images [ 5 ]. Gee
Vaucher of the anarcho-punk band CRASS also used
photo- collage techniques for the image of a poster
insert for the single Bloody Revolutions (1980). She rep-
resents four band members based on a publicity shot of
the Sex Pistols from their single ‘ God Save the Queen ’ ,
and the statue of Liberty. George McKay, in Senseless
Acts of Beauty , writes that the ‘ modes of juxtaposition
and subversion are so entwined in punk; the safety pin
and the Queen, the bin liner on the body … the bricolage
of CRASS is a patchwork of ideas, strategies, voices,
beliefs and so on ’ . 49
Jon Savage, writing in 1983 observed that ‘ we are
inundated by images from the past, swamped by the
nostalgia that is splattered all over Thatcherite Brit-
ain ’ . He continues to suggest that ‘ Punk always had a
retro consciousness — deliberately ignored in the cul-
tural Stalinism that was going on at the time — which
was pervasive yet controlled ’ . Savage cites a number
of key examples in fashion, including Vivienne West-

wood’s use of 1960s’ Wemblex pin-collars to ‘ mutate
into Anarchy shirts ’ ; The Clash wearing winklepick-
ers; and in music the Sex Pistols cover versions of
1960s’ bands, The Who and Small Faces. 50 Greil
Marcus writing in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century defi nes punk as a ‘ load of old ideas
sensationalised into new feelings almost instantly
turned into new clichés … ’ . 51
Fig 5. Back cover. Panache Nr. 11, c.1978, London
Aesthetic
77
Record covers were perhaps the most visible use
of images taken from the past. For example, the lay-
out and use of typography of The Clash’s London
Calling (1979) album drew directly from Elvis Pres-
ley’s eponymous 1956 album. The choice of photo-
graphic image of a single artist with his guitar is
mimicked, although Elvis is seen in a frontal pose
and looking upward, the guitarist for The Clash is
caught in motion striking the guitar on the stage
fl oor. 52 Such intentional plagiarism demonstrated
punk’s disregard of established publishing traditions
and in this way may be interpreted as a political act.
The way in which this was achieved visually is ‘ sym-
bolic ’ but also subcultural ‘ plundering ’ . Panache for
example, reproduced frames from mainstream comic
books such as DC Comics’ Batman and used still
images of the puppets originating from the British
children’s television show, Thunderbirds . Issues of

the fanzine were also themed including those using
reproduction 1960s bubblegum cards for studio fi lm
stills [ 6 ]. 53
Despite these popular cultural references, however,
punk fanzines remained decidedly underground and
Panache, during its time of publication, was no excep-
tion. While Panache shared a similar status with punk
fanzines Sniffi n’ Glue and Ripped & Torn , it was unique
in that its sheer longevity allowed Mercer to reinvent
the publication as his own musical interests shifted.
By the early 1980s, Panache had transformed itself
into a fanzine for Britain’s Goths, and later estab-
lished itself as a fanzine for the emerging Indie music
scene. In both cases it retained the ‘ do-it-yourself ’
aesthetic for which the fanzine had become known.
Ripped & Torn and Chainsaw
Despite an emerging set of punk ‘ conventions ’ , which
included the A4 stapled format, page layout, the
Fig 6. Page Spread. Panache Nr. 13, c.1978, London
Teal Triggs
78
production values of the photocopier and mixture of
typographic elements such as cut-n-paste, ransom
notes and handwritten and typewritten letterforms,
each fanzine maintained its own individualized
approach. The techniques of DIY encouraged this to
occur. The manner in which the graphic marks, visual

elements and their layout were presented not only
refl ected the message but also by default the individ-
ual hand of the fanzine producer. This we can see in
a comparison of covers from Sniffi n’ Glue , Chainsaw
and Ripped & Torn [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Charlie Chainsaw, for
example, in his fi rst issue of Chainsaw (No. 1, 1977)
[ 8 ] used stencil letters for the title and a series of cut-
out newspaper texts collaged with photography of
the Sex Pistols and reference to its namesake, an
image from the poster of the fi lm The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre . Mark P. of Sniffi n’ Glue (No. 1, 1976) [ 7 ]
on the other hand, employed his own quickly pro-
duced handwriting scrawl where letters were all caps
and visually presented in the same weight. Alterna-
tively, Tony Drayton’s Ripped & Torn (Issue No. 1,
November 1976, Glasgow) [ 9 ] took a more formal
approach combining one photographic image of The
Damned with handwritten caps and lowercase letter-
forms in a hierarchical sequence from the
title, the stories promised inside to the smaller, self-
effacing tag lines ‘ This is too fantastic … buy it now ’ .
Ripped & Torn also enjoyed a long run — from Issue
1, November 1976 to Issue 18 September 1979, and
it is important in that it covered the punk music scene
in both London and Glasgow. This fanzine attempted
to broaden out an understanding of punk’s political
agenda. As Tony D. himself explains in a rant titled
‘ Politics and Punk ’ ,
‘ The whole idea of politics is enough to put anyone off it,
and therefore the closest most of us get to it is either signing
on once a week, or fi lling in a tax return form once a year.
But that’s the way the government wants it, so they can get
on with their business of running us the way they think we

should be run ’ . 54
Despite its exclusion from most academic histories
of punk, 55 Ripped & Torn was considered one of the
key publications of the period by both the under-
ground and mainstream press. As Jon Savage offers in
a review of fanzines for the British music paper Sounds
(1977), Ripped & Torn was ‘ … again one of the very
fi rst, and now important — set to take over from SG
should the latter fold. As such, could be more broad-
minded on occasions, but ish 7 is well laid out and
contains material not covered elsewhere: ants, chars
and reviews of the Pistols/Clash bootlegs. Full at
25p ’ . 56 Savage co-opts the punk abbreviations ‘ ants ’
and ‘ chars ’ often found in the pages of the fanzines
meaning ‘ rants ’ and ‘ charts ’ respectively.
Ripped & Torn also provided an alternative model to
that of Sniffi n’ Glue and one that infl uenced the types
of production decision made by other producers.
Tom Vague, for example reveals that he adopted
colour for his fanzine Vague (1977 – 79, London) in
order ‘ to be like Ripped & Torn ’ . 57 In the same review
as Ripped & Torn , Jon Savage fi nds fault with our other
example Chainsaw , ‘ New, little criticism — most things
are “ bleein ’ beaut ” . Maybe its unfair to compare this
with 30 or so others but it just doesn’t stand up very
well. No pix (bar one collage from music press/record
sleeves) and identikit articles. No fun. 20p’. 58
Despite Savage’s criticism, however, Chainsaw
is important to include in any discussion of punk
fanzines. In the fi rst instance this is because of its Fig 7.
Cover. Sniffi n ’ Glue Nr. 1, 1976, London

Aesthetic
79
relative longevity and consistency of production.
Chainsaw ran irregularly for 14 issues covering a
seven-year period. In the second instance, its later
issues demonstrated an innovative use of colour not
found in other fanzines of the time. It was also through
the efforts of Chainsaw that lesser-known punk bands
were recognized. Charlie Chainsaw acknowledges
that his fanzine began as a ‘ Sniffi n ’ Glue and Ripped &
Torn clone, but it quickly developed its own distinc-
tive style by concentrating on (then) totally unknown
bands and featuring seriously sick cartoons, articles
and newspaper cuttings’. 59 Kid Charlemagne (Hugh
David) as well as cartoonists Willie D. and Mike J.
Weller (the latter known for his work in the School
Kids issue of OZ and in Cozmic Comics in the early
1970s) occasionally produced work for Chainsaw .
These contributors also established a visual link
between 1960s’ countercultural activity and 1970s’
punk. Phil Smee, who did the cartoons for Ripped &
Torn and occasionally contributed to Sniffi n’ Glue
(1976), was a graphic artist and designed album
covers for 1960s psychedelic bands. He was founder
of the independent record label Bam Caruso and
also coined the term ‘ freakbeat ’ in 1980 to describe
mod and R&B bands.
In the fi rst issue of Ripped & Torn , eighteen-year-
old producer Tony D. asks in the fi rst sentence of his
punk fanzine editorial ‘ What’s in it for me?? ’ By the

Fig 8. Cover Chainsaw Nr. 1, July/August 1977, London
Teal Triggs
80
top of the second column he has found the answer
admitting ‘ My excuse for this self-indulgent esca-
pade … it’s the only way to read my views on punk ’ . 60
Fanzines are self-indulgent productions and in the
view of one ex-fanzine producer, ‘ elitist ’ in the way
they focus on their own individual interests in bands,
gigs and records. While this may be true, the autobio-
graphical narratives established both in the content
and its visual form provided an interesting, if not
useful, history of punk experience. The question of
narrative in contemporary historical theory is worth
considering in terms of the way in which it may be
used to explain the literary and visual construction of
the fanzine. Ripped & Torn , for example, is a historical
narrative formatted as a series of accounts — editorial,
interviews, gigs, reviews, charts, etc. Skid Kid, for
example, acts as a foil to Tony D.’s editorship in
Issue 1 and is made visually evident through the use
of different handwriting to refl ect the process of
banter. Kid’s hand rendering is measured and
methodically realized; whereas Tony D.’s aggravated
interjection is represented in a scrawled and hurried
cursive hand. On a later page of the issue, Tony D.,
who even typed out Skid Kid’s contribution, continues
his discursive practice in his seemingly jealous com-
plaint through the headline, ‘ The SKID KID PAGE

(HOW COME HE GETS A WHOLE PAGE?) ’ . 61
The typewriter text is also unique to the machine
from which it was produced. In the case of Chainsaw
the punctuation marks appear darker (as if double
strikes) from the main body of text, which is uneven
in weight but also in line, thereby refl ecting the type
of pressure that was used to hit individual keys. In
addition, the typewriter he used from Issue 5 had
dropped the letter ‘ n ’ throughout. He writes ‘ the
missing “ N ” was fi lled in by hand — a laborious pro-
cess! ’ , but also that he did not have the funds required
at the time to repair the missing key. 62 The typo-
graphic treatment mixing a handwritten ‘ N ’ with the
typewritten forms, establishes Chainsaw’s trademark
or ‘ signature ’ [10].
Fig 9. Cover Ripped & Torn Nr. 1, November 1976,
London Fig 10. Page detail. Chainsaw Nr. 3,
November/December,
1977, London
Aesthetic
81
Chainsaw developed a house style for his fanzine
which refl ected his individual approach but also an
awareness of standard ‘ professional ’ typewriter and
printing conventions. Alistair McIntosh has written
of house styles that ‘ each express the personality (and
often the haphazard variations in what they were
taught at school) of its originators ’ . 63 For example,

Charlie Chainsaw tabs two spaces after the punctua-
tion marks, indenting by two spaces the fi rst word of
each paragraph opening and without line separations
between paragraphs, standard use of correct quotation
marks, and establishes a hierarchical structure for
headlines with body text justifi ed, ragged right. His
word breaks also follow the convention of breaking
words between syllables. And in keeping with
convention, he uses the two columns with adequate
margins, which is deemed preferable for a stand-
ard A4 page. 64 Ironically, Charlie Chainsaw is using
conventional practices in an unconventional artefact.
Conclusion
Whether fanzine producers were recounting their
experiences inside or outside London, the notion of
resistance remains a key element in the construction
of a punk identity. Fanzines are democratic in that
they provide accessible forums for writing through
their ‘ anyone can do it ’ production strategies. They
also encourage participation (e.g. readers’ letters) and
suggest refl exivity (or refl ectivity in this case) in terms
of their autobiographical manner of communication.
The art critic Michael Bracewell writes ‘ In terms of
contemporary culture, therefore, punk has become
the card which cannot be trumped; and the reason for
this enduring reputation must lie in punk’s unrivalled
ability to confront the processes of cultural commod-
ifi cation; or rather, to play cultural materialism at its
own game, by creating a culture which was capable
of pronouncing its host environment exhausted and
redundant ’ . 65 Like the music and fashion of the fi rst
wave of punk, fanzines continue today to display
many of the early graphic characteristics and aggres-
sive rhetoric associated with punk publications. My

analysis of fanzines emphasizes their position as ‘ polit-
ical ’ forums and mouthpieces for expressing the views
of individuals and also punk collectively. It demon-
strates how such resistance was defi ned by the graphic
language, which had emerged not only from a punk
‘ do-it-yourself ’ ethos, but also from the use of sym-
bols, photographic images, typefaces and the way in
which they were laid out. It is as much the graphic
language that differentiated fanzines from the main-
stream as the content of these publications.
Professor Teal Triggs
School of Graphic Design
London College of Communication
University of the Arts, London
Notes
1 Russ Chauvent in the United States fi rst coined the term
‘ fanzine ’ in 1941 to describe a mimeographed publication
devoted primarily to science fi ction and superhero enthusiasts.
The word ‘ zine ’ appeared sometime in the 1970s as a short-
ened version of ‘ fanzine ’ or fan magazine, usually used to
de-
scribe an A4, photocopied, stapled, non-commercial and
non-professional, small circulation publication. See P. Nicholls
(ed.) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: An Illustrated A-Z ,
Granada, 1979, p. 215.
2 S. Duncombe, Notes From the Underground: Zines and the
Politics
of Alternative Culture , Verso, 1997 , pp. 1 – 2.
3 Frederic Wertham coined the phrase ‘ a special form of
communication ’ in the title of his 1973 book, The World of

Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication. It may be
suggested
that by using the term ‘ novel ’ , Duncombe is playing upon the
form of fanzines as unique narrative forms.
4 Duncombe Notes From the Underground: Zines and the
Politics of
Alternative Culture , 1997 , p. 11. The relationship between the
amateur and fanzines extended beyond punk and formalized
through the range of ‘ how to ’ fanzine books that were
published in the 1990s including: B. Brent, Make a Zine!: A
Guide to Self-publishing Disguised as a Book on How to
Produce a
Zine , Black Books, 1997; and F. Lia Block and H. Carlip, Zine
Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines , Girl Press, 1998.
5 R. Sabin, Interview with author, London, 2005 .
6 Blade The Secret Life of a Teenage Punk Rocker: The
Andy Blade
Chronicles , Cherry Red Books, 2005 , p. 5.
7 J. Davis (ed.), Punk, Millington, Davison Publishing
Limited,
1977 , n. p. This publication was a compilation of articles
and editorial rants from punk fanzines including Chainsaw ,
Live Wire , Flicks , 48 Thrills , Ripped & Torn , Negative
Reaction
and Jolt.
8 N. Spencer, ‘ Don’t Look Over Your Shoulder but the Sex
Pistols are Coming ’ , New Musical Express , 14 February
1976 .
Steve Jones is reportedly to have made the comment.
9 S. Duncombe Cultural Resistance Reader , Verso, 2002 ,

p. 5.
10 J. Ewart, Interview with author, London, 1991 .
11 M. McLaren quoted in G. Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A
Secret
History of the Twentieth Century. Secker & Warburg, 1989 , p.
9.
12 G. Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth
Century. Secker & Warburg, 1989 , p. 82.
13 J. Savage, ‘ Sniffi n’ Glue: The Essential Punk
Accessory ’ , Mojo
No. 81 August, 2000 , p. 129.
14 Charlie Chainsaw, ‘ Alio Punks ’ , Chainsaw Issue 5,
London
1978 , n.p.
Teal Triggs
82
15 E. Eichenberg and M. Perry, And God Created Punk ,
Virgin,
1996 , p. 11.
16 M. Perry, Sniffi n’ Glue , No. 1, London, 1976 , n.p.
17 M Perry, Sniffi n’ Glue , No. 12 August/September,
London,
1977 , n.p.

18 M. Perry, Sniffi n’Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory ,
Sanctuary
House, 2000 , p. 15.
19 Ibid, p. 16.
20 P. Stokes, ‘ Sniffi n’Glue Fanzine: We Love UHU ’ , Q:
Special
Edition: Never Mind the Jubilee , 2002 , p. 105. Mark P. was
not
the only fanzine producer to suggest a longer-term value of
their fanzines. Charlie Chainsaw predicted in Chainsaw (Issue
1, July/August 1977), ‘ Anyway in years to come this mag will
become a collector’s piece, you’ll be able to sell it for
thousands
of quid. ’ Private fanzine collections do exist but it is rare for
copies of British punk fanzines to come onto the collector’s
market. However, over the last decade, museums such as the
Victoria & Albert Museum, The Women’s Library, London,
The British Library, and The New York Public Library, have
developed substantial fanzine collections. The recent popularity
for collecting such material has been borne out in the book by
Julie Bartel, From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine
Collection
in Your Library , American Library Association, 2004.
21 T. Parsons, ‘ Glue Scribe Speaks Out ’ , NME 12
February 1977 .
Reprinted in NME Originals , April 2002, p. 12. Author and
fanzine producer Amy Spencer elaborates on this emphasis of
the unprofessional and the notion of ‘ truth ’ by equating it
with
punk fanzine’s visual chaos. She observes, ‘ the sloppy style
seemed to be a badge of authenticity. If a zine wasn’t slick in
appearance or perfect in terms in presentation, and was not
interested in reaching a mass audience, then the content was

seen as truthful and therefore something to believe in. ’ A.
Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture , Marion Boyers,
2005,
pp. 195 – 6.
22 M. Lehtonen, The Cultural Analysis of Texts , Sage
Publications
Ltd, 2000 , p. 48.
23 G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse:
The Modes
and Media of Contemporary Communication , Arnold, 2001 , p.
2.
24 D. Laing in K. Gelder and S. Thornton (eds), The
Subcultures
Reader , Routledge, 1997 , p. 413.
25 Best also asserts we should see the ‘ everyday ’ as an
equally
signifi cant site of confrontation between power and resistance
as other more ‘ traditionally ’ political spaces. For Foucault it
is
the way in which we defi ne social spaces which determines
‘ how we are able to envisage the practices that take place
there ’ . B. Best, ‘ Over-the-counter-culture: Retheorizing
Resistance in Popular Culture ’ , in S. Redhead (ed.) with
Derek Wynne and Justin O’Connor, The Clubcultures Reader ,
Blackwell Publishers, 1997 , pp. 26 – 27. See also Ben
Highmore
(ed.), The Everyday Life Reader , Routledge, 2002, pp. 10 –
11.
26 G. McKay, DIY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties
Britain ,
Verso, 1998 , p. 4. Duncombe has argued that American

fanzines are more about cultural production than political
action and bemoans the fact that there has been little radical
political action through this medium. He calls this process
‘ virtual politics ’ when underground culture is unable to
effect
‘ meaningful social change ’ . Duncombe, Notes from the
Underground , p. 192.
27 J. Swannell (ed.), Oxford Modern English Dictionary ,
Oxford
University Press, 1992 , p. 920.
28 Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader , 2002 , p. 5.
29 M. Twyman, ‘ The Graphic Presentation of Language ’ ,
Information Design Journal vol. 3 no. 1, 1982 p. 2.
30 Ibid, p. 6.
31 Ibid, p. 5.
32 S. Mealing, ‘ Value Added Text: Where Graphic Design
Meets
Paralinguistics ’ , Visible Language 37(1), 2003 , p. 43. See
also
Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001 op. cit.
33 S. Thornton, ‘The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital (
1995 )
reprinted in Gelder and Thornton, The Subcultures Reader ,
1997, p. 4. These arguments about ‘ resistance ’ need to be
qualifi ed to some degree, however, in the light of Sarah
Thornton’s ideas on subcultural capital. This concept she
defi nes as ‘ conferring status on its owner in the eyes of the
relevant beholder ’ (S. Thornton, Club Cultures: Music,
Media

and Subcultural Capital (1995) London: Polity, p. 11.). It is
therefore not directly connected with notions of resistance as
previously understood by a previous generation of cultural
studies scholars such as Hebdige and others.
34 J. Clarke, S. Hall, T. Jefferson and B. Roberts, ‘
Subcultures,
Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview ’ in S. Hall and
T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures
in Post-war Britain , Hutchinson, 1975 , pp. 9 – 74. See also
D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style , Methuen,
1979.
35 L. Grossberg, ‘ Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock
and
Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life ’ in Gelder and
Thornton, 1997 , pp. 477 – 493.
36 M. Garrett, Interview with author, London, 1999 .
37 For a detailed discussion of the art practices in
relationship to
punk see T. Henry, ‘ Punk and the Avant-Garde art ’ , Journal
of
Popular Culture 17(4), 1984 , pp. 30 – 36; M. Rau, ‘ From
APA to
Zines: Towards a History of Fanzine Publishing ’ , Alternative
Press Review , Spring/Summer, 1994, pp. 10 – 13 and G.
Marcus,
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century ,
1989.
38 S. MacGowen, Bondage, Issue 1, 1976 , n.p.
39 R. Reynolds, Response to author’s questionnaire, 1999 .

Jon
Savage writes that his fanzine London’s Outrage (1976 –
1977)
was infl uenced by the photocopied, A4 format of Sniffi n’
Glue
and its ‘ enthusiasm ’ as well as ‘ the type of detail offered in
the writing of Bam Balam . ’ J. Savage, Response to author’s
questionnaire, 1999.
40 M. Mercer, Response to author’s questionnaire, 1999 .
41 M. Mercer, ‘ Ed ’ , Panache , Issue 20, London, 1981 ,
p. 2. Panache
also had stories on conspiracy theories as well as humanitarian
and social-based issues. In the fi rst few years of publication it
had a print run ranging on average from 200 – 500 copies.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid. Other producers who co-existed as mainstream
journalists
included Simon Dwyer (1959 – 1997) producer of Rapid Eye
Movement ( 1979 ). Shortly after he published the fi rst issue
of his
fanzine he became established as a regular contributor to the
mainstream music magazine Sounds. Danny Baker co-produced
several issues of Sniffi n’ Glue before entering into the fi eld
of mainstream journalism and as a broadcaster for BBC
Radio London.
44 T. McLaughlin, Street Smarts and Critical Theory:
Listening to the
Vernacular. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996 , p. 53.
Fanzines held an ambiguous position as independent mouth-
pieces for bands and, by default, as promoters of commerci-
ally available products.

45 M. Mercer, Letter to author, 1997 .
Aesthetic
83
46 Mercer, Letter to author. Panache was later printed by
the
Notting Hill based printer Better Badges, whose owner Jolly
handled most of the printing and distribution of punk fanzines
in the 1970 s.
47 Adam and the Ants, ‘ Zerox ’ , Dirk Wears White SOX ,
1979 .
48 Mercer, Letter to author, 1997 .
49 Her photomontages and collages follow in the tradition of
early political Dadaists Hannah Höch, John Heartfi eld and
Raoul Hausmann as well as her contemporaries Peter Kennard
and Linder Sterling. They convey messages using the
propaganda of popular culture references, in this case that
the Sex Pistols had become the new establishment. Gee’s
assemblages juxtapose photographs, text and paintings to create
an illusory space and via this layer she is able to enhance the
meaning of the scenes they depict. For a further discussion of
CRASS, see G. McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of
Resistance , Verso, 1996 , p. 78; and T. Triggs, ‘ Bullshit
Detector:
Gee Vaucher ’ Graphics International 76, pp. 18 – 21.
50 Here Savage refl ects on the way in which pop has

plundered
the past, commenting that for punk ‘ nostalgic and found
elements were ripped up and played around with to produce
something genuinely new ’ . J. Savage 1996 , Time Travel:
From
the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop, Media and Sexuality 1977 –
1996 ,
Chatto & Windus, pp. 144 – 145.
51 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century ,
p. 77.
52 On the other hand, the relationship between the fi ne art
world
and punk music is exemplifi ed in artist Roy Lichtenstein’s
painting Gun in America ( 1968 ) which was reproduced as a
label on the single of ‘ White Man in Hammersmith Palais/The
Prisoner ’ (1978) by The Clash (shown through the die-cut
sleeve). Similarly, work by American West Coast artists
Raymond Pettibon included fl yers and album covers for the
punk band Black Flag in the early 1980s, which experimented
with cut-n-paste techniques that often mimicked punk
fanzines. R. Sabin, ‘ Quote and Be Damned … ? ’ in Valerie
Cassel (ed), Splat Boom Pow! The Infl uence of Cartoons in
Contemporary Art , Houston Contemporary Art Museum, 2003,
p. 12.
53 Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style , p. 123.
Mercer
would often ‘ theme ’ his issues using for example, Diane
Arbus’
photographic collection, war photographs, Penguin’s ‘ guide to
Bathroom Design ’ or images from pre- 1940 s French
pornographic magazines.

54 T. Drayton, Dayglow , Issue 5 May, 1977 , n.p. As if to
emphasize
the point of government control, Tony D. at the bottom of the
rant, circles the designated space where the page number
should be and writes ‘ Number? I’m not a number! ’ .
55 Although Ripped & Torn has been mentioned in
academic
books including R. Sabin (ed.), Punk Rock: So What?: The
Cultural Legacy of Punk , Routledge, 1999 , and R. Sabin and
T.
Triggs, ‘ “ Below Critical Radar ” : Fanzines and Alternative
Comics From 1976 to Now’, Slabo-O-Concrete , 2000, this
fanzine has not been explored to date in any critical way. Any
discussion of punk fanzines generally was even omitted from
the programme of ‘ No Future? Punk 2001 ’ an academic
conference held at the University of Westminster, 15 – 23
September 2001.
56 J. Savage, ‘ Fanzines: Every Home Should Print One ’ ,
Sounds
10, September 1977, p. 29. In a letter to the author ( 1999 ),
Tony D. writes, ‘ But as Ripped and Torn become more
important — in the scene — than the increasingly out of touch
SG we tended to ignore one another in print. ’
57 T. Vague, Response to author’s questionnaire, 1999 .
Tony D.
also recounts that his use of colour fi rst for his Issue 10,
February 1978, was merely ‘ because the printer told me it
could be done ’ . Response to author’s questionnaire, 1999.
58 J. Savage, Fanzines: Every Home Should Print One’,
Sounds
10, September, p. 29.

59 Charlie Chainsaw, ‘ Chainsaw Fanzine — A Brief
History
1977 – 1984 ’ , http://www.wrench.org/chainsaw.htm ,
accessed
November 2005. Issue 1 of Chainsaw ran to 200 printed on the
Gestetner duplicator and by Issue No. 11, Charlie Chainsaw
comments that issue No. 10 … ’ sold as many, apparently, as
an average issue of the New Statesman , and more than an
average New Society or Leveller .’ Charlie Chainsaw,
Chainsaw ,
no. 11, February 1981, p. 16.
60 T. Drayton, ‘ What’s in it for me? ’ , Ripped & Torn ,
no. 1,
1976 , p. 3.
61 T. Drayton, ‘ The Skid Kid Page ’ , Ripped & Torn , no.
1, 1976 ,
p. 9. Tony D. also comments that ‘ Looking back over Ripped
and Torn, the fi rst issue uses two different typewriters, over
three pages — the rest being hand-written … one of the pages
is my typing out Skid Kid’s contribution at work. I know this
because in the writing I complain about the state of the
typewriter I’m forced to use. ’ T. Drayton, letter to author,
1999.
62 Charlie Chainsaw. ‘ Chainsaw Fanzine — A Brief
History 1977 –
1984 ’ , http://www.wrench.org/chainsaw.htm , accessed
November
2005 .
63 McIntosh, ‘ Typewriter Composition and Standardization
in
Information Printing ’ , Printing Technology 9 (1), 1965 , p.

68.
64 S. Walker, Typography and Language in Everyday Life:
Prescriptions
and Practices , Longman and Pearson Education Limited, 2001
.
Walker also discusses prescription in typing manuals and in
the training of typists and how historically this has informed
the visual organization of the page.
65 M. Bracewell and A. Wilson, No Future: Sex,
Seditionaries and
the Sex Pistols , The Hospital, 2004 , p. 9.
http://www.wrench.org/chainsaw.htm
http://www.wrench.org/chainsaw.htm
• Mid Term Overview.
• Re-read Chapters 14 -21, review class lecture notes and
answer the following.
• Mid-Term will be Thursday, Oct 13.
1. Provide 3 examples of Black Codes as found in the text.
2. When it was passed, the 14th Amendment, which confers
citizenship on "all persons born or
naturalized in the United States", excluded what group of
people?
3. The Navajo were forced to walk from their traditional homes
in Arizona to a reservation in New
Mexico in 1863-1864. This was called:________.
4. By the 1870s, Chinese workers composed what percentage of

California's agricultural work
force?
5. Indian and Mexican cowboys were known as:___________.
6. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of women employed rose
from 2.6 million
to:__________.
7. At the turn of the century, besides employment opportunities,
women began to experience
more access to what?
8. Provide a formal definition for progressivism.
9. In a few short COMPLETE sentences compare and contrast
BTW’s childhood with that of
DuBois.
10. In 1892, what southern university began to maintain a
database of lynching statistics?
11. Why were Mexican American victims of lynching often left
out popular histories?
12. Which Amendment established the prohibition of alcoholic
beverages?
13. Which Amendment gave women the vote in federal
elections?
14. What was the primary incentive for American interest in
imperialism?
15. Name two ways the US transmitted ideas of “American
exceptionalism” around the world.
16. What kind of Filipinos where exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis
World’s Fair?
17. The United States fought Spain for control of what territory
in the Spanish American War?
18. As a result, what nation became the most dominant power in

Latin America?
19. The Central Powers were made up of which countries?
20. When did all Natives receive U.S. citizenship?
21. Describe Theodore Roosevelt’s relationship to Booker T.
Washington.
22. King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo was also known
as ________
23. The Central Powers were made up of which countries?
24. When did all Natives receive U.S. citizenship?
25. Margaret Sanger dedicated her work to what cause?
*Explain in a few short COMPLETE sentences how lawmakers
and landowners exploited the
language of the 13th Amendment to force African-Americans
back into free labor marked by
unsafe work conditions and violence.
*Explain in a few short COMPLETE sentences how John D.
Rockefeller achieved market
domination.
*Explain in a few short COMPLETE sentences why Booker T.
Washington’s “Atlanta Cotton
States Exposition” speech would lead to some African-
Americans criticizing him.
*Explain in a few short COMPLETE sentences how immigrant

Europeans protected
themselves from ethnic discrimination and assumed
“whiteness.”
*Explain in a few short COMPLETE sentences the story of Ota
Benga AND the phenomenon
of eugenics and how the two are related.
This article was downloaded by: [The UC Irvine Libraries]
On: 03 January 2015, At: 20:56
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered
Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK
New Political Science
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnps20
“Revolutionary art is a tool for
liberation'’: Emory Douglas and
protest aesthetics at the black
panther
Erika Doss a
a University of Colorado , Boulder
Published online: 13 Dec 2007.
To cite this article: Erika Doss (1999) “Revolutionary art is a

tool for liberation'’: Emory
Douglas and protest aesthetics at the black panther , New
Political Science, 21:2, 245-259,
DOI: 10.1080/07393149908429867
To link to this article:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393149908429867
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of
all the information
(the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor
& Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties
whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for
any purpose of the
Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication
are the opinions and
views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by
Taylor & Francis. The
accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and
Francis shall not be liable
for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs,
expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising
directly or indirectly in
connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the
Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private
study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling,

loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden.
Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/
page/terms-and-conditions
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnps20
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.108
0/07393149908429867
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393149908429867
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
New Political Science, Volume 21, Number 2, 1999 245
"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation'': Emory
Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at The Black Panther
Erika Doss
University of Colorado, Boulder
Abstract From its emergence in 1966, the Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense
deliberately projected an image of black power and
revolutionary martyrdom that hinged
on potent black masculinity and patriarchal authority. If that
image was embodied in the
Black Panthers' paramilitary physical and public presence, it
was also visualized in
numerous posters and drawings designed for The Black Panther,
the Party's newspaper
and chief means of political dissemination. Emory Douglas, the
primary artist at The
Black Panther during the Party's peak from the late 1960s to the

early 1970s, produced
hundreds of pictures promoting the Panthers' mixed agenda of
armed militance and
community welfare. Challenging long-standing assumptions
about race and racism,
Douglas crafted a visual strategy of cultural resistance which
aimed at convincing
audiences of the efficacy of black power by offering alternative
images of a forceful black
masculinity.
A poster sized drawing by Emory Douglas titled Shoot to Kill
(Fig. 1) occupied
the back page of the November 21, 1970 issue of The Black
Panther, the Black
Panther Party's newspaper.1 The drawing, which featured scenes
of black men
killing white policemen, was subtitled, "Our Minister of
Culture, Emory Dou-
glas, Teaches: 'We Have to Begin to Draw Pictures That Will
Make People Go
Out and Kill Pigs."'
As the authors of a government report remarked in the mid-
1970s, the Black
Panthers were "blessed with a theatrical sixth sense that enabled
them to gain
an audience and project an image [that] frightened America."2
Recognition of
that image is central to an understanding of the Panthers and
their politics.
Emory Douglas, the primary artist at The Black Panther during
the Party's peak
from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, produced hundreds of
pictures promoting
the Panthers' program of armed militance and community

welfare. Challenging
long-standing assumptions about race and racism in America,
Douglas crafted a
protest aesthetic aimed at convincing audiences of black power.
In a 1970 essay in The Black Panther, Douglas detailed the
central role of
1 This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the
conference "Toward a History
of the 1960s," University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 1993.
For an expanded version, see
Erika Doss, "Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power
and Masculinity, 1960s—
1990s," in Prospects: An Annual of American Studies 23
(1998), pp. 483-516. I would especially
like to thank Emory Douglas, John Gennari, Rickie Solinger and
Rebecca Yule for their
assistance and advice with this essay.
2 G. Louis Heath, Off the Pigs! The History and Literature of
the Black Panther Party
(Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 214.
0739-3148/99/020245-15 © 1999 Caucus for a New Political
Science
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d

by
[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri
es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu

ar
y
20
15
246 Erika Doss
WE HAVE TO BECIH TO DRAW PICTURES THAT
Wil l MAKE PEOPIE ^.
4 f GO OUT AND
mu nes
SHOOT TO KILL
Figure 1. Emory Douglas, Shoot to Kill, 1970. Offset collage,
The Black Panther (November 21,
1970). Courtesy the Center for the Study of Political Graphics
(CSPG), Los Angeles.
visual images in raising revolutionary consciousness:
"Revolutionary art gives
a physical confrontation with the tyrants, and also strengthens
people to
continue their vigorous attack. Revolutionary art is a tool for
liberation."
Insisting, in another newspaper essay, that "all progressive
artists take up
their paints and brushes in one hand and their gun in the other,"
Douglas

instructed revolutionary artists to paint pictures of "fascist
judges, lawyers,
generals, pig policeman, firemen, Senators, Congressmen,
governors, Presidents,
et al., being punished for their criminal acts against the
American people
and the struggling people of the world. Their bridges, buildings,
electric
plants, pipelines, all of the Fascist American empire must be
blown up in our
pictures."3
From 1967 to 1973, Douglas matched his rhetorical call to arms
with the
pictures he produced for The Black Panther. Ranging from
inflammatory images
of resistance and revolution such as Shoot to Kill to drawings
which focused on
inner-city poverty and the need for social and political change
(Fig. 2), Douglas's
3 Douglas quoted from "On Revolutionary Art," The Black
Panther (January 24, 1970), p. 5,
and in Lawrence Alloway, "Art," The Nation 211:12 (October
19, 1970), p. 382.
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d
by

[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri
es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu
ar

y
20
15
"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 247
Figure 2. Emory Douglas, When I Spend More Time ... ,c. 1971.
Backpage drawing, The Black
Panther. Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.
pictures were highly visible and highly regarded within the
Party during the-
black power era.
The Black Panthers and Visual Imagery
The Panthers counted on media, both their own and that of the
mainstream
press, to spread their message. Reporters flocked to the
Panthers, certainly led
by the promise of a good story about American anarchy but
perhaps more
attracted by the Panthers' own visual presence. With their black
berets and
leather jackets, their afros, dark glasses, raised fists, and
military drill formation,
the Panthers made great visual copy. This was no accident: the
Panthers were
extraordinarily astute about the appeal and influence of visual
imagery as a tool
for raising political consciousness. Huey Newton's assertion

that "the Black
community is basically not a reading community" may be
considered an
acknowledgment of the central importance of oral expression in
African Ameri-
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d
by
[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri

es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15
248 Erika Doss
can culture. But it also suggests an understanding that in the
modern age people
increasingly gained their information, knowledge, and political
and cultural
directives, from visual sources. As Douglas echoed, "Every
revolutionary move-
ment that I've known of has some type of revolutionary art."4
Indeed, the
pictorial, the visual, became an essential component of Panther

ideology. Their
dramatic redefinition of black identity, and in particular their
assault on previ-
ously held assumptions of the passivity and powerlessness of
black men,
garnered the Panthers immediate attention. Their canny
attention to visual
authority made the Panthers' mode of self-representation the
image of 1960s
radicalism.
Contesting mainstream caricatures of black men, the Panthers
also defied
middle-class and liberal representations of black masculinity
tentatively put in
place by the leaders and followers of the civil rights movement.
The Panthers
projected black power, not egalitarianism. If Martin Luther
King, Jr. tried to
challenge dominant racist stereotypes by claiming black men as
citizen-subjects,
the Panthers' subverted that civil rights image by reconfiguring
and romanticiz-
ing black men as the very embodiment of revolutionary rage,
defiance, and
misogyny. "We shall have our manhood," Eldridge Cleaver
insisted in Soul on
Ice (1968), adding: "We shall have it or the earth will be
leveled by our attempts
to gain it." Angered by the limited field of integration and
autonomy that the
civil rights movement had achieved, alienated by older,
"establishment" patterns
of political activism, and incensed by their ongoing status as
second-class
Americans, the Black Panthers (like other black liberation

movements of the
1960s), "sought to clear the ground for the cultural
reconstruction of the black
subject."5
Both civil rights and revolutionary black nationalist movements
saw that
black subject primarily on masculine terms: the placards carried
by striking
sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, for example, asserted "I
Am A Man."
The Black Panther Party's interest in more aggressive forms of
masculinity
followed from perceptions of very real threats to America's
black men—from the
large numbers of black men drafted into the US military during
the Vietnam
War to blatant forms of domestic oppression. Believing that the
civil rights
movement had failed to alleviate those threats and as such was
physically,
psychologically, and socially impotent, the Panthers devised a
forceful image of
black masculinity that asserted male power in a mostly male
sphere.
In so doing, they clearly aimed to recuperate the socially
constructed mascu-
line attributes of power, militarism, independence, and control
that had been
denied subordinated black men since slavery. But by aligning
black masculinity
4 Newton quoted in Brad Brewer, "Revolutionary Art," The
Black Panther (October 24,
1970), p. 17; Douglas quoted in "Revolutionary Art: A Tool for

Liberation," taken from a
speech delivered at Malcolm X College (Chicago) at the First
Revolutionary Artist
Conference, June 8, 1970. Reprinted in The Black Panther (July
4, 1970), pp. 12-13. For an
extended analysis of the role of the media in shaping and
directing radical politics see Todd
Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the
Making and Unmaking of the New Left
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
5 Eldridge Cleaver, "Initial Reactions on the Assassination of
Malcolm X," in Soul on Ice
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), p. 61; Kobena Mercer,
Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions
in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 139.
See also William L. Van Deburg,
Black Camelot: African-American Culture Heroes in Their
Times, 1960-1980 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 78-81.
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d
by
[
T
he

U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri
es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15

with symbols and styles traditionally associated with potent
white masculinity,
the Panthers also reinscribed the most egregious forms of
patriarchal privilege
and domination, from machismo and misogyny to violence and
aggression.6
Their heterosexist and homophobic brand of revolutionary black
nationalism
excluded black women and homosexuals, and limited the
context of black
liberation and black power to conflicts over the definition and
manifestation of
black masculinity. Rather than reconstructing black masculinity
on terms which
would have truly disturbed white power, the Panthers aided in
codifying the
obviously still current cultural demonization of both black male
youth and
political radicalism.
Affirming the Panthers' demand for a specifically masculinist
black power,
one of the first writers to depict them titled his 1971 book A
Panther is a Black Cat.
The Panthers, Reginald Major declared, were soldiers at war in
"the jungle
which is America," warriors "moving to bring greatness to the
American
Experience" by "completing the work begun by the revolution of

1776."7
Militarism and military metaphors were rampant among the
Panthers, not
simply because they saw the struggle for black power as a battle
against
white oppression but because 1960s America was itself
thoroughly steeped
in military action and rhetoric, overseas and at home. It became
Emory
Douglas's job to visualize the militance of the Black Panther
Party and to
articulate an image of black masculine power that meshed with
the Party's
overall ambitions. In May 1967, Douglas took over the layout
and visual
renderings for The Black Panther. Working side by side with
Cleaver and
Newton, Douglas created a visually dominant newspaper style
that one manag-
ing editor described as "a tremendous factor" in The Black
Panther's circulation,
which reached over 100,000 weekly by 1969 (fairly high volume
for underground
newspapers at the time) and was the "most reliable and lucrative
source of
income for the Party."8
Emory Douglas and The Black Panther
From the start, Douglas's visual style was direct and angry, its
content rooted in
years of urban poverty in San Francisco's black slums, its
pictorial sensibility
nourished in reform school printing shops and in college art
classes. As one

author notes, "The story of Emory Douglas's harrowing youth is
the story of the
breeding of a Black Panther." Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan
in 1943, Douglas
moved with his mother to the Bay Area in 1951, after her
stormy relationship
with his father ended in divorce. While his mother found work
operating a
concession stand at Juvenile Hall, an arm of San Francisco's
Youth Guidance
Center, Douglas worked on his "rep" as a brawler and burglar.
In 1958,
6 See, for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and
Representation (Boston: South End
Press, 1992), pp. 87-113; Herman Gray, "Black Masculinity and
Visual Culture," in Thelma
Golden (ed.), Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in
Contemporary Black Art (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), pp. 175-80, and
Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle,
pp. 141-54.
7 Reginald Major, A Panther is a Black Cat (New York: William
Morrow, 1971), pp. 280-82.
8 Frank Jones, 'Talent for the Revolution," The Black Panther
(March 16, 1969), p. 9; Robert
H. Brisbane, Black Activism, Racial Revolution in the United
States 1954-1970 (Valley Forge, PA:
Hudson Press, 1974), p. 218.
D
ow
nl

oa
de
d
by
[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri
es
]
at
2
0:
56
0

3
Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15
250 Erika Doss
double-charged with truancy and fighting, he wound up at Log
Cabin Ranch, a
rural facility for juvenile offenders. Douglas spent a year there,
assigned in
particular the tasks of "taking care of the pigs and keeping the
pigpen clean."
When he left Log Cabin Ranch he entered San Francisco's
predominantly black
Polytechnic High School. But, arrested on burglary charges,
Douglas was sen-
tenced to 15 months at the Youth Training School in Ontario,
California, near the
men's prison in Chino. His work-study experience there was
concentrated in the
prison's printing shop and, after his release, Douglas decided to
pursue commer-
cial art.9
In 1964, Douglas began taking graphic design courses at San

Francisco's City
College. He also joined the college's Black Students Union and
was drawn to
political activism. Doing classroom assignments geared at
teaching artists how
to appeal to the tastes and dollars of mainstream consumers,
Douglas made
drawings of black consumers:
One of the school projects involved our doing story board
drawings for an
animated film. I chose to do a "brother" being denied courtesy
and service in a
public place until he donned the garb of an African V.I.P. As
[the teacher] took a
look at what I was doing he suggested that I needed to be more
provocative ... Ha
ha ha ha! The man had no idea how provocative I actually was.
The thing was
that I hadn't been able up to that time to apply my anger to my
drawing and
painting.
Tossing aside "aspirations to join the bourgeoisie" of
mainstream commercial
advertising, Douglas put his aesthetic energies into designing
props for the
theater workshops that playwright and poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri
Baraka) gave
while teaching at San Francisco State College in the mid-
1960s.10 He also became
involved in the Black Panther Party. As he recalled:
I was drawn to it because of its dedication to self-defense. The
civil rights
movement headed by Dr. King turned me off at that time, for in

those days
nonviolent protest had no appeal for me. And although the
rebellions in Watts,
Detroit, and Newark were not well organized they did appeal to
my nature. I
could identify with them.11
As a "brother off the block," Douglas found the Panthers'
message of aggressive
self-reliance and revolutionary action far more persuasive than
the principles of
pacifism and negotiation at the core of civil rights discourse.
The Panthers spoke
specifically to the social reality of his urban life. They
valorized an image of
hardcore, militant, virile, and invincible black manhood already
prevalent
among the youthful black male underclass, and fused it with a
political culture
that similarly justified street violence and outlaw behavior.
Joining Huey Newton, Douglas was one of several heavily
armed Panthers
who, in February 1967, "escorted" Betty Shabazz during the
First Annual
Malcolm X Grassroots Memorial at Hunter's Point, a
predominantly black
community in San Francisco. Canny to the PR opportunities
inherent in their
9 Elton C. Fax, "Emory Douglas," in Black Artists of the New
Generation (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1977), pp. 257-78.
10 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 270, and Phineas Israeli, "Emory
Grinds Down the Pigs,"

The Black Panther Party (November 22, 1969), p. 6, reprinted
from The Berkeley Tribe (no date
given).
11 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 273.
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d
by
[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri

es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15
protection of Malcolm X's widow, Newton's Panthers were
eager to shape their
first testing of the media waters around claims to Shabazz,
despite the fact that
she had actually been invited to speak by the Black Panther
Party of Northern
California. The press played into Newton's hands, producing
headlines such as
"A Frightening Army" in the San Francisco Chronicle.12 Soon

joined by Cleaver,
Newton's Panthers went on to become the Black Panthers, and
the San Francisco
group aligned with the Afrocentrism of Maulana Karenga's US
(United Slaves)
Organization. The split was hardly amicable: repeatedly over
the next few years,
The Black Panther featured vicious cartoons and blistering
essays blasting the
"armchair revolutionaries" of cultural nationalism, for whom
black liberation
was found in "back to black" clothing, hairstyles, language, and
holidays (cf.
Kwanzaa) rather than in armed resistance and revolution. Bobby
Seale sneered,
"I have a natural and I like it, but power for the people doesn't
grow out of the
sleeve of a dashiki."13
Emory Douglas was present, too, at the Panther's next heavily
publicized
action. On May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale and 30 fully uniformed,
fully armed
Panthers stormed the California state capitol in Sacramento to
protest the
Mulford Bill, an ordinance motivated by Oakland police fears of
armed black
resistance, and aimed at curtailing the Panthers by banning the
display of loaded
guns in public. Eldridge Cleaver was present as well, as a
reporter for Ramparts.
While Governor Ronald Reagan's handlers quickly hustled him
inside the
building (he'd been giving a speech to a teenage group of Future
Youth Leaders
on the capitol lawn), the Panthers made their way toward the

state assembly and
Seale delivered Executive Mandate No. 1, a lengthy statement
condemning not
only the pending bill but the "racist California Legislature" and
the "racist
war of genocide in Vietnam." The journalists and news reporters
who had
come out in droves to cover the story asked Seale to read it
again and he did,
twice.14
Media coverage of the Panthers' "invasion" of Sacramento (and
the arrest of
over 20 Panthers, including Douglas, on their way back to
Oakland) swelled. US
News and World Report demonized the Panthers as a gang of
"armed Negroes"
who had swept through capitol corridors crowded with
schoolchildren. Photo-
graphs showing the Panthers as a disciplined and tough-looking
cadre of
militant and macho revolutionaries were published in Life and
Time and the New
York Times Magazine. Angela Davis, then studying in Frankfurt
at the Goethe
Institute with Theodor Adorno, recalls seeing the "image" of
"leather-jacketed,
black-bereted warriors standing with guns at the entrance to the
California
legislature" in German newspapers. The "appeal" of that image
called her back
to the United States "into an organizing frenzy in the streets of
South Central
12 Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and
the Price of Black Power in

America (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994), pp. 120-26,
Major, A Panther is a Black Cat,
pp. 70-72, and Mario Van Peebles, Ula Y. Taylor and J. Tarika
Lewis, Panther: A Pictorial
History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film
(New York: New Market Press, 1995),
pp. 31-32.
13 On cultural nationalism, see William L. Van Deburg, New
Day in Babylon: The Black
Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
1992), pp. 170-91.
14 The full text of Executive Mandate No. 1, written by Huey
Newton, is reprinted in
Major, A Panther is a Black Cat, pp. 289-90.
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d
by
[
T
he
U
C

I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri
es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15

252 Erika Doss
Los Angeles." But it also, she would later write, came to
represent the problem-
atic "masculinist dimensions of black nationalism."15
Out on bail after returning from Sacramento, Douglas began
full-time work
at The Black Panther. Breaking away from Baraka, who had
become deeply
involved with cultural nationalism, Douglas's earliest newspaper
art mostly
consisted of attacks on counterrevolutionary "paper panthers"
opposed to
armed resistance. One 1967 editorial by Cleaver damning the
"scurvy-ness of the
NAACP" was accompanied by Douglas's montage of a
"bootlickers gallery,"
which positioned photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Bayard Rustin, and
Roy Wilkins against a crude cartoon of a prostrate black man
licking the cowboy
boots of President Lyndon Johnson. Douglas's scornful
caricatures of the "Old
Toms" of the civil rights movement, and his insinuations as to
their apparent
complicity with mainstream American politics, helped visually
prop the aggress-
ive and oppositional tenets of the Black Panther Party. Within a
year, however,
Douglas (known as "Emory" in the Party and at the newspaper,
as he signed his
drawings with his first name) developed a more refined and
brightly colored
graphics style of "revolutionary art" which concentrated on

"new images of
victory" to "get the defeatist attitude out of the people's
minds."16 He also began
writing newspaper essays and giving speeches on revolutionary
art's centrality
to black liberation.
Reproaching the social realism of an earlier generation of black
artists,
Douglas remarked, "Charles White used to draw various
pictures dealing with
the social injustices the people suffer but it was civil rights art."
White's 1950s
images of "mothers scrubbing the floors" were "valid," said
Douglas, but they
weren't geared toward raising revolutionary consciousness.
Dismissing, too,
many contemporary black artists, especially musicians, Douglas
wrote: "What I
see Aretha [Franklin] and B. B. King singing about is cultural
nationalism from
the beginnings of slavery up to now. But it isn't anything that
TRANSCENDS
COMMUNITIES and creates revolution."17 The civil rights
movement, and the
art associated with it, was seen by the Panthers as toothless and
soft; the "soul
style" sensitivity of cultural nationalism was viewed on
similarly derisive terms.
In contrast, Douglas crafted a hard and unyielding visual
narrative grounded in
black resistance and revolution.
The revolutionary artist, by extension, was committed foremost
to the revol-
ution. As Black Panther artist Brad Brewer explained in 1970:

"The primary
thing about a revolutionary artist is that he is a revolutionary
first. The question
confronting Black people today is not whether or not he or she
is 'Black' but
whether or not he or she is a revolutionary. With politics
guiding the brush, and
the gun protecting them both, the potential Black revolutionary
artists could rid
themselves of their tendencies of cultural nationalism. Because
their talents are
geared in behalf of preparing for revolution, they aren't
involved in dealing in
life style but rather [in] offering solutions."18
15 On media coverage of the Panthers see, for example, Abe
Peck, Uncovering the Sixties,
The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York:
Pantheon, 1985), p. 65, and Peebles,
Taylor and Lewis, Panther, p. 39. Angela Davis, "Black
Nationalism: The Sixties and the
Nineties," in Gina Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture: A Project
by Michele Wallace, Dia Center
for the Arts, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No. 8
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), p. 319.
16 Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," p. 6.
17 Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," p. 6.
18 Brewer, "Revolutionary Art," p. 17.
D
ow
nl
oa

de
d
by
[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri
es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3

Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15
Douglas found aesthetic inspiration for those solutions in "the
art coming out
of the struggle in Vietnam. Their pictures ... always express the
victorious spirit,
a picture of a mother holding her baby—we will fight from one
generation to the
next!"19 1960s-era underground newspapers attentive to
international struggle
frequently reprinted the well-designed, semi-abstract posters
produced by
OSPAALA (the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of
Africa, Asia, and
Latin America). Many, including The Black Panther, subscribed
to the Liberation
News Service and received twice-weekly mailings of news
bulletins, feature
articles, and graphics detailing armed revolution around the
world. Inspired by
propaganda posters from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Cuba
picturing heroic
sword or gun-toting peasants—male and female—in indigenous

garb, Douglas
often pictured Panthers similarly outfitted in cotton pajamas and
thongs, draped
in bandoliers, carrying rifles.
The fact that few, if any, Black Panthers dressed this way, much
less carried
Kalishnikovs, didn't matter: this was revolutionary art that
transcended the
realities of inner-city America in deference to a vision of global
black liberation.
Women had a place in this revolutionary art, too: Douglas's
1969 cartoon All
Power to the People depicts a black female, machete in tow,
hawking copies of The
Black Panther; Revolutionary Art Exhibit (Fig. 3, 1969); a
poster Douglas designed
to advertise a display of his pictures illustrates a black mother
cradling her child,
dressed in a cotton shift and head-scarf, a rifle slung over her
back. But by
casting black women within conventional and limited roles, as
salesgirls and
mothers, for instance, Douglas reinforced the patriarchal
conceits that largely
dominated the Black Panthers' political image and program.
Honing the City College commercial art lessons which had
given him
"insights into how to appeal to the audience I was trying to
reach," Douglas
turned Madison Avenue advertising and global agitprop into a
form of revol-
utionary art aimed at empowering the Black Panther Party.
Perceiving a key
relationship between black liberation and pictures, Douglas

stressed the educa-
tive and preparative role of revolutionary art, and laid out the
precise means by
which revolutionary artists were to operate. Rather than
forecasting a Utopian
future to be lived after the revolution, revolutionary artists were
instructed to
illustrate the ongoing political struggle: "When we say that we
want decent
housing, we must have pictures that reflect how we're going to
get decent
housing." Taking their cues from Fanon's advice that the
oppressed must
destroy their oppressors, revolutionary artists were ordered to
"create brand
new images of revolutionary action for the entire community"
which would
convince "the vast majority of black people—who aren't readers
but activists—
[that] through their observation of our work, they feel they have
the right to
destroy the enemy."20
In a 1968 issue of The Black Panther, Douglas listed the images
that revolution-
ary artists should cull to elicit such reactions:
We draw pictures of our brothers with stoner guns with one
bullet going through
forty pigs, taking out their intestines along the way... We draw
pictures that
show Standard Oil in milk bottles launched at Rockefeller with
the wicks made of
19 Douglas quoted in Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," p.
6.

20 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 274; Douglas, "Revolutionary
Art," p. 13; Emory Douglas,
"Revolutionary Art/Black Liberation," The Black Panther (May
18, 1968), p. 20.
D
ow
nl
oa
de
d
by
[
T
he
U
C
I
rv
in
e
L
ib
ra
ri

es
]
at
2
0:
56
0
3
Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15
254 Erika Doss
SEE REVOLUTIONARY
ART EXHIBIT
BY EMORY DOUGLAS
October 17, IS
(3 to S)
and 19 (itoO)

Gallery 33.
072 So. Lafaijette
Part: Place
Lvs Aiiacfcs, Calif
HEAR
ELAINE
BROWN
>..„,<„..: ,„•,.',•„„.. ;••;•(• V .
Singing Revolutionary Songs '•i. u
'row soon to be released l''/'j
album, "Seize the Time"
DONATION: 'J ">)
$2.00 PER PERSON -y'i
FOB FBII » » I A K F A » I FOB CHILDBIM.
F i l l HIALTM CLINIC.
AND FOB POLITICAL »BIIOMIB«
rer More Information, Call
235-411T
Figure 3. Emory Douglas, Revolutionary Art Exhibit, 1969.
Offset print, The B/acfc Panther
(October 10,1970). Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.
cloth from I. Magnin... This is revolutionary art—pigs lying in
alleyways of the
colony dead with their eyes gouged out... Pictures that show
black people

kicking down prison gates—sniping bombers, shooting down
helicopters, police
mayors governors senators assemblymen congressmen firemen
newsmen busi-
nessmen Americans.21
In each edition of The Black Panther, Douglas matched these
scenes with quotes
and slogans from Panther leaders or from the pages of various
revolutionary
tracts: "By Any Means Necessary," "In Defense of Self-
Defense," "All Power to
the People." Concentrating especially on pictures of young,
gun-wielding black
men, sometimes dressed in Black Panther regalia and sometimes
outfitted in
military uniforms appropriated from OSPAALA or Liberation
News Service
images of international freedom fighters, Douglas provided an
iconography that
clearly supported the Panthers' profoundly militant and
masculinist thrust.
If pictures of black men hoisting guns were essential to the
Panther's
ideological directives, Douglas's most influential images were
those of black
21 Douglas, "Revolutionary Art/Black Liberation," p. 20.
D
ow
nl
oa

Ja
nu
ar
y
20
15
men fighting pig-policemen. Considered the in-house "expert on
the way pigs
look and act" because of his pigpen chores at the Log Cabin
Ranch reform
school, Douglas has been credited with inventing the era's
visual symbolization
of policemen as fat, mean, uniformed pigs. Linking policemen
with pigs actually
has much earlier roots: Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue has:
"Pig, police officer. A China Street pig; a Bow Street officer.
Floor the pig and
bolt; knock down the officer and run away." Still, if not exactly
an innovation of
the black power movement, Douglas's cartoons helped revitalize
a broad na-
tional trend of vilifying cops as pigs. His pig pictures were a
regular feature in
The Black Panther and "readers looked forward every week to
seeing them."22

Douglas later extended this anthropomorphic demonization to
represent politi-
cians as rats and businessmen as vultures.
The "purpose" of his caricatures, said Douglas, was "to make
the people
aware of the character of those who oppressed us" and to
provide visual
examples that would inspire them to "revolt against the
slavemasters" and "kill
the pigs." Some cartoons highlighted the badge numbers of
policemen
"whowere harassing blacks in the community." Others were
more ideological:
one 1969 cartoon featured four hogs swinging from a tree,
labeled, respectively:
"AVARICIOUS BUSINESSMEN," "DEMAGOGUE
POLITICIANS," "PIG
COPS," and "U.S. MILITARY." The text below read: "ON
LANDSCAPE ART: 'It
is good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by
his mother
f—kin neck"' (Fig. 4).23
With their straightforward slogans and images, Douglas's pig
pictures recast
despised figures of institutional authority in negative symbolic
form. The con-
trast between the clarity of his political cartoons and the
"happy" type and
obfuscated imagery of the psychedelic styles used in other
1960s-era under-
ground newspapers is obvious. Keyed to revolutionary
instruction rather than
counterculture euphoria, Douglas's artwork was visual
reinforcement for a

Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi10.1093jdhepk00.docx

Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi10.1093jdhepk00.docx

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi10.1093jdhepk00.docx

Similar to Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi10.1093jdhepk00.docx (14)

More from tawnyataylor528

More from tawnyataylor528 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi10.1093jdhepk00.docx