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.

My Monthly Curse (Part Forty)

We refined the layouts, edited all the copy and edited it again, we treated Borderline #1 as though it was really going to be a printed magazine and read by 100,000 people. The level of professionalism I made as standard for Borderline was far greater than anything ever seen in a comics magazine. Not only did I want the best content I wanted to show Dez that CI was a badly produced anachronism and he and it had lost touch with its readers. I also wanted to show him what I was capable of doing without him.

People who were against Borderline were few and far between. There were the people who just didn’t like me, there were those opposed to the PDF format, but there were also those who didn’t like what I was doing. Many of them believed that I was only doing Borderline to get one over on Dez and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t, but it wasn’t the overriding reason, the real reason I wanted to do it was because I knew I could create something better than Dez and something far more important, something that people wanted to read because it was the best. I knew I was capable of doing that, it was the one thing I had left in me and I wanted to prove it myself as much as any one person. Dez was in my past and that’s where I wanted him to stay. The problem was if you’re going to launch a comics magazine you have to be aware that he runs the only other one in the UK and by default he runs British comics.

At this time something very covert was taking place. Mike Conroy, had heard from his US publishing friend that he wasn’t interested after all in our own version of CI, so had aligned himself with Borderline. He couldn’t deny that the buzz around the industry was strong and even though I’d assembled a team of virtually unknown editorial staff, he and most of the people who had worked for Dez in the past had been unknown themselves once. The team I had consisted of former comics writers, comics historians, mainstream press journalists and editors and dedicated fans with the same energy I had when I started with Dez. I saw it as the perfect mix. Conroy saw it as one of potential, but also a threat and that bothered him, he needed to keep his feet in both camps so to ensure he had options at a later date. One of the reasons it bothered him was because Borderline was bothering Dez. I’d stolen his thunder, not that editing a comics magazine makes you the forefront of comics news that often, but I was now the most visible comics magazine editor in the business and I was going around making lots of big promises and, more importantly, keeping them.

Mike saw Borderline as something he could influence me with, he believed he could steer me into his directions and I believe that right up until our friendship finished he thought he was ‘almost there’ with it and me. What happened was that Borderline was more than just a success it was huge. So huge in fact, at the launch party – three days after the launch – we had been downloaded by more people than we expected would download it in the entire month! John Parkinson informed us of something none of us expected – we had been downloaded by a total of 51 different countries in three days – we were truly international, not just in name, like some. We had also been downloaded 65,000 times – the demand was so great it crashed our servers constantly throughout the first three days!

Now it’s important to understand a few things. Comics International had a circulation, at its highest, of about 24,000. That is pretty damned impressive given the audience they had in the UK. That was roughly one in four of every comics reader who picked up CI. In the USA, Wizard was the best selling thing to do with comics and at its peak it was shifting over 300,000+ per month. What Borderline achieved has to be quantified – we were free, but it still cost people to download us, either through charges from their ISP or Internet Café costs. But these were hidden costs and people never really notice hidden costs. At the Borderline launch party, in my back garden in Northampton, we announced to those attending we’d been downloaded by 65,000 unique Internet addresses in three days – that was 40,000 more than we expected to download in the entire month.

Between Dan Black and me, we bulk mailed as many places as we could, told as many people as we knew to pass the info on and we got the comics companies talking about us to their professionals and we were getting inundated with interview and features pieces from all quarters. We were new, we were fresh and we were attracting the attention of the masses and not just the masses in the USA and UK, but all over the world. By the time we launched we were everywhere and we began to offer deals to other magazines and websites, affiliate with Borderline and we’ll help each other. Many signed up, others refused because they were frightened of losing their own support or simply just didn’t like the way we’d bludgeoned our way into the consciousness of the world.

We had no real time to rest on our laurels, we had another issue to get out and then another, we had a target and that target was by March 2002 we should have attracted enough sponsorship and advertising to be relatively self-sufficient and be able to pay the contributors something. By the time I was putting #2 to bed we knew that over 100,000 readers all over the world had downloaded #1. Our flurry of press releases telling the world of our success was greeted either by more people arriving to see what all the fuss was about or people claiming that we were reading our results wrongly and we probably hadn’t been downloaded by 1000 people – we offered these people access to our log files, but they either refused or never got back to us. Some people just can’t accept success, especially if it’s someone else’s success.

One of the unbelievers was of course the eponymous Dez Skinn. It got back to me through the people we shared as friends that he believed I was massaging our circulation figures and that we were basically lying through our teeth – how ironic is that? He was busy on the phone telling his advertisers that they shouldn’t believe anything I told them because we had split acrimoniously and I was doing everything in my power to ruin CI. I took this badly at first, but then it was pointed out to me that he was obviously very frightened of Borderline. It wasn’t a magazine thrown together by some ambitious fanboy, it was a magazine put together by someone he’d taught everything he knew and that meant he really needed to up his own game, especially in the light that people were commenting on the drops in standard in CI since my departure.

It was a fantastic couple of weeks for me. But, I’m a natural born pessimist and I knew that it would all come crashing down around my ears.

I received plaudits from all over the comics world and I made damn sure that everyone knew that it wasn’t me, it was the team of quality editorial staff I’d assembled that had made it so good. Mike Conroy called me several times during the month, mainly to report on comments made by Dez. I had a smug grin on my face, Skinn was worried, because if he wasn’t he would have ignored us. Mike didn’t seem convinced of our numbers despite showing him the evidence, which he couldn’t argue with (unless of course there was some way of manipulating the figures and I wasn’t aware of how to do that and frankly John Parkinson isn’t the kind of man who would have manipulated figures for my sake), but Mike soon seemed to come around, especially as Dez was growing more and more unstable towards him. There we were thinking that if one of us wasn’t at CI any more it would have eased the problems for the other, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Just by being on the planet, I was annoying Dez and he was taking it out on Mike. The fact that I was producing a comics magazine that was receiving major praise from everywhere in the industry was like someone sticking a red hot spindle up his butt. No one ever talked about Comics International in the same way they talked about Borderline.

By the time issue #2 came out we were synonymous with quality comics coverage. The reaction was phenomenal again and we were well on our way to achieving at least 70% of the first issue’s download figures. The magazine had changed again slightly, I had tinkered with the design and layout slightly and it looked very slick indeed. We were thinking that if we could keep this up we would be cashing in before long, we needed something that embedded us into the subconscious of the comics reading people – or as we liked to call them ‘the Americans’, because they had the money to throw around and because we were lazy, we didn’t know how to approach the European publishers and no one seemed prepared to find out – there is, after all, only certain things a person will do for free before it becomes a chore.

I was sitting in my office working out different approaches I could use to coax money from potential advertisers when the phone rang. I went downstairs and picked it up, ignoring the scenes on the TV that looked like a poor special effect from a cheap TV movie. It was my late brother-in-law on the phone, “Are you watching this?” He asked, but by then the full horror of what I spotted on the television was unfolding in front of me. I’ve lived in a world where my escapism had always been world-shattering events and planets inhabited by so many super freaks where devastation was a daily thing. I’ve read comics where entire planets have been wiped out, where cities have been devastated, but the cities that were destroyed were only fictional ones. My other world was one where Superman would have raced and not only stopped the plane from crashing into the building but would have saved all of the lives and wrapped the terrorists up in a street lamp and dumped them on the door of the local FBI. On September 11^th, 2001 there was no Superman.

My life in comics had always been centred on New York City, because as a fan of US comicbooks New York was the place where it all happens. I have friends who work there; colleagues and personal friends made from comics and all, if it wasn’t for New York City, I probably wouldn’t even have had a career in comics (even if it was in tatters like the plaza around the Twin Towers).

The news broke here around 3pm UK time, it felt like reality and the unreality of comics had suddenly merged. I stood and stared at the TV until my wife came home and I was still shocked beyond belief by the time I went to bed that night. The next few days badly hit the magazine’s hit rate, but that didn’t concern me. Then on the Monday after the event I got a call from Mike Conroy asking me if I wanted to be involved in some form of tribute book? I asked him to explain his idea to me in more detail and he said that the comics industry had had a massive outpouring of grief since 9/11 and there were a number of tribute books scheduled where all the funds raised would go to the widows of those that died trying to save lives. At the time the only comics magazine that could do something at short notice was Comics International (because of its frequency and short lead time) and allegedly Dez’s reaction to Mike’s suggestion of acting like a conduit for the people who wanted to know what was happening was: What the bloody hell for? The Americans probably had it coming to them! So the only alternative was to try and get Borderline to do it and of course Borderline was capable of reaching so many more people than CI. We were about to gold seal our reputation.

While the rest of the team were busy on Borderline #3, me, Mikes Conroy, Kidson and Sivier put together a special edition of Borderline called The Manhattan Projects. It gave room to comments as well as news and showcased artwork that would feature in the tribute books coming out from various companies. It was small so it could be e-mailed to people’s in-boxes and conservative estimates reckon we were seen by nearly half a million people. I was asked why Mike Conroy was involved in this Borderline special, but instead of telling them the truth I said it was because there was animosity between Dez and me, I was doing it because Borderline could get to more people quicker. Dez took a real umbrage to this remark and the next four months became a time of dirty tricks...

Next: The halcyon days of Borderline.

My Monthly Curse (Part Thirty-Nine)

I talked to many people while I was at Bristol in 2001 and more and more of them were convincing me that comics in the UK was at its strongest for years and there was enough burgeoning talent out there for something big to happen.

All people could talk about was how we were on the verge of something big and there was no one there to promote it, to cover it or to show the rest of the world (not just the USA) that it was emerging from its slumbers and the old dinosaurs no longer ruled the planet. I remember talking to Mike Conroy about it that evening and receiving the same looks from him, as I would have from Dez. But I stopped him in his tracks – “What if we produced our own Comics International? What if we, the two people who actually matter, went to a US publisher and said, ‘we can give you this, we’re two of the most respected journalists in the industry with both the fans and the pros on our sides and we can give you something more than what is there at the moment’. Have you ever thought about that, Mike? We would actually get the money we work for and the credit.” He looked at me like he’d been having the same idea. Incredibly he thought it was a good idea and he knew someone who might just like the idea – an American publisher. I left Mike to sort out the publishing side of the venture and I spent the next day talking to some of the people I thought would be valuable assets. These people included old friends and colleagues like Martin Shipp and Peter Ashton, as well as artists like Marc Laming and Paul Rainey. Before long word was going round that something was happening, something that could be big for the future of comics in this country. No one knew what it was, because I hadn’t told them yet. I had learned that the best way to get people’s interests was not to tell them everything, just tease them with a possible concept and that always worked well with comics fans, because of their desire to know things before they happen. By the time Bristol ended I had a list of people who I felt would be invaluable to the creation of the perfect comics magazine.

The problem was Conroy didn’t like any of the people I suggested, although he didn’t really have a problem with Peter Ashton, he couldn’t understand what the guy brought to the table. I explained to Mike that Peter’s knowledge of small press and independent comics and his growing knowledge of the European market made him a valuable consultant. Mike couldn’t understand why I wanted to entertain anything other than superhero comics. I decided that my idea and Mike’s idea weren’t the same. Mike wanted to do Comics International but without Dez, I wanted to do the most all-encompassing thorough exploration of the comics medium in magazine form there had ever been done. There were other comics magazines out there as well as CI, these included the multi-hundred thousand selling Wizard and the supposed doyen of alternative comics coverage The Comics Journal, which over the years had grown a reputation for being impenetrable reading and focusing on only areas of US comics that no one had ever heard of. I wanted to take the ground between the two and offer enough coverage to keep everyone happy.

As Mike continued to press his connections, we were fast approaching D-Day for me at CI.

The day after I was fired (or left) I sat in front of the computer and realised for the first time in nearly 10 years I had nothing to do. I was unemployed. So instead of looking for a job or doing something completely different I opened up my desktop publishing package and started to create the ultimate comics magazine.

The period between June 11^th and August 1^st 2001 was quite an extraordinary period. The wife, having worked for the tax office for a number of years, sat down with my accountant and the two of them came back to me and said that there was a good case to believe that I was technically employed by Dez and I could sue for constructive dismissal. I scoffed at the idea, but after a series of phone calls to ACAS and the TUC’s help-line, I decided that perhaps I had a case after all. I had spent years being paid by Dez and over the last few years I had been giving him invoices with breakdowns for how much I earned. Dez, as I said previously, was not responsible for anything – we didn’t work for him, we worked for ourselves (if that was the case, why did I have a company car in Quality Communications name? I still have the documents as proof). Yet he had a certain degree of control over anyone who freelanced for him. The certain degree was about 99.5% of control and you only had the .5%, if it suited him. I consulted my lawyer and he nodded to me that I had a case. So it set proceedings against Dez for wrongful dismissal at the end of June. He laughed it off, but soon realised that perhaps he had laughed too soon. Suddenly he was taking it very seriously and had put his own solicitor in place. The world became a very legal place and I was only fuelled by the belief of others.

Fortunately I had good advisors, one of which worked in an Industrial Tribunal office. More and more information was coming to light, as I detailed the areas in my statements that I believed Dez could not oppose, he instead fought back with emails, testimonies and a signed statement from Mike, which he had coerced from him by threatening him with his job. I remember Mike phoning me up in tears apologising because he had to do it.

Then the fates transpired against me. I had appealed for the case to be heard in Bedford, which was local to me and not too far from Dez. But it was refused. I appealed again and subsequently the hearing date was adjourned. I then received a phone call from Dez’s solicitor, I didn’t and still don’t know if this was a proper procedure, but she started demanding information from me, which I grew very defensive about. But she also informed me of the fact that my second appeal had been rejected, something I wasn’t aware of, and it would be held in London inside the week. I then phoned the Industrial Tribunals offices in London that were dealing with the case and discovered that two important pieces of information that I should have received had not been sent to me. This information basically had me stumped and I realised that I needed a lawyer because I didn’t understand what was being asked of me.

I got no joy from the woman I spoke to, so I asked to speak to her superior. I explained that not only did I still require an additional adjournment – the new hearing was going to be in five days – I could not afford to pay for my travelling expenses, I also now needed time to be able to find out exactly what was being asked of me and the time to get myself some legal counsel. I was refused and told my only recourse now was to write to the Chairman of the Tribunals, with the reasons for the adjournment and he would decide. I faxed furiously through the night, sending him the reasons why I wanted an adjournment, the reason why I simply could not afford to travel (regardless of the fact they reimbursed your costs eventually, I had no one I could ask to lend me a couple of hundred pounds to cover my expenses). I could drive to Bedford, I couldn’t drive to London, pay for parking or park up and travel in by tube, and it was impractical and unfair, especially as the hearing was to start at 9.00am. I was the poor sap with the grievance and they were going all out to cater for the bastard in this scenario.

The Chairman refused it again. I received another abrupt and threatening call from Dez’s solicitor and the walls came crumbling down. He knew he stood a very good chance of losing and if he lost it would have resulted in the end of CI; he would have made sure that the livelihoods of all his ‘employees’ would be blamed squarely at me. I was woefully unprepared despite all of his worries, it was already costing me more money than I anticipated and with the fact that I had missed out on a number of important communications – copies of which arrived the day before the hearing, I realised that I stood a very good chance of being torn apart on the witness stand and that I didn’t have the confidence to stand up and make my arguments clear. I really do believe that if I had gotten the one little thing I asked for (Dez was allowed an adjournment it should be noted), an extra couple of weeks to get a solicitor involved – I had stupidly believed I could defend myself and make it cheaper – I could have screwed him to the floor and got what I deserved. But I didn’t, so at 4.30 on the Thursday, the day before the hearing I phoned up the supervisor at the Tribunal and told her I was going to pull out. I had no option, the Tribunals were pushing me into doing something that I was unprepared for and, to be fair, the woman on the other end of the phone, probably hearing the distress in my voice, assured me that her staff would help me as much as they could to understand and deal with the things I had no knowledge of. It was no good; I just didn’t have any fight left in me. I said, “I had this man ritually humiliate me for 11 years, I’m not going to give him the chance to do it again publicly because you people are at fault.” The Jammy Bastard had won again, this time by default, but I suppose I got the last laugh, it cost him well over £6,000 in legal fees, in the end.

However, that £6,000 wasn’t the last of it. I suddenly heard from the Tribunals stating that Dez had appealed for me to pay all of his costs and if the Tribunal ruled in his favour, there was nothing to stop Dez from suing my arse off in court. Suddenly I was fighting for my life. After writing to the Member of Parliament who dealt with things such as Industrial Tribunals, I detailed all of my case out to them, why I didn’t think I should be made responsible for Dez’s costs, I also said that if they did rule against me I would sue them for their negligence in the case. The Tribunals rejected Dez’s bid for compensation.

The following day Dez’s solicitor phoned me again and told me that Dez was considering a proper legal move against me for damages, so would I be prepared to meet him halfway? I laughed at her and said, “He can take me to court and he can win, but at the end of it he will get nothing, and you can tell him that from me! You can also tell him that if he does I will make this whole sorry mess public knowledge.” There was never a case against me.

While all of this was going on, the first dummy of the ‘project’ as it became known circulated between a close-knit group of 10 individuals.

The ‘project’ was coming along nicely and thanks to a good friend of mine, called Rad Kerrigan, we had a name for it – Borderline.

The dummy we produced started to find its way over the Atlantic and we started to hear good noises from pros and publishers. In fact, the feedback we were getting was excellent. But as far as anyone knew at this point, apart from a few select people, we weren’t actually looking at a magazine – a physical paper and print booklet. What we were distributing to people was a 500K Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable data format) file, with a print ready magazine inside. The idea had been touched on before, by a group who produced a zine called Savant, but all they did was repackage the contents of their website into PDF format. We were going to produce a comics magazine that originated all of its material, had something for everyone, covered everything from the current hot US comics to the obscurest comics of Outer Mongolia. We were going to be the world’s first educationally entertaining magazine dedicated to the medium of world comics.

We were ambitious.

We were electronic!

What made Borderline different was that it was going to be FREE. It would eventually survive from advertising alone. It would be the first of its kind, a magazine that promoted the industry that the industry had to pay for, allowing the fan to read it and use it for nothing. It would be able to do this because it would look, read and be so different from any other comics magazine. It would be able to give more coverage than a conventional magazine and it would automatically link (if read on screen) to websites that would expand on the story further. Borderline was a multi-purpose, multi-levelled, fully interactive magazine: you could print it out, read it downloaded on screen or on-line like a website – the potential reader base was immense; little did I know how immense.

By the time we were getting ready to launch, the magazine had gone through a number of changes, the most significant being it changed its shape from a conventional A4 magazine to a widescreen, the shape of your monitor, which meant we could fit more on screen but the design ethic would remain intact; this was the idea of Mike Kidson. We had lost a couple of the founders, but gained a few new people who added new dimensions to our approach. At the time of launch the team consisted of me, Mike Kidson and Peter Ashton as assistant editors, Jay Eales and Mike Sivier as news editors, Andrew Winter was reviews editor, Martin Shipp was features editor and John Parkinson was our webmaster and controller of all things Internet. We also had a guy called Dan Black doing our PR. Dan Black, or Dan the moderator from the Comics International forum was really a guy called Mark Emerson, ironically a regular at the comic shop that Dez once owned. He had joined the CI Forum initially to start an argument with Dez Skinn because he never received a competition prize he had won – weird that – but ended up liking the group so much he stayed, but never told anyone that he was really someone else entirely. So Dan Black was created and Dan Black became a real person – a growing influence on the comics scene via the Internet. So real in fact was Dan Black that when Mark revealed this to everyone on the Borderline team we still ended up calling him Dan for months after.

We were the people who will probably go down in history as folk heroes and mugs in equal proportions. Borderline was free, we knew that we had to do it that way for at least six months solidly before we could start to expect any of the publishers to advertise, but we were confident of our product and I was confident that because of my history and respect in the industry I would get more than enough advertising. If Plan A by some fluke didn’t work, then Plan B would be to charge a nominal fee for the magazine. Plan B was never really considered viable by any of us. There was no Plan C.

We announced to the world what we were doing – releasing a top quality comics magazine, in PDF format to the rest of the world. A magazine you could print it or read it on-line, it would feature interviews with some of the top people in comics and features about comics from all over the world. It would teach people about the origins of their hobby, have sections that would appeal to all genres and sub-genres, it would have cutting edge reviews, and space to show the fans as much or as little of something as they want to see. But above all, it would be free!

We didn’t get laughed out of the place like we expected, and we didn’t receive as much negativity as we expected and nothing seemed to be stopping us from launching. Something had to go wrong, but it didn’t; at least not straight away...

Next: The Borderline experience!