Peel Magazine

A couple of years ago a couple from Indiana came up with an idea which aided to the evolution of stickers as a medium of artistic expression like nothing else before. Take your art and STICK IT. That pretty much sums up the notion behind Peel Magazine, an idea Dave and Holly Combs came up with in 2001 focusing on a specific aspect of street art. After the couple had traveled from their hometown of Indianapolis to New York to help clean up the mess that the September 11 attacks had left behind, Dave first noticed Shepard Fairey's Obey Giant sticker on a signpost. At first he found the meaning behind it quite ironic, but when he realized it was spread all around the city, it was then when it suddenly hit him.

This small revelation along with Holly's genuine need to react against a specific letter font that she was getting sick of after using it constantly in a school project a couple of years before, gave them the necessary boost and inspiration they needed to get involved with the sticker-art subculture. So they started to collect, and two years later near the end of 2003, they felt the need to share their sticker collection which had already grown in a size they couldn't even believe themselves. So they took all the stickers they had gathered up to then and put them altogether to create Peel Magazine. Of course things weren't all that easy when they first started. In the beginning when Peel was more like a zine, they started giving away around 200 black and white 8x5 copies together with some stickers, and had them distributed across the country. Gradually though and within a rather small time period, their popularity started to expand outside the US boarder as well, eventually reaching to a point where distribution would go up almost to 200,000 11x8 glossy periodical full color copies on a worldwide scale. Two important factors contributing to the magazine's success according to the Combses were their personal passion for art, as well as the good relations they maintained with the artists who's work they promote through their publications. From the very first issue which focuses solely on sticker art, Peel has reached up to 8 publications at the moment which have evolved in texture and size, and feature artwork from various individuals,some of them having stickers as one of their many different mediums of artistic expression such as Evoker, Above and Shepard Fairey. A typical characteristic of Peel is that within its different issues there seems to be a motif which tends to repeat itself. In other words there are certain categories or themes or whatever you want to call them that appear quite often. These include stickers that have some kind of political or social message into them, usually depicted by some sort of visual that expresses an opinion on society or any political situation, characters which pretty much like graffiti can be associated with a specific artist, various different versions of the magazine's logo, street art not associated with stickers directly such as stencil and spray drawings, sticker art contests that are run by the magazine in which the winner gets to see their work published in Peel's pages, the blackbook which is a series of pages that artists can show their work by paying a small fee in order to go against any kind of corporate sponsorship, and finally toy making which has been getting quite popular among sticker artists lately. Today Dave and Holly have even set up a space in their own home in order to exhibit any kind of work which the magazine can be associated with, and one day hope they can take this to the next level by not just focusing on stickers but in the entire street art culture instead. For a complete list of all the artists that Peel endorses you can check their website