You may have noticed that we skipped this monthly round-up towards the end of last year. In November the focus was entirely on our Thought Bubble Month and I figured you would probably prefer an extra review for TB in the limited time we had pre-Harrogate. And by the time we got to December I was so burnt out by those Thought Bubble efforts that we had a very quiet month of posting! But a new year means it’s time to return to these monthly “editorials” and talk about what we did (and didn’t) achieve in 2025, and where we go from here in the next twelve months…
2025 at Broken Frontier
Highlights on the site this year were, of course, our big coverage events. For our Pride Month celebrations in June we put up something LGBTQIA-related every single posting day. The month after we were lucky to be able to work so closely with LDComics who arranged for the review comp PDFs that allowed us to run an astonishing 35 articles and features for our LDComics Online Comics Fair Month of coverage. Huge thanks to BF’s Lydia Turner and Gary Usher for their efforts there.
And, finally in this regard, our Thought Bubble Month this year was, if I do say so myself, an outstanding effort from the team. An astonishing 72 reviews, interviews, features, blog pieces and reports went up over the month. And it would have been far, far more if the BF team hadn’t been hit so badly by Covid in the lead-up time to the convention. We started working on that with the TB team back in August and had well over 200 requests for reviews/interviews this year. We excel at coverage like this and I don’t think there’s anyone out there doing anything similar on so epic a scale. Again, huge thanks to both Lydia and Gary for their contributions there.
Events-wise this was the year that the Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw came back to in-person events. Fittingly enough on the tenth anniversary of our very first one. The D&D continues online as well but it’s great to have that chance to mingle with people in a pub setting every month too. It seems incredible to me that the format I devised for it on the spur of the moment back in 2015 is still going strong a decade later. We (Gosh’s Will Humberstone and I) are currently planning out our first meet-ups for 2026. Stay tuned for another poster announcement via our multi-talented cartoonist-in-residence Mark Stafford.
2025 also marked a more solid return to festival/fair programming for me. For August I was given free rein by the wonderful Caption Festival to organise a special Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ panel (above) where I got to interview such talented UK indie creators as Cara Brown, Mike Armstrong, Dominique Duong and Shane Melisse/Shanefaced. In September I had the privilege of interviewing old friend of BF and editing legend Shelly Bond in the Old Laundry Theatre at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (below). One of the most high profile things I have ever done and it was a real highlight for me to speak with Shelly about her career, from Comico to Vertigo, Black Crown to Off Register Press, and more. And, finally, what a thrill it was to take a tour of the Avery Hill Publishing exhibition at the Mercer Gallery at Thought Bubble. I often feel that AHP and BF have had an aligned mission and path over the last decade and I was honoured to be asked to talk about that journey at Thought Bubble.
Small Press Day continues to be something that Broken Frontier plays a huge part in and this year was no different. I have been a co-organiser since the very beginning and this year BF’s Lydia Turner joined myself and the Alternative Press’s Amneet Johal on the team for the big 10th edition of our celebration of comics self-publishing across the UK and Ireland. We had around 25 events this time, marking our biggest SPD since before the pandemic. Thanks so much to all the shops and community spaces that took part. And what a great experience it was to talk to so many of you again on Zoom as part of our BF/Small Press Day one-to-one emerging creator advice calls. More on SPD 2025 here at BF.
On the team-front our ranks grew in 2025. Gary Usher, Edward Picot and Swati Nair joined us on the reviews side while Lydia stepped up to fill the long vacant Managing Editor role. BF is as much a small group of activists for the form as it is a comics commentary website and the hard work across the team is exemplary. They deserve far more in the way of public acknowledgment for their efforts. So, again, my hugest gratitude to our BF family for everything they do to promote good work and exciting voices in the form.
BF’s Lydia Turner hosted the Small Press Day event at ArtHole in Cardiff, organised by Kamila Krol/Pigeon and Abs Bailey.
2026 at Broken Frontier and an apology…
So that’s the celebratory stuff covered. And now, it’s time for an apology…
Last year, as many of you who know me in whatever we loosely define as “the real world”, was a somewhat harrowing one for me personally. As a result my available time here became extremely limited and I missed so many things I should have responded to. So please don’t be offended if I didn’t reply to you. Sometimes comics have to take second place to more immediate concerns and this was certainly a year where, as much as I love the medium and our community, they had to move to the back seat. If there were things we spoke about and I had promised you something please feel free to get back in touch and we will chat. It could be anything from a review I had guaranteed you to events I said we would support, through to a Zoom mentoring chat I may have confirmed we would set up and didn’t.
As I said, it was a tough year, and I am profoundly sorry about dropping the ball on so many fronts.
Drink and Draw fun at #GoshBFDD
Now something else I feel hesitant to talk about but, ultimately, I think it’s important for people to be aware of the harsher realities of running something like Broken Frontier. It’s no secret that we have lost many outlets for comics coverage over the last couple of years. I wrote about that extensively earlier this year here and focussed then on the extra pressure that has put on us as one of the only sites left in the UK with significant reach. If Broken Frontier is to avoid becoming another casualty of that trend then we are going to have to make some changes here.
We have no outside funding at Broken Frontier Towers. Only a small amount coming in from things like Ko-fi (which I am incredibly grateful for!). And more and more outgoings as time goes on. Since I took ownership of BF in 2017 we have run at a cumulative major five-figure loss, and it’s just not sustainable anymore. It’s something I’ve spoken to people within the community/industry a lot this year and some very supportive folk have come up with some cool ideas as to how we can effect some “Friends of Broken Frontier”-style initiatives and ensure that we are still doing what we do best in the years to come. Again, watch this space.
Tim Bird, Andy Oliver and Donya Todd at the tour of the Avery Hill exhibition at Thought Bubble
In the meantime, though, please do what you can to spread the word about what we do and repost/share our reviews/features posts on social media. That is so important and we get very little in the way of shares since social media came crashing down around our ears. I will also have to slow down to a degree this year too. Family and my own health (turns out you can’t push your body to the degree I have been doing over the last few years, working as many hours on BF every week as I do on the full-time day job, without there being consequences…) will, again, be my priority over comics in 2026. So that also means we will be refocussing our coverage and leaning more heavily into our core areas over everything else: self-published and micropublished comics; socially relevant comics; emerging and marginalised creators; and work that embraces the language of the form.
One thing I am very keen to hone in on this year is our Broken Frontier Resource Lists of socially conscious comics. I feel these need a greater commitment in 2026, especially given the feedback we have had from libraries that use them extensively for collection development purposes. So expect to see reviews of slightly older work that we may have originally missed wherever relevant as we seek to expand and refresh that part of our mission.
Happy New Year!
To all of our readers and friends in the community all the very best for 2026! Coming this week at BF we have the ballot for the Broken Frontier Awards for 2025 and then, later in the month, our most read post of each and every year as we reveal the names of this year’s Broken Frontier Six Small Press Creators to Watch. And what an epic line-up it is shaping up to be for this year.
Until next month…
Andy
