What you are about to read is, on one level, probably the most self-indulgent piece I have ever written for Broken Frontier. On another, though, I would argue its necessity cannot be overstated. With so many comics sites (particularly in the UK) having either shut up shop entirely or shifted their coverage more towards the mainstream during the pandemic years the resulting pressure on us here at BF for comics coverage has become unmanageable in recent years. Expectations are high and, sadly, they are not always realistic. Particularly for a skeleton team of just four people.
So what follows is a kind of diary piece focussing on my own personal work schedule here at Broken Frontier over two weeks in March 2024. Hopefully it will give some insights into what we do behind the scenes to support and promote our comics community, and give you an idea of how constantly overwhelmed we are at all times. And this represents a period at a far quieter time of the year too, away from festivals and fairs and before the publishing schedules really start ramping up.
Before diving in this seems an appropriate moment to thank the 70-plus people whose bylines have appeared on the site since I took over in 2017, whether they were team members or guest writers.
Thank you one and all. You are Broken Frontier.
Saturday March 9th
I am horribly behind.
Of course those four words are more mantra than revelation after 17-plus years of involvement with Broken Frontier. This week though has seen a major network outage at our hosts that lost us two working days of being able to upload and lay out articles. I like to be at least a week ahead in terms of having material to release for each weekday (we don’t like using the word “content” at Broken Frontier Towers) but much of my Saturday will be spent on the back end of the site ensuring there’s at least one review, interview or feature published each day. We can then select a few of the more interesting press releases that feed into our coverage ethos to fit around them as they come in across the week.
On this occasion I can appreciate that the issues our host faced were not of their making and I have certainly been educated in the intimacies of pulling and splicing cables (insert your own mental image gif of Kenneth Williams gurning to camera here) but the reality is it has cost us time we could ill afford to lose.
Saturdays are usually my main writing day as well so I need to fit in at least four reviews today. In this instance that actually means reading the books/comics today too. Ideally I would have done that during the week and just have to transfer my notes to long-form writing today. But, as I said, I am horribly behind…
Other tasks on my priority list to at least start drafting ideas for today include:
- Start on supporting letters for a couple of very worthy external initiatives for award-funding bodies that I’m happy to lend our name to if it helps.
- Finish up a list of creators to potentially approach for a cool coverage opportunity as our planning for Pride Month 2024 in June gets underway. Pride Month is a big thing for us here at BF and last year we got a related review or feature up every single weekday in June. We have to at least live up to that again this year. But it takes a lot of forward planning.
- Try and work through some of the dozens of unanswered e-mails. This, frankly, is now unmanageable. Aside from just the hundreds of coverage requests we get a three-figure number of e-mails every month asking for help/suggestions/input from creators, publishers, event organisers, academics, students, activists, museums, galleries, festivals, universities, schools, libraries, comic shops, book shops, and from so many other directions. It’s exhausting, there’s only so much we can do, and it’s very easy to forget an e-mail/DM conversation you might have been in the middle of with so much going on.
Oh and as it’s Saturday I need to go through all the publisher digital review copies mail-outs that generally come in at the end of the week, as the links are time-sensitive.
Sunday March 10th
Another reason yesterday was so bunched up is because today I will be losing a BF writing/editing/organising day to attend the Bristol-based fair Zinezilla. The pandemic changed my life forever, as it did for so many, and while I returned slowly to events in 2023 they were all London-based. This will be my first trip outside London since 2019 and The Before Times, and it’s going to test my comfort zone boundaries. But it’s a smaller event with less travelling time to test the waters, and I’m looking forward to seeing co-organiser Mereida Fajardo and Bristol-based comics folk like Simon Moreton and Alice Urbino.
Commuting time to Bristol is spent on my iPad, reading digital review copies and making notes. Zinezilla turns out to be one of those DIY/grassroots/alternative comics events that are always among my favourites. We lost far too many of them through the pandemic. The small venue is absolutely electric – a buzzing hive of furious creativity as I will later describe it on Twitter. I catch up with Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artists including the aforementioned Mereida Fajardo (above), Miranda Smart and Alice Urbino (below), which is lovely.
Most importantly though I get to use this as an opp to discover new talent. There are a number of names very new to me and at least one who I will pencil in on my list of potential ‘Six to Watch’ artists for 2025. Curation is strong and while there’s the usual number of people stopping me to give me business cards or comics in the hope of review, it also feels like there’s a lot of younger artists who have no idea who I am. For the first time in at least a dozen years I feel like I’m browsing the tables incognito; the joy of potentially discovering exciting new voices we can go on to amplify a very real one.
I’ve missed this so much through these pandemic years. I may not be fully back in the game as yet but at least it feels like I got off the subs’ bench for a quick run-out today.
I had intended to get back to London and knock out a couple of reviews in the evening but I catch up with comics friends and go for a few drinks; enough to ensure that my concentration levels will be too diminished for writing later. I think I can give myself an evening off. I’ve probably deserved it.
Monday March 11th
Contrary to popular belief there is no Broken Frontier Bullpen. This is not my career. This is the thing I fit around my extremely busy and demanding day job. I have a late start today so in the morning I read and write reviews of the latest Colossive Cartographies. All commuting time is spent reading and making review notes so take that as a given for each day hereon.
I have Broken Frontier-related meetings on Zoom in the evening. Some of these I will be in a position to talk about openly here while others I will have to allude to for the moment. This evening I am chatting with a publisher interested in my input into potential names for projects. This is always a rewarding exercise. There have been quite a number of artists out there over the years who remain blissfully unaware that I/we suggested them for projects that they later landed. After that it’s a chat with an event organiser interested in working more with the comics world who wants to pick my brains about the comics landscape. It’s time well spent if it means opening up new audiences to our comics community.
The meetings go on longer than I’d imagined. I’m too tired to start writing so instead I upload, edit and format a few reviews from BF team members Lindsay Pereira and Lydia Turner who are doing some great, insightful work for us right now.
Tuesday March 12th
My lunch break is rarely used for eating. Instead today at work I upload some of the more relevant (to us) press releases that have come in of late. In the evening I take a semi-regular look at my triaged potential BF reviews list (my personal one not the team’s). This is organised in two main lists (one for socially relevant work with an emphasis on comics by or about marginalised voices, and another one for what I class as “language of the form” comics; those that really embrace the medium) and then three categories – priority/definite but not priority/if I find time. Every so often I have to purge titles from that final category because as much as I want to we can’t get to everything.
I also work more on the Pride Month plans this evening, get some e-mails answered , write some ideas for a video presentation I’m working on for something comicky, and write another minicomic review.
Wednesday March 13th
Here’s where we go all meta because today’s lunch break was spent writing up the notes I’d been making as I went along for this very article. This evening I am heading over to Jam Bookshop to say goodbye to a fabulous venue for indie comics that burned briefly but oh so brightly these past 18 months, and also to pick up the art from the ‘Breaking Frontiers’ exhibition of BF ‘Six to Watch’ artists I curated there last Small Press Day. Before the pandemic I would have been at comics events in the evenings at least two or three nights a week representing the site, alongside whatever daytime events were happening at the weekends. Not quite sure how I managed that on top of everything else in hindsight.
New Yorker cartoonist Joe Dator is signing and talking at Jam tonight and he proves to be highly entertaining. I spend a couple of hours going through yet more long unanswered BF e-mails when I get home and call it a night.
Thursday March 14th
Lunchtime is given over to chatting on a call with someone from another big publisher about the work of some small press names for a potential gig. Fingers crossed this works out for them. Their work’s great and they deserve the possible opportunity. Then it’s time to use the rest of my lunch break editing some articles on the back end of the site.
This evening I have a Zoom call with a university programme leader about potentially speaking to their students about BF’s work and also talking about routes into comics publishing. This is something I have been working to actively encourage since we announced our ‘Broken Frontier Connects‘ initiative last year. It’s a reciprocal thing – students get the benefit of our insight into raising their profiles and getting their work seen. We get access to exciting new prospects on the comics scene who we can go on to support and advocate for.
Friday March 15th
This evening is spent looking at and reworking our Broken Frontier Resource Lists of socially relevant comics work. These have proved immensely popular and my efforts to get them seen by university and college libraries for potential additions to collections seem to have proved popular. But we need to expand them (I’m working on lists for Palestine, a more general Graphic Medicine one, and one for Asian voices right now). I’m not always happy with the terminology I have used either and there’s one that had an especially clunky title (until tonight!) but they have become a central part of our ‘Broken Frontier Connects’ mission. It’s a constant housekeeping exercise but with additional summaries and some retouching this evening I’m hoping their accessibility is even more assured.
Saturday March 16th
Head down and it’s several hours today of writing reviews and another set of interview questions. I begin an hour or so after getting up and work through the day with a break at lunch time to sit in the garden watching the birds before working again until around 9pm-ish. “I wrote some reviews” or “I wrote some interview questions” doesn’t sound particularly interesting but it’s the bread and butter part of the operation and, again, it’s what I spend the near-entirety of my Saturdays every week on doing.
Also today I’m looking at our recent reviews and analysing which publishers who fit into the main mission of our coverage ethos have been neglected of late. With such a small team right now it’s harder than ever to ensure we give everyone the deserved consideration they are due. Sadly, for the moment, that means we don’t really have the resources to take as many sidesteps into the more obvious genre comics work out there as we would like. Where once there were plenty of other sites to spotlight that kind of work in the small press arena that’s no longer the case and we’re feeling the extra pressure.
Even when I finally stop BF-ing today and relax with a couple of beers and some comics at the end of the night I’m not really off duty. The stuff I’m reading is all for future reviews…
(If you want to join our small team of comics activists and champions for the form full details can be found here.)
Sunday March 17th
Sundays are admin day. I check out the Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ Discord server first. I have a week off work this week and I’m using it to schedule as many Zoom mentoring appointments as we can squeeze in. I like to have a gameplan in mind for our Six to Watch-ers that takes into account their areas of practice, methods of delivery, and potential outlets/publishers that may be interested in their work. I need to make notes for each session in advance so they get the most out of them.
Then it’s downloading and considering this week’s Broken Frontier review submissions*, checking out our Events page to update it, and catching up with our much-diminished-at-the-moment-team’s messages. I have a job reference to write for a past mentee today too which needs careful consideration. There’s also editing, uploading and image placement for next week’s articles to get done which takes significantly longer for a week’s line-up than you might imagine.
(*Last week we were offered 97 comics/graphic novels/collections for review. We ran 6 reviews. The Winter into Spring period is the quietest point of the year for review submissions. If you’re one of that tiny number of people over the years who have felt the need to publicly attack us for not giving you coverage these are the realities. There really is only so much we can do.)
And then at the end of the day I manage to get another couple of reviews written. One of them is the last issue of Peter and Maria Hoey’s excellent Coin-Op anthology; something we were offered nearly a year ago that had disappeared into the wrong review folder. Never give up hope!
Monday March 18th
A week off work is a chance to get way ahead on the reviews-writing and hopefully give us some breathing space scheduling-wise. I’m concentrating on longer-form work this week to try and make a dent in that reviews backlog. Each day this week I will spend several hours on reviewing/interview question-writing while I have the chance. Rather than tediously repeating that for each day’s entry please take it as a given if I haven’t mentioned it.
In the evening I have the first of this week’s Zoom call mentoring sessions with BF ‘Six to Watch’ artists. It’s Manon Wright (above) tonight whose comic Children of the Earth & Sky so impressed me last year.
Tuesday March 19th
I’m all Zoomed out after today. This morning I had a meeting about the work I’m doing for the Lakes Festival’s exciting British Comics Now initiative, something that gives me a chance to help boost some of our finest indie talents. In the afternoon and the evening I have sessions with Six to Watch talents Tom Philipson (Complicated Young Man), Mike Armstrong (Bigger) and Shane Melisse (Road Knight below). This kind of support is nourishment for the soul and an incredibly fulfilling experience. The ‘Six to Watch’ initiative and the genuine, tangible difference it has made to creators is the thing I am proudest of in my time at Broken Frontier.
And if that wasn’t enough I finish up the day with one final shorter Zoom catch-up with a publisher about setting up a series of spotlight coverage.
Wednesday March 20th
More Zoom mentoring was planned for today but we have had to reschedule which gives me some extra time around reviewing to do some housekeeping around the site. I need to do some tidying up of the ads and extend some that have expired (all advertising on BF is provided free as a community outreach endeavour for Six to Watch creators, socially relevant work, and marginalised voices). I’m also in the process of re-evaluating our creator opps page in order to give more opportunities to artists to create their own coverage on the site (especially our Inside Look creator commentaries feature).
Today as well I am doing more planning for our Strip for Me event week. Our themed week/month events like Pride Month, Earth Day Week, and our two weeks of pre-Thought Bubble features always go down well but as I mentioned before they require an incredible amount of meticulous planning well in advance. Having spoken to micropublisher Strip for Me’s Douglas Noble about this a few weeks back I have kind of dropped the ball on it a little so now need to get my act together. It’s always vital to remember that the grassroots side of comics publishing is just as important to us at BF, if not more so, than those who get regular media attention. I have some neat ideas for this event but they are going to need considered organising. Watch this space!
Chatting with Tom Philipson
We have been deluged with requests for either upcoming or currently running crowdfunding campaigns over the last fortnight too so I am having to make decisions as to what we can realistically give coverage to. This is always a delicate and difficult aspect of the site. We want to support people in their crowdfunding endeavours but at the same time BF cannot just be a broadcasting service for every comics Kickstarter in existence, otherwise that’s all we would be doing.
And, of course, there’s a few hours of reviewing/feature-writing wrapped around all this.
Thursday March 21st
Aside from the aforementioned ploughing on with the writing duties today is also the Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw Online on Twitter. This runs every two weeks and is the spiritual successor to the events we used to co-host in a Soho pub with the much-loved London comic shop before the pandemic. While we’re talking about returning to in-person soon it’s important that when that happens the loyal online audience isn’t abandoned.
Amazing Drink and Draw art from regular Alba Ceide
I have been organising this Twitter night fortnightly now for the best part of four years and, since our scheduled tweeting of drawing round themes is no longer possible without paying for the privilege (thanks Musk), it’s meant I have to be more active on the night posting the art prompts for the participants. Some nights that means running it on a train on my journey home commuting from work! It’s been another big commitment these last few years but during lockdown, especially, it was a vital community event that brought people together during the hardest of times. I’m proud of that and of the community that made it happen.
Tonight’s themes are based around the splendid Rebellion all-ages monthly Monster Fun. As ever, the interpretations are witty and inventive.
Friday March 22nd
We’re coming to the end of my week of annual leave and today I actually have a little bit of time off to take care of some of my non-comics life considerations! But it’s not all slacking off. Today I am meeting my Small Press Day co-organiser Amneet Johal (of the Alternative Press). Small Press Day is an annual UK and Ireland event founded by the amazing cartoonist David ‘Ziggy’ Greene that aims to bring punters, shops and small press comics creators together on a day of comicky celebration via in-store signings, panels and events.
This is the ninth year of Small Press Day and BF have been co-organising it since the beginning. Today Amneet and I are settling on a date, reflecting on what we learned from last year, getting the ball rolling on contacting shops, updating the Small Press Day site, thinking about social media promotion and so on. SPD has become a really cool part of the UK comics calendar and we’re very excited about both this year and 2025’s tenth anniversary celebrations.
This has been, as ever, an exhausting two weeks at Broken Frontier but finishing it up on something as celebratory as Small Press Day seems an appropriate place to end… for now. If you stuck with this article to the end we salute your indefatigability and your patience. Hopefully it gives some insight, at least, into the work that goes into keeping a project like BF alive.
Like what we do at Broken Frontier both on the site and in the wider comics community? BF is currently running at a significant four-figure loss every year. If you’d like to help us secure our future you can make a donation to our running costs here.
Top “Andy Oliver” avatar art by Francesca Cassavetti
Blimey! I’m exhausted just reading that amigo! Kudos.