Prune: Getting high on your own supply

Tyler Watamanuk on the cult of the black marker and Allister Lee’s latest zine 500 Marker Logos, Wordmarks & Icons.

The graphic artist Allister Lee has been drawing for most of his life and can trace his fixation with black markers back to high school. But his massive collection really started when he lived in London during the early 2000s. “At the time, everybody I knew had collections of records and sneakers or whatever,” he tells Prune. “I didn’t have the money for that, but markers only cost a couple of dollars. I thought, Maybe this is the thing that I collect.”

It began casually. When Lee traveled to a new city, he’d make a point to visit a stationery shop here and there—the older or more disheveled the storefront, the better. He quickly learned the messy shops usually had dust-covered boxes of vintage editions—or the weird off-brands no one wanted to buy—tucked away in the back. Around 25 markers, he remembered thinking to himself: Okay, what’s next? 50. From there, the goal posts kept moving. Fifty became a hundred, and a hundred turned into 250. The collection stopped feeling incidental and started to resemble the handiwork of an archivist. 

Now, Lee estimates he has “maybe 1,650” markers—accumulated and catalogued from far-flung stationary shops across the globe to his current home city of Toronto.

The markers don’t just sit there. They’ve bled into Lee’s creative output in a very real way. As a commercial artist, Lee has collaborated with brands like Nike, Swatch, and Stüssy, but his independent projects orbit closer to the collection itself. He’s produced zines and posters centered around this habit—one dedicated to Japan’s fading stationery stores, another to his illustrations of marker mascots. His latest, 500 Marker Logos, Wordmarks & Icons, leans furthest into the archival impulse: a dense, unprecious survey of branding across the category. It is the first and only publication of its kind that focuses on markers, pulled directly from his deep personal archive.

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