Borderline Press's second project was Zombre. In my mind's eye, I saw myself literally as 'the publisher' and was happy to get others involved, especially if they were going to do most of the donkey work. The idea was my friend Will Vigar would compile and edit an anthology to try and we'd cash in on the zombie/walking dead popularity. Yes, it was an unprecedented attempt to cash in, but it was done in the spirit of putting something out that would sell a lot and allow us to do other more eclectic projects.
My role was essentially publisher and editor-in-chief/designer, but the latter was literally only as a safety net. I had to make some difficult decisions as far as page count etc was concerned and wrangle Will into getting it all to me so I could get it to the printer.
Will was massively excited about having the opportunity to do such a project and managed to get his old friend, professional TV and comics writer Si Spencer involved. For someone such as myself, who had essentially been out of comics for ten years, I was vaguely familiar with the name but accepted Will's assurances that having Si involved would be a good thing; after all, I was trying to surround myself with people who were more 'in tune' with trends in comics than I was. And to be frank, I couldn't care who he got involved as long as the quality was high.
To this day, Zombre has been the best selling of all the Borderline Press titles; although 'best' is something of a misnomer as it sold about 300 copies (a rough estimate, I no longer have actual figures etc) and I don't know if that was because it had a 'name' involved or if it was catching the zeitgeist of zombies and dead things.
To say that my initial meeting with Si was all fluffy kittens and £ signs would be a massive understatement. He had arranged a sort of small scale 'comics mart' at his local pub The Lord Clyde and Will and I found our way into London to be present at what was effectively a 2nd, much lower key, launch (we had been to Leeds in the early autumn for an official launch which proved to be a huge waste of time and money). There was, if I recall correctly, a slight frisson of mistrust from both of us. In 2013, I was still kind of known in the industry, but more for being Skinn's pit bull rather than for such proper achievements as Borderline Magazine and the good stuff I did for Comics International, and thanks to renowned shitmongerer Rich Johnston I was being painted as some kind of misogynistic arsehole as Johnston focused on my numerous faux pas than on the fact we were trying to do something new and for the underdogs in comics and I got the impression that Si did the job for Will and had I approached him I would have got a big fat no.
However, by the end of the day, we'd sat with beers and talked about stuff and I began to warm to him; we had, it seemed, a lot in common. We hooked up on Facebook, although at first it felt more like an arrangement of convenience rather than because we liked each other, but gradually I commented more on his timeline and I noticed he was appearing on mine. It seems that social media has some benefits, it can cast you in a bad light, but it can also help shine a light on the fact that for all my faults - of which I have many - you can sometimes get a feel for what a person is really like by the stuff he or she posts.
I realised that we were friends at some point in 2015 when Si got banned from Facebook for a month - his hobby it seemed was going onto right wing FB pages and winding the fascists up. He set up a new FB account and befriended the people he was in contact with or liked, I was one of them and in a weird kind of way that was a bit of an ego-booster for me.
Over the last few years, with memories of Zombre fading, my involvement in comics completely gone, we would talk either publicly or in private messages about other shit. Music, old TV, interesting stuff that he or I found funny or abhorrent and eventually a lot of our discussions turned to depression - something both of us suffered from, but Si obviously was further down that road than me. I once said to him, 'I sometimes wonder if being born when we were is indicative of our mental health 50 years down the line'. He agreed.
Despite the fact we had little to do with each other personally, it didn't stop us from communicating more. I got the impression that first impressions had long been put aside and while I would never consider myself one of his proper friends, I often felt I had become part of his infamous Hivemind of friends who would be consulted when Si needed advice or input from people he thought might know what he didn't.
Oddly enough, whenever Si got banned from social media, I felt something was missing from my Facebook and whenever he reappeared either as Si or Simon depending on which account hadn't been frozen it made me happier. You know, for all my disdain towards things like Facebook and social media in all its forms, I've made some good 'friends' who I've barely ever met and Si was one of them.
Then on the 17th February, Will posted something about Si dying. My initial reaction was, this has got to be wrong, he had only posted something like 20 hours earlier about vaccine rollouts for Covid and toad in the hole, but it proved to be very true. I have no idea what happened in those hours after his last post and the announcement from Colleen his wife, on his FB page, but it all pretty much became a reality very quickly.
It left me in a profound state of shock. We were virtually the same age and like dear Terry Wiley I had lost another 'comics' friend far too early.
John Freeman of Down the Tubes contacted me and asked if I would write Si's obit; I turned him down because there are far more people out there far more qualified who would do it justice, but I tagged my own little tribute onto the end of Will's. https://downthetubes.net/?p=124922&fbclid=IwAR04_16Zpr_u0q78RbXXOK5c1wcKFdgmmno7aQ99SjJaEUlEz2xF162jbr8
However, he was still one of mine. I was someone who published him, albeit in a small way and therefore he was important to me.
The world is a little less today and tomorrow and all the subsequent days that follow. I wish I'd known him a lot better, but equally I'm selfishly glad I didn't because that would have made this so difficult to write. I have the utmost sympathy and love to his wife Colleen and all of the fantastic people whose lives have even been slightly touched by Si Spencer not being in the world any longer. KYAL as he used to say - Know You Are Loved. You were.
