Help the National Art Library
The Andy Roberts Memorial Collection of Comics and Zines is at present awaiting full cataloguing and relocation to an area where it will be available to the public. Until that time, there are two main areas that the comics community can help with:
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enhancing the hand-list (interim list of comics in the collection) with comments, corrections, and further information on matters relating to the collection.
→ The hand-list is reproduced on this website in the section entitled ‘Boxes’, with each box (as in the photo above) given a separate blog entry with the relevant hand-list entries.
→ You can help enhance the hand-list by either emailing me on one of the ‘Email me’ links, or by creating a comment on one of the blog pages. I will integrate these into the list and send it to the NAL at intervals.
Andy Roberts Memorial Collection of Comics and Fanzines
Andy Roberts was a comics creator and collector. Born in 1963, he wrote and drew comics from an early age, moving to London in the late 1980s, where he attended the London Cartoon Center course run by David Lloyd (artist and co-creator, V for Vendetta) and Steve Whitaker (colourist, V for Vendetta).
He became heavily involved in small press and independent comics creation (partly as an extension of the punk/DIY ethic he was also very concerned with as a musician). Although published professionally in varied publications such as Deadline, Weymouth’s Dorset Evening Echo, and the UK’s first electronic comic publication (Nervous System), in the end he dedicated himself full-time to a combination of music creation and promoting comics from within the bureaucracy of the UK bookselling industry.
Sadly, Andy Roberts died early, in a traffic accident in June 2005. His family have donated the many comics collected (and indeed created) by him to the National Art Library at the V&A museum, to provide a national resource for comics with a particular focus on small press and independent publishing.
Who am I?
I am Jenni Scott, Andy’s partner during much of the 1990s, during which time we were active together in the UK small press. When he died, I remembered an exhibition we’d gone to years before at the V&A, and various conversations we’d had about donating comics to a create a national, readily-available resource.
