Early Punk Counterculture Zine "Desperate Egos" Archive, 1985

[Zines][Comics][Feminism] Archive of three issues of Desperate Egos, an underground punk literary and art zine published in Eureka, California in 1985. Issues #15, #21, and #23. Each issue is corner-stapled and xeroxed from typed and hand-drawn originals. These zines exemplify West Coast DIY publishing aesthetics and emotionally raw countercultural expression during the Reagan-era punk underground, and represent a striking convergence of zine culture, outsider poetry, and visual narrative. Desperate Egos is curated with a strikingly intimate voice and a deep infatuation with loss, nihilism, sexuality, violence, and punk iconography. Each issue is filled (truncated) with first-person poetic monologues, short fictionalized memoirs, intensely personal writing, and hand-drawn illustrations that reference music, urban alienation, existential drift, and interpersonal cruelty. Issue #15, titled "Looking for Lou Reed", includes a shaded pencil portrait of a man—presumably Reed—and the epigraph “In dreams begin responsibilities,” nodding to Delmore Schwartz, a known literary influence on Reed. Issue #21 bears the title "Such Is Life... I Love It, But It Sucks" and includes “The Misunderstood Maniac,” a hallucinatory prose-poem blending confessional writing with celebrity elegy. Issue #23, “Featuring Cross Currents,” collages intense facial expressions and ends with a deeply disturbing, diaristic narrative of abuse titled No More Excuses by contributor “Shy,” who also appears in other pieces.

The zines reflect the queer-coded emotional terrain and brutalist aesthetic often associated with early West Coast punk literature, distinguished by typographic cut-ups, photocopied handwriting, and irreverent collage. The address listed in each issue—P.O. Box 3118, Eureka, CA—anchors the production in Humboldt County, which was in the mid-1980s a fringe haven for anti-mainstream artists and radicalized youth. These issues also contain shout-outs to “Soldat People’s Records” and reference contemporaneous punk scenes and mail-art exchanges. The presence of sexually explicit writing—alongside crude illustrations, self-deprecating humor, and lyrical longing—locates Desperate Egos within a lineage of confessional and feminist zines, despite its aggressive and unfiltered tone. All three issues with moderate edge wear consistent with age, issue #21 with some dampstaining to upper margin. Overall good to very good. Scarce. A raw punk ephemera archive documenting the emotionally volatile underground self-publishing scene at the height of 1980s Reagan-era alienation. (Inventory #: 21917)