Ever since the sixties, when the medium was somewhat clumsily added to the list of eight art forms in circulation, comics have been struggling to gain critical respect and public attention. Expected to be either funny or fantastical, comics tend to be consumed without consideration – greedily in the morning paper alongside a fried egg and toast, or lazily on the bus home from the second hand bookstore (about to go bust, any day now).

Comics receive little interest from the public, and even less from the academic world. The people who do show interest are either relegated to an unfortunate niche (Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics) or else appropriated by wider disciplines like Art History or Graphic Design as though comics, which synthesise writing with visual art and create something like film, could not stand alone as a discipline. It was only this term that Cambridge finally found a forum in which to produce and publish comics – yet the 9thArt magazine has struggled to find its feet at a university that is already super-saturated with media. “There’s a lot out there clamouring for the same space – there are three papers that appear in each porter’s lodge every week so it has been really hard to make people pay attention to our magazine in particular,” said Jon Porter who, until last week, was managing editor for 9thArt in Cambridge. “Even making people open the front cover is a battle.” Roxy Rezvany, one of the two chief editors at Oxford where the magazine was first started, expressed a similar frustration at the inflexibility of the reading population, “As soon as people look at it they can see that it’s quality, it’s just a question of making them look at it!”

If one were to look at it, one would find a magazine dense with talent that brims over with artistry: pages full of the pyrotechnic wit and beautiful drawings that are normally ignored as ‘doodles’ and crumble away to the bottoms of bags. These rescued strips contain everything: the obscene, the quaint, the solemn, the absurd. And in them we can find everything – our entire ink-limned lives.

It was the administrative nightmare necessary in order to make people look at the magazine that finally closed the case for Jon, who had started the project hoping that an Oxbridge stamp on comics might help validate the medium. “I thought 9thArt could potentially be quite a powerful thing by acting as a legitimiser for comics,” he said. “I recognise that it is kind of a problem that people have faith in something just because it’s from Oxbridge, but that fact is also symptomatic of just the amount of information out there. It’s crazy that this is the case, but people need to be discerning with their leisure time, and if looking upon certain universities’ work in a better light is a way to do that then it’s a means people will use, however inaccurate it may be.”

But the very information overload that might have given an Oxbridge comic magazine weight in the wider world has proven counter-productive for the magazine in Cambridge itself. Local businesses have shown a great reluctance to advertise with the magazine for fear that doing so will incite the requests of other university publications also. “They say that although they are not averse to publicising in 9thArt, they can’t because if they do then all sorts of other people will also go to them,” said Jon. “Roxy is a very, very good marketer - listening to her talk about some of the tactics she uses in Oxford makes me realise that I’m just not a marketer in the same way that she is.”

Some local businesses, like Lush Cambridge, have shown their support for the 9thArt project, turning up to give free massages at its launch event. “Lush has a policy that each store should try and really become a part of its community,” said Jo Hardman, supervisor at Lush Cambridge. “We have a certain amount of money set aside for this kind of thing although it’s difficult because hardly a week goes by when we aren’t asked for samples as prizes for raffles, or promotion events etc. With the 9thArt Magazine we had a precedent for saying yes, because Lush Oxford had helped with the magazine over there and thought it was worthwhile.”

Unfortunately, Lush is a rarity amongst local businesses, and Roxy worries that 9thArt’s desire to remain free might prove problematic in the future as “distributing the magazine for free means we solely rely on advertising – advertising which Cambridge is struggling to provide. The magazine was begun based on the idea that we wouldn't sell it so that then everyone could have access to it, but I think we might have to start asking for subscription fees from JCRs.” Issues one and two were largely subsidized by the Oxford and Cambridge unions but the money needs supplementing from other sources.

Until then, 9thArt’s future in Cambridge will remain uncertain. “Cambridge needs a dedicated team who can not only have ideas, but also (and this is perhaps the more important part which is often overlooked) make them happen,” Roxy said, talking about what is needed to rescue 9thArt from the crisis it currently faces. The able members of this team must surely be hidden amongst the thousands of people that populate this city. All that is needed is that they show themselves, and prevent us losing our ninth art.