My Monthly Curse (Part Forty-Six)

I also worked for DC in the early 1990s, but this particular flirt with a comics company was just so tragic I never thought of it in the same light as other bits of bad luck I’d had. I got a call, out of the blue, from New York. It was a guy called Neal Pozner, who was a managing editor at DC and was in charge of a lot of the projects that the general public never saw. Neal was a great guy and we chatted for an hour before he even got around to telling me why he called. He needed a British based comics journalist to do some work for DC on an in-house publication they produced for the creative community called Shop Talk. It was a newsletter cum fact sheet for people who wanted to work for DC, actually worked for them or did some freelance work. Neal was a huge advocate of promoting new talent in comics and during one of our many conversations over that spring he asked me why I’d never bothered to try and write comics, after all isn’t that why everyone who can write gets into comics? I told him about my Marvel experiences of a few years before and he chuckled and told me about the proposals procedure that most companies operate. He didn’t suggest that my allegations against DeFalco were true, but he did warn me that the worst people to send ideas to were the editors, because they could steal ideas and feed them to the writers.

I told him that I’d grown away from superheroes and really wanted to be a novelist. He asked me what I wrote and I had to be honest, not a lot. I’d set out at 17 to be a famous writer. I’d written my first novel by the time I was 20 and hadn’t picked up a pen or sat at a typewriter for nearly 10 years. Since my return to writing I’d written mainly factual stuff and hadn’t really considered fiction because of a lack of time. But that year I’d had an idea and I was working on it when I first heard from Neal. I plucked up the guts and told it to him.

It was called Dead Girls and was the story of three girls, two sisters and their best friend, who died, but didn’t. They became the living dead, except they had their mental faculties; in fact, none of them knew they were dead until things started to go a bit wrong. They weren’t interested in eating brains, they were young teenagers trying to enjoy life; they just at first wanted to know what had happened to them and then eventually to be left alone to really die. After thinking about it, I designed as a four-part comics story around the premise. I ran through the projected four parts and said, “That’s it, I think it’s quite an allegorical tale.”

“AIDS.” It was the only word he said.

“Yeah, in a nutshell.”

“Is the script as good as the outline?”

“It’s only half finished and I’ve never scripted a comic before, but yeah I think it’s workable.”

“You should show this to Art Young.” Young was the then head honcho at DC UK, the editorial liaison office for DC in New York to deal with its huge list of British creators. He was also commissioning editor for any new projects coming out from the UK. I was going to meet and interview him as my first assignment for Shop Talk. Neal seemed quite adamant that I find the time to talk to Young about it. Which I duly did and at the end of a fairly uneventful interview in Soho, I told Art about the Dead Girls idea. He told me to send what I had over so he could have a look through it. And I headed back to Wellingborough feeling like I maybe had a chance.

A couple of days passed, I got a call from Neal asking how the interview went and when could he expect the piece. I told him by the end of the week. I finished that, got it away to New York and concentrated on fluffing up Dead Girls and getting the best job I could muster over to Art.

Neal called the following week, we chatted again and he told me he had Peter Milligan and Alan Grant lined up for me in the coming weeks and would I be able to work my CI schedule around for him. I could, but we didn’t mention Dead Girls.

The following week, I received three copies of Shop Talk and a note saying to call him when I got them. I phoned Neal that evening (UK time) and he kindly phoned me back straight away. He was happy with how it had come out and he apologised for trimming it down, but was happy for me to use the stuff I’d written that wasn’t used elsewhere. We talked about music for a while and I asked him a few questions about DC and finally he said, “I was thinking about your Dead Girls idea, did you mention it to Art?” I thought I had told him already but I might have been wrong. I told him I had and he said that it was important for me to really try and sell the AIDS allegory to Art and that if he could he would put a good word in for me when he got back from his vacation. I thanked him and wished him a good vacation. He replied, “I should be so lucky.” I never spoke to Neal Pozner again.

His vacation turned into a permanent one. I wasn’t aware but Neal had AIDS and had been working at DC over that last year on borrowed time. He never spoke to Art Young, therefore never smoothed it over for me. Neal’s partner, a well-known comics artist had worked for Young, so Art was quite distraught at the death of a friend’s partner.

I didn’t know.

Because Pozner was a backroom boy this kind of news took a while to filter out, so when I phoned Art Young about two weeks after Neal died and about three weeks after I sent my proposal in, the conversation ended up being a little awkward and at the end of it I felt like a schmuck. Suffice it to say DC never picked up Dead Girls. I had a letter from Young’s assistant saying DC was cutting back on new projects for the time being, but keep on trying. I don’t think it was ever looked at.

***

The following was written by Chris Spicer for his Borderline column World of Heros, it perfectly illustrates the futility of wanting to be in comics:

YOU want to work in comics. Don’t you? Of course you do. Everyone who reads comics does. You watch the constant whirlwind of changing creators as they dance from title to title and you think to yourself “I could do that!” Don’t you? Yes, you do. And that goes doubly for people who write for comics magazines, and even more so for the hard-bitten, cynical writers of spoof news columns.

But you can’t. Comics creators are special, and you’re not. Here’s why:

· Comics creators create comics, which makes them artists. You read comics, which makes you a geek.

· Every month you trek down to the local comic shop, desperate to know what wonderful stories your favourite creators are going to tell you next. Those same creators don’t care whether you live or die.

· You queue for hours to meet comics creators for a few meager minutes, but no comics creator has ever queued to meet you.

· Comics creators get paid to write or draw. You get paid to flip burgers or something.

· You show your portfolios and scripts to creators in the vain hope that they’ll bless you with a few words of even faint praise. They don’t come to you, because your approval means nothing to them.

· Comics creators are in high demand because they can create wonderful things. There are a million mindless proles who could do your job.

· Editors actually want to receive work from comics creators, whereas they could throw your submissions straight into the bin without even so much as a moment’s thought.

· Comics creators don’t have to slog down to their local comic shop to pick up the latest issues of the best titles, because they’re writing or drawing them. In their spare time they phone each other to laugh at you and tell dirty jokes about your mother.

· Comics creators can do their jobs without even leaving the house. You have to spend hours driving through crowds of inconsiderate mindless nothings, or cramming yourself into a dirty, crowded, fetid tube train just to get to a job that you hate.

· When a comics creator dies, they leave behind a legacy of distraught fans and respectful colleagues, whereas if you were to die tomorrow, no one would notice.

· Comics creators have scripts and sketches lying unwanted around their houses. If you were to get your hands on just one of them, you would frame it and put it on the wall, and talk about it in everyday conversation, and worship it as if Jesus himself had just handed it to you with the instruction that the chances of all your descendants getting into heaven depended purely upon it remaining in tip-top condition. A comics creator would consider such behavior to be stupid.

· This column is devoted to talking about comics creators. It may be a spoof, it may take the piss out of them, but there aren’t any magazine columns devoted to you at all. Not even ones taking the piss.

· You wish you could be a comics creator. No comics creator has ever wished they could be you.

· Comics creators’ ideas are published on a monthly, even weekly basis. No one cares what you think.

· When comics creators go to conventions, they meet friends, get drunk, and have a good time. When you go to conventions you spend hours in queues like a sweaty, pathetic sheep.

· Go into your local comic shop. Go on. Now, look at the people in there. If you were to take out a knife, and I’m talking about a really fucking big knife, with a huge serrated blade and a handle that you could use to club seals to death, and use it to hack your throat open then and there on the spot, spewing out astonishing fountains of blood as you floundered almost comically around before collapsing to the ground to bleed out your last in a sorry, unwanted heap in the corner, people in the shop would care more about the prospect of you having damaged their comics by spattering blood on them than about your slowly cooling corpse.

· Comics creators get the respect of their peers. Nobody respects you at all.

· Have you actually read work by Alan Moore or Grant Morrison? You could never be that creative or intelligent. Could you? No.

· At signings, comics creators get paid to sign their name. At signings, you queue for hours to have someone deface your comics.

· Hundreds, even thousands of people write to comics creators every month. The only letters you regularly get are sent by cold, emotionless automated systems operating on behalf of grubby-handed company executives hoping you’ll be stupid enough to sign up for their credit cards.

· If Alan Moore walked into a comic shop, everyone would know who he was. If you walked into a comic shop, nobody would notice you even existed.

· You just read this article. A comics creator would never have done that.

Fandom is full of wannabes and like most industries a lot of tenacious wannabes can become a somebody. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of hawking yourself around and taking a lot of criticism from people whose only knowledge of comics art is what they like, but they persevere. For artists it’s easy, they take a portfolio and they can get instantaneous reactions from commissioning editors. The same editor can’t read through half a dozen scripts in the same time to get an idea of how good a writer you are. Lots of new artists appear all the time. New writers? Very rarely and in general it’s who they know rather than how good they are.

A lot of comics creators view their ‘fame’ as relative. They can walk in the local Tesco and never be bothered by anybody because of who they are and that suits most of them. They do a job and that job involves a lot of hard graft, much like anyone else that goes out to work. Yeah, most of them are thanking God that they had the talent or the ability to get there, but to most it is a job.

I've told you about Alan Davis briefly. Davis actually lives in the same county as me, but he’s a very private man, so I never did the stupid thing of turning up on his doorstep (even though he lived next door to a former best mate’s brother!) Alan, as I said, worked for British Steel in Corby – during all of the upheavals and what industry likes to call consolidation, he still had his job. In his spare time he spent it drawing comics strips – he didn’t know it, but the people who were seeing his work were being blown away with this contemporary yet cartoonish style. Alan started to get offered more work, and gradually his income from comics surpassed his income from British Steel. Alan gave his job up at British Steel, not because he couldn’t do it anymore, but because he was stopping someone else in Corby from having a job. Unemployment in Corby at the time was about 50%, he didn’t think it was fair, however unsteady his comics work might end up being, to deprive someone else the opportunity of earning money. He made sure one of his redundant colleagues got his old job.

Like I said, when I finally met Alan - he had been one of my comics idols for years - he was a down-to-Earth man with a real sense of privacy about him. He seemed to view comics conventions as part of the job; but you got no sense that it was a pleasure for him. I suspect Alan’s friends aren’t comics people and would never likely be.

The biggest problem with any creator is unless he’s that good he will eventually reach his sell-by date. Remember the rock dinosaurs of the 1970s, when they got back together in the 80s or 90s was their new stuff a patch on the old? No, of course it wasn’t, and the same rule applies to almost all innovators, especially as they get older. Even if the spark is still there the style might have dated. Take the guy who helped turn the X-Men into the most popular US comic of modern times – John Byrne. Born (co-incidentally like his co-creator Chris Claremont) in the UK, Byrne came through the ranks of Charlton Comics before being poached by Marvel. His style was quite extraordinary compared to the general lifeless art that was on display in most comics and whenever he worked on a comic it sprang to life. He never really became the focus of the speculator because quite simply he put out far too much material. Byrne was prolific, he could draw four books a month, nearly 100 pages of finished pencils, compared to some artists today who can struggle to finish a page in a week! Obviously as time wore on, Byrne slowed down, but he could afford to, he was one of three major stars in comics during the late 1970s. He, George Perez and Frank Miller were quickly making names for themselves as creators who steered falling comics out of the doldrums. Byrne did it with just about everything he touched, Perez did it for The Avengers and The Justice League of America and Miller started with Daredevil and really got into the swing in the 1980s with Batman. There were others, but these three were the Adams, Steranko and Wrightson of their era.

Of the three, none fell from grace quite as fast as Byrne. In fact the other two are still regarded highly in comics, most people remember Byrne as ‘The Tinkerman’. Byrne became too big too fast – yet in reality, his rise took many years, but this was the 1970s and rarely did someone come out of nowhere in comics and cause such a reaction. He wrote and drew some of the biggest comics in existence, but because he was so up his own arse at times, he eventually was replaced, because the fans grew tired of his revisionist approach.

Next up: fandom

My Monthly Curse (Part Forty-Five)

Before we continue, I'd just like to wish every one a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thanks for reading and all the feedback!

We went back to Bristol expecting an exciting weekend and while no one on the team really believed we would win the Best Magazine Award again, (we hadn’t done anything different from the previous year in terms of promoting ourselves, and we were no longer guaranteed support by a lot of potential voters) there was more an air of resignation than disappointment from the team when we didn’t. That accolade was returned to Dez and Comics International and if there were 2004 awards they probably won that as well. In reality we didn’t try in 2003, I think all of the remaining team knew that we’d fought a good hard fight but it was beginning to slip away from us.

By early spring of 2003 we’d ground to a halt. We released #19 as if there was no change, but when issue #20 finally came out (it was 6 weeks late) there was an air of finality about it. The team that had once consisted of some of the top names in comics journalism in this country (and now regarded the same throughout the world) was barely four active people and we were holding on because we didn’t really know what else to do. We’d had such unbelievable highs that even the horrendous lows, which just seemed to take the piss out of us in gallons, didn’t matter. We held on because we thought there would be an 11^th hour reprieve and someone would come along and say, ‘this is too good to let go’ but it didn’t happen.

The demise of Borderline would have gladdened Skinn’s heart. He had seen off yet another pretender; yet the truth was for two years our magazine was considerably better than his – it was consistently better edited, better laid out and had interesting articles that didn’t patronise or belittle the reader. The fact he sold CI a few years later proves to me that I managed to kill his enthusiasm for it; he was never going to get it to the level it was when I was there and it was never, ever, going to be as good as Borderline.

Then a couple of interesting things happened. The first was I was invited to go to the Lodz Comics Festival in Poland, as a guest of the organisers and sponsored by the British Council in Poland. Organiser Adam Radon had mooted this a year earlier, but they lost the funding they needed to get me over, with the British Council’s help I could go. Borderline was hugely popular in Poland and it was the first comics magazine in the world to do a feature on Polish comics outside of Poland. This endeared us to them and they made us honorary Poles.

By this time, Borderline consisted Martin Shipp, Jay Eales and a few people helping us out part time and me. Mike Kidson who had finally quit with #18 was helping with some sub editing when he could and we had a half a dozen contributors still toiling away with columns, interviews and reviews and there was very little you could spot that said we were struggling to get issues out. We rallied the troops and decided to do a Summer Special, using up unused material and seeing if we still had the energy to get it working. The idea was if we had a successful Summer Special we’d do an Autumn Special that would tie in with the visit to Poland. We lined up a new server and host in Silver Bullet Comic Books, an Internet comics site run by an entrepreneurial New Zealander called Jason Brice.

Jason offered us a deal and we eventually delivered a Summer Special that took his server down within 12 hours of going live. There hadn’t been an issue of Borderline in four months and the fans were crazy for it. Brice didn’t realise, despite what we had told him - about just how popular a quality product is appreciated by the thousands of ‘net surfers looking for bargains. The thing was it was smaller than usual, it was a standard A4 shape and it had nothing in it that really reached out and grabbed the fan by the balls, yet over 30,000 people still downloaded it before the server crashed. It is the only issue I haven’t got an accurate figure for downloads for, but it doesn’t really matter. The Summer Special was to be the last nail in the coffin – although the corpse still had a wee bit of life left in it.

The Summer Special was my first attempt at doing a standard shaped magazine again for nearly three years. I didn’t like the finished product – others did, but that was because it finally met with their approval.

Comics Lesson 19:

The ego is a monstrous thing and in comics if you become regarded as a star it isn’t long before your ego outweighs your ability. There are many egos in comics and most people would probably think that the worst offenders are the highly paid artists and writers who have made small fortunes from the industry. But that just isn’t the case, the worst prima donnas are the ones who haven’t quite made it to the A list, the ones with more than enough reasons to be self-conscious and be riddled with doubt.

I suppose it makes perfect sense, once you made it to the comics’ A list of creators you have achieved what all young creators want and therefore there is no pressure and if you fall from your mantle in the years to come, you will survive because of your reputation. But that doesn’t work for all the time – for every Todd McFarlane there’s an Aaron Weisenfeld who might get a few years work from comics if he’s really lucky; and he’s the guy who’s going to hold onto to it for as long as he can and defend it rigorously. He could represent the person who seems to think he has a God given right to be treated like Brad Pitt at conventions and will make demands (often ignored by organisers) akin to those of rock stars on tour, but only because he threw away his first chance by believing his own hype.

Once getting a comic printed or having your artwork on display in a Marvel or DC book was the pinnacle of ‘making it’ even if it was just the one issue, you could probably lunch free on it for about six weeks, but because of the way comicbooks changed its focus from characters to creators, you only have to have enough money to print something professionally and all of a sudden you’re a star (in someone’s eyes, probably your mother’s) because you’re in ‘proper’ print.

It isn’t just B and C list writers and artists who begin to feel precious, some of the worst prima donnas are editorial staff and backroom boys – I suppose it must be all the frustration of living in the shadows of greatness? Essentially people choose their level of snootiness from what they perceive as their standing in the industry. The more perceived success, the more arrogant many become. This isn’t true of them all, but if they have delicate or precious egos then they have a good chance of becoming an arsehole.

Comics has attracted a lot of failed writers of other mediums over the years, I don’t know if they view comics as a place to make a fast buck, but they have arrived here and earned their dollars. Now we get real writers writing comics, because it’s viewed as a place to earn some bucks away from books, TV or film.

I think that maybe I should have realised a lot sooner that regardless of what I do for comics, comics doesn’t want to reciprocate. I haven’t done badly from comics, but in reality I could have probably done a lot better, but I was a pothead for so long ambition and motivation were replaced by the desire to do nothing constructive.

I’ve said that I really never had any desire to be a comicbook writer, but that isn’t true. I’ve had my moments and those moments weren’t special. In researching some background for this story I saw a few of the proposals I put together when I first had a computer, they weren’t my first proposals, but they’re the only ones I still have intact.

My first flirtation with comics happened way back in the mid-1970s when me and one of my oldest friends Colin Theobald sat down and over the space of a week wrote and drew a 7 page strip called The Human Crustacean. This told of a scientist who was bitten by a radioactive crab and was transformed into a half man half lobster, working on the side of law and order. This super-powered monstrosity first battled an alien called Inferno, who could basically do everything the Human Torch could do and in the process of the battle they released a big bad dinosaur type creature called Tyrannus (I think, I sold the strip in 1980 to a pillock who thought it was worth something). It had a cliff-hanger ending and I thought it was pretty good for a 13 year-old wannabe and a 17 year-old art student.

Neil Tennant (yes, that one), the then editor of what was essentially Marvel UK, also liked it and wrote to us personally to say that he thought it was a great strip and he was really interested to see how it finished. There was obviously no offer of printing it, nor was there any hint of anything that would make a young man dream of his name in lights, but it was enough for both of us to be proud. The problem was Colin discovered girls at art college, his brother Graham, while a good artist wasn’t in the same league with comics art and we just never got the first page of the second part off the ground, and then summer came along and… well there was long hot summers and pretty girls to chase and…

Fast forward to the late 1980s. I was reading one of my favourite comics, The Fantastic Four, the one with the Human Torch, Mr Fantastic – he can stretch, The Invisible Girl and the strong orange rock monster called the Thing. The comic was truly abysmal, both the art and the story stank and this was a comic that had helped turn me into the comic fan I was then. So I sat down at my mate’s computer over three nights and wrote my Fantastic Four proposal. It rocked. At least I thought so.

In a nutshell I intended to turn Mr Fantastic, the brains of the outfit into a bucket of rubber, I was going to have the Invisible Girl suffer from amnesia while she was invisible, I’d make the Human Torch an arsonist and just for laughs certain parts of his anatomy were no longer fire resistant and lastly I was going to make The Thing relatively normal, give him what he always wanted, the ability to be the Thing, but also be his alter ego Ben Grimm – but there was a price to pay for this new found ability.

The proposal was ignored.

I really wasn’t bothered.

Two years later a number of the ideas I’d proposed had started to appear in the magazine. Coincidence or theft? Well, the person I sent the proposal to was a guy called Tom DeFalco; he was the editor of the book and the logical person to approach. Two years later the writer/editor of the Fantastic Four was… Tom DeFalco. Coincidence? Probably, because let’s face it, there’s nothing new under the sun!

At the same time I put in my proposal for the FF, I sent in a proposal for a graphic novel called The Last Spider-Man Story, this was set in the future. Spider-Man had two kids, a son who idolised his father but had his mother’s genes, therefore no powers and a daughter who hated her father, his powers and therefore… had powers. It was a tragic tale of the Green Goblin’s (remember him? He’s in the first film) final act of vengeance. He kidnaps Peter Parker and subjects him to untold horrors and torture and in a fight Parker loses his leg. The Goblin displays Spider-Man’s tattered body (he’s not dead, yet) to the world and Mary Jane and the children watch. The son is enraged and dons his father’s spare costume and races to the scene. Amazingly he gets to the Goblin, who kills Peter’s son in front of him. Peter’s daughter has rushed out of the house, she hates her father, and she hates her life, why was she born that way? Just as the Goblin as about to kill her father, Spider-Girl appears and saves the day, killing the arch nemesis and saving her father’s life. She decides to continue the fight in honour of her brother and with respect to her father.

DeFalco launched a Spider-Girl comic using similar themes to this. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.

I decided I wasn’t going to do proposals for Marvel anymore.

Next time: more...

My Monthly Curse (Part Forty-Four)

Once Warren Ellis and me had been good friends (in comics ‘good friends’ is about the same as ‘very good’ in grading terms), we weren’t going to be best pals, but we talked a lot on the phone, communicated via email and drank with each other on the few occasions he ventured to a public event. I’d never really met a true opportunist, or at least one had never used me until I met Warren.

His comics career was rising and he saw Comics International as a useful way of helping that career along. He became a very valuable source of rumour and news and in return he got coverage and favourable reviews – not that he didn’t deserve favourable reviews; he was a talented new writer. But the day after he signed a contract with one of the big two was the day Warren stopped phoning. Our conversations became few and far between, if I rang him he could never talk for long and eventually we just didn’t have anything to do with each other. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pissed off or bitter about this, but I didn’t really do much, if anything, to damage my relationship with Warren, but I seemed to be the target of a lot of hostility from him. When we launched the magazine he was highly sceptical of it, but finally accepted it was quite a novel product. During the Waid debate he stayed relatively quiet and I can’t deny he sat on the fence for most of it, but when Dan Black began the ‘Save Borderline’ campaign he came crashing down on the side against us.

When you have a dream you hold onto it for as long as you can. You’ll go to extremes to try and secure its future. I’ll be totally honest; I had no real qualms about asking people for money. Forget the argument that was being put across that ‘no one asked us to do the magazine so why should we ask them to give us money to keep it going?’ People all over the world were downloading it; it had become an important thing and deserved its place in comics hall of fame. We might not have deserved anything, because we were stupid enough to do it for so long for no money, but the magazine deserved it and eventually, through our begging campaign, we only made enough money to ensure the magazine survived and I think that was a fair outcome.

I still don’t really know what the gist of Warren’s problem was – he’d made enormous amounts of money from the industry, probably more than enough to keep Borderline going for a year without him even knowing it, but the fact we asked for money in such a public way suggests to me that he found it distasteful, so he condemned us in public for it and turned a lot of his acolytes against us. Like I said I should have left it alone, but instead I went for the demigod’s throat. I made a nasty attack on him and I shouldn’t have.

It was quite amazing the amount of sycophants that will crawl out of the woodwork on the Internet, especially when they can twist the knife or defend the objects of their desires. Borderline might have been an arrogant entity – we did indeed love ourselves – but most of the wankers who sided with Ellis, downloaded it and many continued to download it despite this row.

We lost a couple of our contributors, both of them going to Comics International to do similar columns – and, of course, get paid. It was around this time that Dez Skinn made his most obvious attack on Borderline. Cashing in on the ‘slag Borderline off’ campaign that had started after we asked for money, he ran a comment piece (incidentally from someone who had never contributed anything to the magazine before and whose e-mail address bounced, several times) that really did a hatchet job on Borderline and me. The thing was I no longer received his magazine, I had been taken off the complimentary copies list (no surprises there) and I had no interest in paying for it, especially if it meant I had to go to the local comics shop to get it. So I was completely ignorant of the fact he’d done this. So when my emails downloaded one morning and a letter to the CI discussion list (which, incidentally was still being run by me, despite umpteen efforts by Dez to either have me removed from it or its name changed) appeared I was quite taken aback by it:

After seeing Dez Skinn with his beautiful new daughter in last month's Comics International I really was happy for him, I genuinely wish them both well for the future. At the same time I would like to think that he has forgotten his past differences with those old friends who are currently working so hard to make a success of Borderline - especially after our moderator's recent willingness to extend an olive branch following the Bristol Comics Festival.

Unfortunately it's hard to maintain that hope after seeing the 'Comment' section in the current (September) CI, where Andrew Hamilton of Motherwell launches a sustained attack on "undeserving charity cases" like Borderline which "end up having to plead for donations"; he complains that "these comics websites seem to think they deserve to be supported so they don't have to lose money", then asks "Why do they deserve it more than any of a hundred fanzines or small press titles which always seem to run at a loss?"

Quite apart from dismissing Borderline as some kind of fanzine, Hamilton then becomes quite abusive in referring to [the editor] himself: "Britain's Borderline, the self-proclaimed "best thing to happen to comics for a long time" is the most arrogant though. After its editor says you must have been hibernating if you haven't heard of him, he boastfully talks about Rebellion having sponsored his next issue, and having over 40,000 readers. But because he's "lost" over £3,000 in a deal with Cool Beans (not a bad fee for a single issue that he'd have done for free anyway) he now expects others to send him money so he won't have to get a job."

Now admittedly this piece is prefixed by the usual editorial disclaimer that "the following opinions do not necessarily reflect those of this publication", but one can't help but wish that some effort could have been made to deal with the more obvious factual inaccuracies contained in it. Nevertheless there's a part of me that still wants to believe this was simply printed in order to promote a bit of healthy controversy - and in the long run it might even help to clarify what Borderline is all about if Dez features an opposing view next month (and I can't believe that he won't receive one after this). I guess that leaves the ball in his court for now...

After all, in the immortal words of Nick Lowe, "What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love and Understanding?"

Now, I need to clarify something; nearly 18 months had passed since parting with CI and while it caused Dez and me both a lot of grief and money, he had, during my time with him actually, become my friend and I had liked him. For a few years we really were almost equal and very much mates. My life had changed quite considerably in that time and I offered an olive branch. It was flatly ignored, but being the clever little politician I can be I did it publicly, winning myself some humility points and helping ease my bad reputation – gained of course with the guidance of Dez.

I really did well; I went three whole days without rising to email. The guy who had posted it was genuine and was very much on the side of Borderline and he was defending me rigorously and I appreciated that, but I was also pissed off. I had had enough of Skinn’s covert schemes and his nasty little moments where he couldn’t care less how much debris he left to achieve his goal of besmirching my name, so I replied to it, knowing that he would see it.

My Borderline editorial team reside on here. Some of my friends reside on here. Most everyone knows the gesture I made [to Dez] was genuine. You've only got to lose someone you care about or have a terrible row with someone that you genuinely like, for you to realise that sometimes life really is too short. But you see, this isn't about that any more. In Dez's eyes I'm seriously out of order for even thinking that I could contemplate taking him to an industrial tribunal, let alone actually doing it. The fact it never happened annoys him further and the fact that it also cost him £6K further fuels his passions.

I got an email from a mate the other day about the latest Borderline, he's not on here but to show it's genuine it was from ####### ####, who Jay and Selina and a few others know and will be in the [Borderline] letters page next issue: "I'm glad to see your commentary at the beginning of this issue is a lot more upbeat. I'm sorry to say that the last issues opening shot was a hard one to read, you sure sounded on a downer mate. I hope things have picked up a lot for you and Borderline and keep you eager for more. The quality has never dropped though, Borderline is a quality product."

It is depressing when you get all kinds of accusations thrown at you, even if there is a smidgeon of truth in some of them. I did indeed gloat about him losing £6K at my expense - had he met his legal obligation he would have saved himself £5K. But some of the crap he's been levelling at me hasn't been nice... BUT, do you know what? I've stopped caring; life is equally too short the other way around. Dez is being an arsehole - the fact he's being an arsehole in front of about 7,500 people is absolutely freaking hilarious. Regardless of how much money he makes from it and how little he pays the people who actually do all the hard work, he has a pittance of the audience that Borderline has. Currently our *average* download figures are up to 83,000 a month - that's because we're getting to be more and more ***INTERNATIONAL***.

Every single time we do something on Poland we get someone from the Czech Republic saying "can you do something on us" and then someone from Spain, someone from Chile, Andorra, Luxembourg... damn, would you guys like to see a list of the countries that download Borderline? Then you can compare it to the number of alleged countries CI claims to be distributed to. Heck, my audience is over 10 times his audience, I'm not surprised I figure people have heard of me and therefore I'm actually not surprised that some of them voted for me in the [NCA] Lifetime Achievement Award – after all, not only am I partially responsible for Borderline, but I actually produced Comics International virtually single-handedly for about 7 years and you only have to look at it now to see that obviously it's now being designed by the teacher who’s lost touch he's now stealing ideas from his former pupil...

I possess the *Quality* product now and that also goads him something shocking.

I really don't want to have a feud with CI. CI was something from my past and I've moved on. Dez doesn't want to move on because I'm a threat to his happy existence now - he wants to crush me because he feels I betrayed him and he wants to crush me because he doesn't like the fact that month in month out I'm actually producing a better product than he is and yet he's constantly telling people how crap I am. Why do you think that is?

I'm actually getting happy that he's constantly having a go at us in print. It's telling the few people who don't download Borderline, who do read CI, that they perhaps should see what all the fuss is about! I don't mention CI in Borderline, because I don't particularly want him to boost his sales because of me. So, I ignore him - it infuriates him and he knee jerks worse, but in the long run people will realise that he's the only person doing it publicly...

BTW This Hamilton guy is probably a pseudonym - CI has suffered from a lack of genuinely worthy letters for years, no one writes any more, so we solved the problem by writing our own letters - I can give you a list of pseudonyms he, me, Bruce Paley, Mike Conroy, even Loriann and Kerry used, to pad out the letters - it's a cheap page you see (he doesn't pay Mike Kazybrid or Paul Saether for the Comic Cuts strip).

When I was younger and getting hassled by a bully or some one like that, my mum always said to me, "Ignore them, they'll go away". It works on 99% of all known creatures, but it doesn't work on Dez. He's such a control freak that he actually hates being ignored to the point where he'll up the ante to attempt to stay in someone's thoughts (this diatribe alone is probably giving him an erection). He took me off the comps list to see if I continued to buy or find out the little digs about me he put in. I haven't been buying it and I've not really paid a lot of attention to any of the discussions that emerged. So, I haven't been writing editorials that criticise him or his magazine in any way and that will infuriate him - remember I've known this guy for over 25 years, I know him really well, probably better than anyone else apart from Mike Conroy - I also know what makes him tick. Even Mike, who is a good and honest defender of Dez, will testify that Dez likes his own PR - he's arguably the most recognisable comics editor since Stan Lee to emerge - maybe the only one in this country, but he believes he’s still famous enough in the US for him to pull his weight.

I heard nothing about this at all; in fact Borderline disappeared off of CI’s radar faster than a speeding bullet. I suppose it was fortunate because he would have crowed relentlessly about the events to come.

I suppose I should also make the point of explaining what the olive branch was. I publicly tried to end the feud with Dez; I cut through all the shit and said, 'hey, we should be friends and work together - there is no need for this acrimony,' it fell on hostile ears...

Somehow Borderline continued, we celebrated our first year publishing and moved effortlessly into our second year with a following of around 65,000 per month and there was no visible drop in the quality of the magazine either. I had by now taken work in a different world altogether, so there was money coming in for me at least, therefore Borderline just hummed along like a sweet engine. 2002 turned into 2003 and we continued to feature a great mix of mainstream US and UK comics and a greater focus on stuff from all over the world. It wasn't making us money, but it was no longer bankrupting me.

Next time: all good things...

My Monthly Curse (Part Forty-Three)

Borderline as a business was one disappointment after the other with nothing to show and the feeling that we were put here just for someone else’s entertainment should have been playing on our minds, but it wasn’t. Borderline was still a great magazine and despite lurching from one disaster to another, this seemed to endear us to the public – those guys just keep on plugging away! But that wasn’t what I wanted us to be famous for.

The problem was, I was more interested in how someone in particular really felt about us winning the comics award. He claimed that the ballot was rigged and accused me of continually rewriting my own history. The feedback I received was heart warming – he was pissed off. I realised that my victory was complete in all but financial ways, Dez was still making the money, but I was just a damned sight more popular than him. And he hated me even more for it.

Someone sent me this, a paragraph written by Dez shortly after that Bristol defeat:

Why is this industry made up of such small-minded people? It's not big enough for all the bitching and camps that exist. It's more like a playground than a bloody industry. Some of these people should try surviving in the outside world, then they'd see how tough it can be.

I still think it has poetry about it, I also think it shows that this man is a pre-meditated bastard.

We were back on our own and we barely had enough money from the advert commitments to secure a new web host for a month, let alone the foreseeable future, but the amount we were having downloaded (only about 60,000 at the time) was still far too much for any new server without us having to pay extortionate amounts of money. Everywhere I looked I saw more expense and no obvious way for us to make money. Then we got a break, my web hosting partner put off his plans to emigrate for a year and after much negotiation we kept the server open and for nothing – all we were expected to pay was all the add on costs and our advertising revenue covered that.

Then we miscalculated something and it bit us on the arse.

It was with #10 that we lost the United States and the respect of a lot of the creators who we’d fought hard to win over. We did something unthinkable (in the eyes of many); we took cap in hand and went begging. It was that or nearly 12 months hard work would have been wasted, and a lot of people who had grown to depend on us would be disappointed and let down.

We had already come in for a shocking amount of criticism for running a review that, while it wouldn’t have been out of place on a topical current affairs satire, caused no end of offence in the comics world. We dared to break one of those unwritten rules of fandom – we talked about someone as a person rather than as a comic writing demigod. Borderline was six months old and had gone through the opening months free of any controversy (which was probably a good thing considering my reputation for having a short fuse), and then we decided to run this review:

Aria: The Soul Market #5

Image Comics; written by Brian Holguin, with art from David Yardin and Lan Medina

More of an impulse buy than anything and I really should have been put off by the cover. Pretty girl... flashing her boobs... slinky costume... seductive look on the girl’s face... it stunk of low quality and pandering to the fan with one hand down his urine-stained underpants.

Should I leave now, before I upset anyone else? I bought this because of that old chestnut - word of mouth, the thing that can work better than a multi-million pound advertising campaign - and to be fair I didn’t really pay the cover a lot of attention when I quickly stuck it in my pile of buys. Of course, when I got home I was mortified and thought I’d just handed Image $2.95 and a handkerchief full of my seed.

I barely understood a word of it (coming in 5/6ths of the way through a story does that), but I sort of picked up the gist on my second read. Yeah, second read! This was fairly impressive... In fact, by Image’s falling standards this is a masterpiece, and not only does Image have a potentially future X-Men artist in the form of David Yardin, but I can’t understand why Brian Holguin hasn’t been given more writing assignments for the big boys. At least he understands the workings of the English language, compared with someone like Devin Grayson, who probably has a better grasp of Mark Waid’s bollocks than she does of English. Holguin’s dialogue, pacing and overall story idea is worthy of applause.

This is a distinctly European comicbook. One thing is for sure, it’s far too sophisticated for the average Image fan. It won lots of plaudits for Jay Anacleto’s pencilled artwork. Anacleto is here, with spot illos and snippets of future projects, but he’s not in the same league as Yardin - who I believe is slightly let down by his inker, one Lan Medina (any relation to Angel?).

Now for the sad part - I’m hooked. Holguin and Yardin have sold Aria to me. So, I checked on eBay for the missing issues. #3 and #4 won’t cost me the Earth... #1 and #2 would put me off of buying comics again if I was new to this crazy hobby. I suppose I could wait for the Image trade paperback, but with Aria’s schedule apparently being an issue when they can be bothered, I may well forget about this before that happens.

It beggars belief that Image can produce a title of this quality in the same month as something as woeful as the current Tomb Raider. What the company needs is more editors commissioning stuff like this and less manga-esque tripe that tells a single story in half a dozen issues.

The Verdict: Unexpected and entertaining. Ignore the hype and just treat yourself to a better quality of comic. (DRB)

If you didn’t understand all of it, don’t worry, it isn’t that important. The controversial thing about the review was not the suggestion that comics fan fill tissues up with semen every chance they can, or the very sarcastic way the entire review was handled, but this line: “At least he understands the workings of the English language, compared with someone like Devin Grayson, who probably has a better grasp of Mark Waid’s bollocks than she does of English.”... You wouldn’t believe the shit this one line caused.

Andrew Winter came in for a lot of flack about running the review and all fairness to him he took it on the chin and acted with a composure that I envied. It wasn’t fair though because Andy had already submitted the finished reviews and we were light to fill the allotted space, I used a late arriving review to fill the space. I ran it past Mike Kidson and neither of us considered for a moment that it would cause as much offense as it did.

Within days of the issue coming out we were receiving all kinds of abusive mail from the US. One of these included an email from Mark Waid (regarded at the time as one of the best comics writers, but with a reputation for being a bit psycho!). His email to me read:

Just read the new issue. Until now, I have enjoyed BORDERLINE.

However, the personal comment about Devin Grayson and myself in the reviews section was not only out of line--and, by the way, also out of DATE--it was extraordinarily unprofessional in that it had NOTHING to do with the book being reviewed. Until now, I had expected a higher level of professionalism from your publication; apparently, I was fooling myself.

I look forward to not only a personal apology directed to myself and Devin but also to a similar apology routed through your e-mail list and published in the next issue.

When I said no, he didn’t take it too well. His reply was a four-letter expletive and an instruction. Actually it was a little more than that and the underlying tone was one of exasperation – that suited me fine, I was not going to toe the line to a bunch of prima donnas who believed in their own self-importance and Waid was one of these. I had explained to him in my reasoning for not running an apology that we were making no money from the magazine and yet another fucking control freak comes along trying to exert his will over a magazine which didn’t have a heavy-handed editorial policy.

I was growing tired of the wankers in the industry and perhaps this would have been a good time for Martin Shipp and Mike Kidson (by then co-assistant editors) to take me to one side and calm me down – but that was wishful thinking in hindsight.

You could argue that I should have just succumbed to Waid’s demands and got on with running Borderline but I had learned a valuable thing from Dez in my years at CI. If there isn’t any money directly involved then don’t give the bastards a thing. Waid had a reputation for reducing comics magazine’s editorial staff to quivering masses of jelly, if he thought he was going to do the same with me he was very wrong. Waid disappeared after his abusive response (I chose to ignore it – see some bullies go away when you ignore them) and I thought the whole business had died down.

I don’t know who decided to resurrect it but as we were gearing up for the impending Cool Beans World re-launch it became a rather prominent topic of conversation on a comics discussion forum operated by comics writer and self-promoter Warren Ellis (not the one who played with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). I tried to defend my position but the Internet is full of arseholes with nothing better to do than argue the toss all day and have their opinions (and we all know about arseholes and opinions don’t we?). Essentially because we’d upset someone, we were really bad people – which seemed quite strange, as the forum Ellis ran was a litany of insults and nastiness. We walked away from this with barely our reputation intact and I should have let my team handle the situation because I could have quite easily lost it big time. But for some of the team this was just a wrinkle on the skin – we were now more popular in the rest of the world than we were in the US, our downloads showed that the USA accounted for less than 50% of our audience – yeah, it was still the biggest section of our audience, but for people like Mike Kidson, losing face with a bunch of sad sycophants on Warren Ellis’s forum was the least of our concerns.

This all happened before our eventful Bristol Festival, the one we left brimming with optimism. Reality struck hard in the coming weeks. We were broke. We had nothing else left to do but go cap in hand to the people we never wanted to ask, the fans.

So we begged. Dan Black posted every single comics group he could think of and detailed how we were on the verge of closing down, how we were continually being fucked over by the industry and how unless people dug deep there would be no more Borderline. We explained that we needed money to meet our rising costs – the amount of people who downloaded us – our popularity – was our downfall and if everyone liked what we were doing, would they please give us something. Despite all of this we made barely enough money to cover bills. We knew we had the readership still, after Cool Beans World the downloads increased exponentially, but at the end of the day we ended up getting the majority of our donations from the people we covered – the creators we gave the spotlight to, who had seen an increase in orders from our coverage, gave us back the extra money they made! It broke my heart to think the people we wanted to help were financing us. But that wasn’t just the worst thing; it was the sudden backlash we received from certain corners of the professional world…

Next: the backlash begins

My Monthly Curse (Part Forty-Two)

By the time Bristol came around, Borderline was up to half dozen issues and among them was the ultra phenomenal #3; the issue that came out after the 9/11 special. We had over 170,000 downloads that month and the figure was boosted by the fact we did a feature on one of the largest comics consumers in the world – Brazil, we followed that up with another feature on the South American country in #6 which also saw downloads of over 150,000. Issues #4 and #5 also topped the 100,000 mark and we now saw this as the optimum time to hit the potential advertisers. We hit just about every person we could think of, from CI and Wizard advertisers to every single publisher in existence in the USA and the UK. I put forward a great presentation with all the facts, all the proof they wanted and sat back and waited. And I waited some more and then a week after the e-mail shot when I hadn’t had one single reply; I followed it up with a more direct approach. You could hear tumbleweeds sweeping majestically across my Internet connection it was so devoid of activity. What had we done wrong? Why were these people not falling over themselves to advertise with us, our ad rates were ridiculously small for the amount of people seeing our product yet no one was interested?

I was frightened to do something but I did it all the same. This was 2002 and the boom years were over so far that Marvel had been bankrupt for the previous two years and were only just showing signs of recovering sufficiently to stay in business! They didn’t advertise anywhere and besides they still had the lion’s share of the market, they didn’t need to. I had also been told straight by Bill Rosemann, Marvel’s then PR honcho, that he’d do anything he could to help just don’t ask for money. DC Comics was the obvious alternative first choice to ask straight out why they weren’t biting at the ad deal of the century? I had a great relationship with them, knew all the marketing team personally and could hope to get a straight answer from Bob Wayne, as we went back years. So I wrote to him and asked him straight. I waited for three days before I got a reply. I’d like to think I got the reply I did because everyone there was too embarrassed to tell me themselves, but I received an e-mail from someone I’d never heard of, who turned out to be a junior in the marketing department explaining to me why DC didn’t advertise with websites or on-line concerns. I received another email from someone who I can’t name, a couple of days after, saying that they had hated what had happened, but someone higher than Bob had pulled the plug. It did seem strange that DC would advertise in a semi-professional magazine in the UK – Tripwire – with its 1000 maximum print run, but wouldn’t invest in something that would be seen by 100 times the people?

Meanwhile back in the real world we were facing a moment of crisis. We were virtually bankrupt and facing another problem. One of my business concerns involved running my own web hosting business with a computer programmer friend of mine, this allowed Borderline to have unlimited access and bandwidth on the internet. Because I owned the server, we didn’t ever have to worry about the cost of all the bandwidth we were using and my partner took care of all the other business matters. We were coming to the end of our business relationship as well, this time through his imminent emigration rather than erosion and, to be honest our hosting business was not particularly successful, mainly because both of us had other things to do - and we were its best customer!

It was looking increasingly likely that we were going to lose our one thing that allowed us to be so successful, our unlimited bandwidth access at the knock down price of £0.00. We needed money and there was no hope in sight. We had about five months of free hosting at maximum, so we really needed another home and pretty damned quick. Except there was hope and it appeared at just the right time.

Cool Beans World offered us a great deal, not as great as Mike Kidson would have liked, but I bottled it and accepted what we could afford to get rather than what we wanted to get. It all ended up being moot because we got massively shafted. Cool Beans World, a Sheffield-based multi-media company had launched their pay-per-view Internet site a year earlier and unbeknown to me were on the verge of total collapse – they needed something that would attract people to their web portal and Borderline fitted the bill perfectly. I was invited up to Sheffield and talks began about a way for the two to work symbiotically, a deal was hammered out and we were going to be producing Borderline exclusively for CBW, it would remain free and we’d get paid £4000 per month to produce it – more than enough to keep us afloat and we’d be using the CBW servers so we no longer needed our own. I asked for the contracts and was promised them within a couple of weeks, so I concentrated on getting the first CBW hosted issue out – this was #8 and up to that point we were averaging just over 100,000 downloads per month, and, more importantly, we were now an award-winning comics magazine.

Issue #8 was beset by problems and CBW didn’t make it live until the 5^th of the month and downloads were piss poor – people thought we were charging for it. An extensive Internet ad campaign told people it was still free, it was just at a different home and downloads picked up, but not much above 30,000. We started on #9 without having received payment for #8, but if we were going to do it we had to stick with it, we couldn’t be seen to be slouching. Then CBW requested that one of our columnists be removed because of animosity towards him by areas of the publishing world, we started to have serious worries. The second issue arrived in their inbox and took another six days to go live – the reason given was CBW needed to a) check all the coding (what coding? It was a PDF) and b) have their libel lawyers make sure we weren’t upsetting anyone. We’d invoiced them for our second issue and we were still waiting for the first cheque. It arrived midway between #9 and #10, the day before it was announced the company had gone bankrupt and all its creditors would probably not receive a penny. The cheque, of course, bounced. We were back to square one and actually considerably worse off. This alone was horrendous bad luck and you would have thought that some people would have had some sympathy...

We had some tough decisions to make, but the convention had arrived and while we were going down there with little optimism –we deserved to win the best comics magazine award. The amount of bad luck that was now haunting the magazine couldn’t continue surely? If nothing else we had to be seen and we had to schmooze with the right people, regardless of who won the best comics magazine award – we had to give it one more concerted effort – we deserved it.

Bristol 2002 had to be the make or break, we were back at our old server with 3 months of free hosting time left, half the team were exhausted from doing days jobs and coming home to three hours of Borderline work every night, some times more. Bristol was supposed to be big for CBW, and us, except CBW’s people were no longer there, nor were their tables. Despite having gone bankrupt, they had pre-paid for their display area, one of the organisers of the Festival decided to sell the tables again, despite one of them having been earmarked for us. We arrived with nothing to put our limited wares on display. I went ballistic and chewed the guy out saying it was completely unprofessional of him, was this event being run by a bunch of fucking amateurs or what? And various other constructively nasty but not that personal insults.

Good God, you’re becoming him! Resounded through my head and I stared at the guy organising the display arena and said, “Look, I’m sorry mate. If you were in my shoes at the moment you’d think that the whole world was out to get you.” He nodded, very few people in comics weren’t aware of the strange marriage that Borderline had – critical acclaim and 10 broken mirrors worth of bad luck! “I’d really appreciate if you could sort this out.” Ten minutes later he found us the space we needed – not that we ended up using it, we were too busy schmoozing!

The night of the National Comics Awards was strange – the organiser had told Martin Shipp that it would be advisable for us to attend the ceremony, but it was something like £15 per head for the meal and we were literally there on a shoestring. However, we needed to be there, so a crowd of us reluctantly found our way to the venue and we hovered around the main hall until most of the team decided it would be better for them if they headed off to the pub and left Martin, Jay and I to see what happened. I had to suffer a moment of extreme embarrassment first when I received enough votes to be #6 on the list of most important people in comics history. I was flattered, but really red-faced, I had no idea. Kev F. Sutherland the organiser of the festivals told me later he believed that we received so many votes for Borderline from the continent that many people couldn’t think of anyone else to nominate for that specific prestigious award, so they ticked the one they knew - mine. It got a laugh from the audience and suitably humbled me for a while. Dez of course made a big deal of it, but that might have been because he didn’t make the top 10.

Martin, Jay and I were sitting with Bob Wayne and Patty Jerez of DC – see, I had no hard feelings towards them, these guys were my friends and company rhetoric notwithstanding I wouldn’t wish to spend a UK convention without seeing either of them at some point – and we waited for our category. The countdown began, my pulse increased – I felt like the top of my head was going to explode, and then it got to the final three:

At #3 – Comics International, at #2 – 2000AD On-line, and at #1 – BORDERLINE!!!!

There was a cheer, a massive cheer and I was on my feet before I knew it. I was so pumped up it was unreal. I knew we were going to win, deep inside I knew it was a formality, we were simply far better than anything else out there. And the reaction from the professional community was great – many creators gave us a standing ovation, many of them people who had once worked with Dez. Jay Eales, although completely swept away in the euphoria, managed to keep his eye on the Comics International table and told me that while Dez’s face never moved a muscle, Mike Conroy looked shocked and reacted to Dez. But Dez just put his hand up and Mike quietened down. Jay said the look on Mike’s face was one of ‘3^rd - how did that happen?’

I reached the mic and engaged in some banter with the guy who presented me my award, we’ll talk about him later, but the icebreaker for me was that I had just fired this guy from the Borderline contributors team (at the instruction of CBW no less) and I’d done something many people in comics had wanted to do for a long time, got rid of a thorn in the side of comics, but like I said, more about this guy later. I’d gone over in my head what I’d do if I won, but never really thought what I’d say if I won. My actual acceptance speech was short and direct. I made a mistake and said the wrong word, although to some the word I used probably meant more.

This was reported as my acceptance speech – “Twelve months ago I set out to create the best comics magazine money can't buy. I guess this goes some way towards validating that decision. Thank you.” I actually used the word vindicating, which was grammatically wrong, but I was torn between just thanking people and saying how hard we tried to achieve it, and rubbing Dez’s face in it. Had I not been so pumped up I might have just launched into a tirade at him and his pathetic attempts to stop me, his years of mental cruelty, his ability to trample over all and sunder and the fact that NOW he wasn’t even number 2 in his own field, but I didn’t. I was nervous as hell and frankly I felt like crying.

The award always meant so much to him. He claimed he hated awards but he always displayed them prominently in the office. Now it was mine for a year!

The award brought some benefits and we attracted a couple of regular advertisers. One, Top Shelf Books, stayed with us until the end, their owners Brett Warnock and Chris Staros were great supporters of Borderline and they reaped the benefits of a mutually beneficial advertiser/publisher relationship – not something I ethically lean towards, but when they were one of very few throwing money in our direction, I was prepared to stretch my ethics a little. Others expressed interest in advertising and for a while things looked like they were picking up. We also had our hopes raised beyond belief, it was already our convention, and we were on the verge yet again of making it something even better. Rebellion, and the guys who witnessed my outburst at Dez in Bristol a year earlier, were now interested in talking to me about a potential business deal. The owner and publishers of 2000AD wanted to publish Borderline as a monthly newsstand comics magazine!

Martin Shipp and I (accompanied by the former DC artist Marc Laming) met Jason Kingsley, the owner, for lunch and we hammered out the beginnings of a deal. By the time we had finished we had it ironed out, all Jason had to do was make sure his distributor would handle it in the same quantity as 2000AD.

His distributor point blankly refused to carry a comics magazine and warned Kingsley it would be suicide to invest in one – this was the curse of Comics World, the last newsstand comics magazine, despite it having lasted three years, it was never a huge success. Distributors have long memories, especially for something as marginalized as a comics magazine. It obviously put Kingsley off, but he promised us that if there was a way forward he would find it. Others have since tried and failed with newsstand magazines, so there obviously isn't a way forward.

We didn’t hear Jason's decision until a couple of weeks after Bristol, so the weekend was quite an extraordinary one not just for me, but also for the Borderline crew. We were all recognised for our work and we partied in the street (literally) until it was very late...

Next: dogged by controversy, again...

My Monthly Curse (Part Forty-One)

Rewind for a second, on the eve of the first Borderline issue’s launch every single editorial person involved whose e-mail address was public knowledge received a barrage of emails in the hours before we went live. Every single email had virus attachments. It could have been a coincidence, if it wasn’t for the fact that Mike Kidson also received it. Mike’s Borderline email address didn’t work for him, so he used his private email address, which wasn’t publicly known, but was known by some other people in the industry, but Mike was our backroom boy he didn’t deal with the rest of the comics industry. Mike also used a Mac therefore the virus that was sent him was moot. The thing was this was definitely some form of sabotage, it was repeated with the release of #2. Let’s just say we had our suspicions and left it at that.

It seemed that everybody loved us, even the most hardened of critics were at least acknowledging that everyone else thought we were good, even if they weren’t actually looking at us. Except we knew differently – the computer software we were using to track IP addresses could tell us the addresses of everyone who downloaded an issue, we knew if you downloaded it. We knew, for example, what Dez’s IP address was and what his email address was and we could then track it back and actually tell you not only if he downloaded but also when he did and how long it took!

We had some software glitches with the first issue and some people had problems looking at the magazine or printing it out, we’d solved this problem by issue #2 but Dez had picked up on this quickly and claimed that after trying to open the first issue a number of times he’d given up and hadn’t actually seen an issue since to comment on. He actually downloaded the first issue at 12.07am on the 1^st of August (6 minutes after it went live!) and he downloaded the second issue at 2.17am on the 1^st of September. He was a little later with the third issue, but there was probably a reason for that, so he didn’t get it until 7.40am on the 1^st October. But for the first 7 issues he had downloaded it within 12 hours of it going live. He obviously liked to have a full set even if he wasn’t reading it!

The Manhattan Projects, without cynicism, cemented our relationship with the USA, which didn’t please everyone on the editorial team. Mike Kidson, for instance, was primarily involved in this project because of the help I needed; but he did want to use the magazine for awareness to European and small press comics; Peter Ashton’s involvement hung on the fact we didn’t pander to the Americans every month. Mike accepted that we needed money and our most obvious way of making it was from the US. Pete left us after the third issue; I’m not sure it was because we’d started to lose sight of our original aims already or if he really felt he’d given everything he could. With Pete’s departure Mike Conroy saw this as an opportunity to make his move. He moved into overdrive on me – I think he’d realised he couldn’t be part of my party, and the fact it would take longer than he planned to make money, meant he had to get into bed with Dez. It was shortly after the third issue of Borderline came out he started to tell me more things that purportedly Dez was saying. And of course, Mike was my buddy and he wanted to know if the things Dez was suggesting were true. He claimed he couldn’t believe that Dez would sink so low to suggest such things, especially about me. I just sat back and told Mike that Dez could do or say what he wanted, I had nothing to hide. I didn’t.

Here I was, five months gone from him and he was still attempting to control my life. I was beginning to get wound up by it big time and some of the team realised, at last, that I wasn’t just obsessed and paranoid about Dez, he really was out to get me and he wouldn’t be happy until I was gone for good. A number of them even suggested that I would be in the right to try and protect myself, or even go to a lawyer and try to get the man into a court on my terms and conditions.

The weird thing was I’d grown so desperately poor and had just immersed myself in Borderline, I hardly did anything – I just left it to the rest of the team to deal with things while I got on with physically putting the magazine together. I might have been the most well known comics magazine editor at the time, but I was pretty quiet for the best part of it.

I did do one thing however; I ended my long-term friendship with Mike Conroy. During the first five months of Borderline’s life Mike was a constant and he was driving me further and further down the road to depression. His personal woes added to my mounting ones were just too much. I felt he was like some psychic vampire who was draining any positive energy I might still have and all the time he was telling me about how Dez was planning this, or how Dez had said that. Mike was losing his centre-stage, his chance to be the centre of attention – Borderline was slipping away from him. He was being nothing but destructive. Finally, I just sat down and wrote Dez an email. It wasn’t nice, but it was very honest. I told him how I felt that Mike was probably the reason for all the breakdown between us, how he seemed to manipulate everyone to be in the right position, and how he has continually since my departure been trying to undermine things, helping me with Borderline while claiming to have nothing to do with it, reporting to me things Dez had said. It was a napalming of bridges kind of letter. It hurt me to write it and even more to send it but Mike was now costing me mental health points as well as financial ones and frankly I had started to truly believe he was a bitter old man who just liked to stir the shit as much as he could until he could move onto someone else.

I needed to end it and at the time the only way I felt that would be good for him was for him to think that Dez was his supporter and for me to be harsh enough for Dez to come out on Mike’s side. Half the plan worked, Dez came out on Mike’s side, but it didn’t really stop him from continuing to be a bully. I attempted to contact Mike a couple of times in the two years that followed, but unlike Dez who has communicated with me, Mike hasn’t, to him, I don’t exist. Now with hindsight I’m pleased, I don’t like falling out with people, life is too short, but perhaps it’s best – I think he knows I sussed him out.

Then one of my Borderline colleagues got involved in a email exchange with Dez and eventually the conversation turn round to me. Dez was asked what happened between the two of us and this was the reply he received:

He took me to an industrial tribunal, with a mammoth statement, saying I'd bullied him for 9 years, he worked 35 hours a week for me, he never even got paid for his trip to San Diego with me, ad nauseum. He was after proving his employee status so he could hit me with 9 years of back tax (his wife working for the tax people). I got my lawyer on the case. He bottled it at 5:30 on the night before the hearing (making a last minute call to the tribunal saying he couldn't afford the £30 -- refundable -- train fare to London).

So I had to pay my own legal fees. We appealed but the appeal for costs was thrown out. CI is now £6500 out of pocket, but I had to do it. If he'd pulled it off instead of bottling, it would have cost us a lot more. Sure, I sued him. Wotta shit!

Amazing how the same story can be turned around so the onus is pointing somewhere else. But it was nice to see he’d acknowledged he had a chance of losing.

Borderline continued to dominate the comics press and CI was suffering as a result. And then the ballots for the 2002 National Comics Awards were released, and we wanted to win it. But we didn’t do anything underhanded. We asked our readers to vote for us. We asked the people who were on the mailing list to vote for us; we didn’t canvas strangers, nor did we attempt to rig the ballot. The winner of the best comics magazine or website at the 2002 Bristol Comics Festival would be fair and even-handed.

The Bristol Comics Festival* deserves a part of its own in this, but because it really would be a little like shooting fish in a barrel we’ll breeze over it and throw in a sidebar. But suffice it to say it had by this time become something of an institution, as the only really big event that attracted all the top UK creators in one place for one boozy weekend. The standard of the events staged were pretty incomparable to things I saw in San Diego, but Britain isn’t a cheap country to do this kind of event and money was tight (and let’s leave it at that).

[*British comics conventions are remarkable things and have something of a history. The first convention was held in Birmingham in 1969 and was organised by Phil Clarke, the would-be owner of Birmingham’s first comics shop. The next conventions were staged in London during the mid to late 1970s before going back to Birmingham for what some believe should have been their final resting place. My first convention was in 1977 at the Bloomsbury Centre Hotel in London, I think it was at the end of August or the beginning of September. It was an eye-opener for me, mainly because it was so different from a standard comic mart. This was full of all kinds of stuff going on, but like any excitable teenager I was too wrapped up in everything to actually soak up any of the atmosphere. I do remember being in a hotel room at 4am, Bill Bates's if I recall correctly, in the morning when someone threw a chair out of the window and almost got everyone kicked out.

My next convention was the last one I went to for ten years and had the star guest of Jim Steranko. It was at this convention I got drunk. Very drunk. So drunk that instead of going and staying in my pre-booked room at the convention hotel, near the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, I decided I should go home. I staggered to the NEC train station, ended up climbing a fence because I was on the wrong side of the platform. Discovered I was on the northbound platform. I wandered across tracks and onto the correct platform just as the train came in. Armed with a bag of comics, 20 Major cigarettes and an urge to sleep for England, I stumbled onto the train and fell asleep. I woke as the train jolted into the station, grabbed my things and lurched up over the stairs, through the ticket gate and out of the front of the station, still without noticing that I wasn’t in Northampton. Staggering to a taxi, I got in the front and told him where I wanted to go. “Where’s that, then?” He asked. Outskirts of town, I said. “Which town?” He asked and I, still believing I was at my station, said Northampton. The driver smiled at me and pointed at the station. Bletchley was staring me in the face. I was about 30 miles from home having fallen asleep through three stations past my destination. The taxi driver took advantage of me and I ended up being completely wiped out of cash in what was a £25 taxi fare – even in 1978 that was a bit steep.

I didn’t attend another convention again until 1989 and by then I was just a humble retailer. I spent a day looking around, picking up goody bags and thinking that it wasn’t a patch on the conventions I remembered, albeit through a drunken haze, in my youth. The organisers of what was now called UKCAC – United Kingdom Comic Art Convention – were a couple of guys called Plowright and Hussan – they managed to get a lot of support from both Marvel and DC, as well as support from the UK. The events were very informal and held in much smaller venues than I was used to. The guys who organised UKCACs carried on well into the 1990s, but eventually gave it up as the events started to cost the organisers money.

The quality of UK conventions dropped, but the fans still came every year, in their fancy dress, for their yearly chance to hang out with like-minded people and meet a few superstars.

The man to take over the comics convention scene in the UK was a moderately successful comedian called Kev F. Sutherland, who had worked in comics from time to time doing some pencilling and inking. The convention was turned into a Festival and was moved from London to Bristol, in the South West and sounded like it was going to be something considerably different than anything ever seen before.

Never trust a convention by its hyperbole!

Bristol was actually a reasonably good home for the comics festival, despite the organiser constantly failing to secure any financial support to turn it from a sweatfest into an actual recognised festival. Sutherland held it in Bristol primarily because he lives near it, but also because he believed that the setting needed changing to somewhere not as expensive as London. The problem with Bristol was it has suffered from the same malaise that has affected comics in general – there seemed to be little effort going into making it special and more and more onus was placed on the fans to make it something themselves. Marvel and DC attended, but one got the impression they treated it more like a holiday than a business trip.

As a shining beacon of Britain’s contribution to world comics festivals, Bristol was a piss poor example because it looked so badly organised. There are now many ‘comics festivals’ and conventions – far more than I would ever have guessed; but the word ‘colloquial’ is an apt description of most of them.]

I still had to get to this convention. I no longer had any regular income; needed a hotel room, to eat and to schmooze. It didn't matter where we came in the NCAs; I needed to be there and not look or sound like I was eating bread and water.

Next: awards - nuff said.