Michael J. Weller

 Founder-member of Beckenham Arts Lab (1969) Weller designed record sleeve for US David Bowie album after invitation to listen to tapes (1970). 

Weller subsequently produced drawings and artworks for Friends (of Rolling Stone UK) and Oz (London). As M. J. Weller his conceptual artwork was exhibited at Architectural Association (1972) at the behest of teacher Robin Evans. Weller designed cartoon poster for his show. 

Felix Dennis published over fifty pages of Weller’s drawings and cartoon-strips for US-derived British underground comix series cOZmic comics. Weller conceived comix artist character ‘Captain Stelling’ to author The Firm (1972).  Cap Stelling has featured in Weller’s narrative art since. 

As Mike Weller he became well known for drawing cartoons for Chainsaw punkzine (1980-84). He began experimenting with self-publishing in the late 70s and early 80s. His early zine covers, poetry and social criticism were published by Jamming fanzine.

Weller used a period of post-graduate unemployment in the mid-80s to participate in local southeast London community initiatives and enterprises, including music collectives and writers’ groups.

Over fifty of Weller’s self-published ‘visual associations’ chapbooks were printed by Bob Cobbing’s New River Project (1989-2002). MJ Weller's work was included in influential Word Score Utterance Choreography edited by Cobbing and Lawrence Upton (writers forum, 1998). WF also published Weller's Idiotgram (2000), Climb A Free Wheeler (2001), Stem Harvest (2002) and contributions to issues of Cobbing's irregular poetics anthology AND: no.11 (edited Cobbing/Adrian Clarke, 2002); no.12 (edited Clarke, 2004); no.13 (sans imprint artzine edited Clarke/Ulli Freer, 2010). During the noughties he contributed to print publications cul-de-qui (2002), yt communication (2006) and Veer Away, veer off (Veer Books, 2007-08). Weller also produced online work for 'Readings' (2004), Great Works (2005) and his experiments in digital poetics were published and screened by Openned (2006-2009). Short monograph 'Home'Baked: literary artzines in the age of the internet' appears in Openned Zine #1 (2010).

Between 1997-99 Weller produced Space Opera – a 12-part narrative art pamphlet series. Four different ‘Mike Weller’ alterities are featured as 20^th century autobiographical myth. The zines were collected and self-published as limited bookwork Space Opera: The Artist’s Book  launched from Zybooks website (2000).  

Beowulf Cartoon (writers forum/visual associations, 2004) is a choreographic bookwork dedicated to the memory of Bob Cobbing; and sadly, Bill Griffiths, who wrote the edition's introduction.

Three Part bookwork The Secret Blue Book (Home’Baked Books) explores relationships between literary, poetic, comic, and artistic depictions of sex. It was launched at Mike Weller the first thirty years exhibition, bookartbookshop, London (2005).  

Weller’s Home’Baked Books began in 2005 with aim of producing inexpensive self-publications without compromising aesthetic values. In 2008 the imprint partnered Simon Whitehall's free-to-use MyEBook platform. Weller's 'Slow Science Fictions' (2006-2009) series, extending Space Opera themes with prose fiction and digitally-sourced graphics has been processed into printed bookwork Slow Fiction: twenty-three tales 2001-2010.