Escape Magazine

Escape
The cover to Escape magazine #3. Art by Chris Long
Publication information
Publisher	Titan Books (issues 10-19)
Format	Ongoing series
Publication date(s)	1983 – 1989
No. of issues	19
Creative team
Created by	Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury
Artist(s)	Eddie Campbell Glenn Dakin Phil Elliott
Editor(s)	Paul Gravett Peter Stanbury

Escape magazine was a landmark British comic strip magazine founded and edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. Nineteen issues were published between 1983 and 1989. Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliott and Glenn Dakin were amongst the many cartoonists published within its pages.

Escape has its origins in the explosion of small press or minicomics that occurred in the UK in the early 1980s. Paul Gravett was running a stall at the Westminster Comic Mart in London called Fast Fiction where he would sell other people's self-published comics for a small cut. These would generally be short-run publications, usually photocopied and assembled by hand, by creators who couldn't find a professional outlet for their work with many coming from an art school background with unique approaches to comic art.

At the same time awareness was growing of international developments in the medium. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's RAW magazine had started pushing the boundaries in the USA while European anthologies such as Métal Hurlant, Charie Mensuel and PLG showed not only radically different styles of comic art to the usual UK/US variety but a more mature and analytical approach to the medium.

Gravett brought his knowledge and enthusiasm while his partner Peter Stanbury, employed at the time at Harpers & Queen, brought experience in print design and production and together they decided to publish, from their flat, a magazine featuring this home-grown talent along with showcasing examples of new and interesting comics from around the world.

Short for Bande Dessinée, BD became the ideological anchor for Escape. Gravett wanted to apply the values of and respect attributed to French comics to his new breed of British artists. Visually this was reflected in the work of Phil Elliott and Rian Hughes, but it also infused the whole attitude of the magazine, that some comics at least deserved be taken seriously. By identifying with the relatively exotic and beautifully produced volumes from Europe, Escape distanced itself from the action-adventure style of 2000AD and the American superheroes of Marvel and DC and established itself not only as something new, but something important.