A tumultuous week. One to store away and pull out on 'bad' days when I want reminding of how crap things could be.
The same weekend Princess Diana died, a good friend of mine lost her mother. The sense of grief within her family was obvious, but it added a surrealistic element when the TV and radio is awash with the death of someone important who wasn't their mother. Grief is a very personal thing, yet we all kind of have this weird feeling that we're all alone in it but shouldn't be...
Last week felt funereal; but the needs of the many outweighed the need of the one, so I shelved the grief and got on with the jobs mounting in front of me...
I think the lull between books has been a bad thing. You need to blame me for that. I think getting 566 Frames and Zombre out in quick succession, to make a mark, kind of ended up being a bit of an anticlimax, especially if people looked at the books and then said, "Good. Yeah. So, what's next?"
What's next will start appearing before the end of this very month and between then and the summer, Borderline Press will go from being this insignificant publisher with a blue book and a zombie book, to an insignificant publisher with half a dozen titles and a summer/autumn publishing schedule that should impress even the most ignorant and ridiculously lucky comic shop owner.
Hunger House is probably being printed as we speak (ironically Loka and Carl-Michael are closer to the place where it is being printed than ever before as they are on vacation in the Far East). City of Crocodiles will have been looked at this morning by the Hong Kong printer's repro team, and I paid for Zombies Can't Swim today.
The decision to call it a day with thematic anthologies was taken, not because of the loss of the anthologies editor, but because I had been thinking for a few weeks that they were actually more hard work than anything else. I also believe that these kind of anthologies would be better suited for Borderline Press a couple of years down the line, when I feel confident of selling out books quickly and being able to adequately recompense my contributors within a workable time frame. Just another sensible business solution, with hindsight.
The new-look compact and bijou 'beasts' anthology will go to the printer in the next week, along with the Borderline Press contribution to Free Comic Book Day. I've put together a 16-page teaser of everything we've done and all the stuff we are doing that I'm hoping will be put in a large number of peoples' comics bags on May 3rd.
Replacing the themed anthologies will be that project some of you have heard whisper of... 'Spoko' has been the working title for this idea since its inception (Spoko means Cool in Polish) and it will feature lots of really ...ahem... cool strips from Europe and possibly a few from the UK. The idea is to do this as a 64-page quarterly prestige format thing. I was always going to edit this, mainly because I fancied keeping my hand in.
Then there's later on this year... Verity Fair will be back from the printer in time for the summer convention season. I'm especially happy about this because a) it features Miffy in it, who was the star of the Borderline Magazine strip of the same name (by Terry Wiley and the late, great Adrian Kermode) and b) Terry has done all the production himself, all I'm doing it acting like the shady middle man in a dodgy drug deal... "'Ere, sonny, do you want to buy a comic book with boobies and the F word in it? Eh?" ...
Then it's Santa Claus versus the Nazis, Robotz, something special from Jamie Lewis featuring Seth and Ghost; Seamonster by Nathan Castle; A collection of Agata Bara's work and a few projects that I'll maybe talk about in the next blog, including something rather wonderful involving one of my favourite things... Dogs...
And then, I'll be thinking about 2015. But at the moment I'm thinking about Christmas 2014!
Eek! These be excitin' times, ah-hah!
