Pre-Cometbus Zines: Original Manuscripts and Paste-ups, 1980 - 1981

Rats in the Street, Barbed Wire, Submission Rip it Up, Bound & Gagged, and Red Tape were six one-shot independent magazines published in the summer of 1981 in Berkeley, California. They are a crucial link between the music- and science fiction-based fanzines of the sixties and seventies, and the self-publishing “zine” movement that began in the nineties and continues to flourish today. They are the first published writings about the East Bay punk scene/sound later made famous by bands like Green Day, and mark the literary debut of author and publisher Aaron Cometbus and novelist and lyricist Jesse Michaels, son of author Leonard Michaels. Only two copies of the printed versions of the magazines are known to exist, one set in the UC Berkeley special collections and one in a private collection. These are the original handmade paste-ups from which the magazines were reproduced, of interest to students and scholars of the underground press, punk and experimental music, bookmaking, design, and literary history.