Many years ago, on a panel at the late, lamented London shop Orbital Comics, I was asked about my role in comics journalism. My answer was a simple one. “I’m not a comics journalist. I’m a comics activist.” Journalist is a term I have actively distanced myself from over the years. It’s an inadequate, and kind of inappropriate, description for our mission here at Broken Frontier; one which is far more about building community, showcasing socially relevant work, and actively championing the very best emerging talent. There are so many priorities for us that come before reporting or analysing news.
Still, for the sake of the 1600 or so words here, let’s assume we do indeed fall under the umbrella of “comics journalism.” Because however you define written, online comics commentary one thing is very clear. We are at something of a crisis point. Our colleagues at Comic Book Yeti made this point on Bluesky recently and both Heidi MacDonald and Tiffany Babb have written insightfully over at The Beat on the current state of play.
The Defending Comics panel at Orbital. Left to right – Alex Cox, Khary Randolph and Andy Oliver. Photo by Camila Barboza
My own reflections veer, unsurprisingly, more towards the UK side of things and it’s a bleak picture we are faced with, particularly for the self-published comics scene. Multiple mainstay sites have either disappeared altogether or have near abandoned small press coverage, leaving the few British platforms providing intelligent, considered comics writing overwhelmed as a result.
The changing landscape of UK small press comics commentary
Way back in 2011 when I first started focussing first and foremost at BF on small press comics it was just us and the Forbidden Planet International Blog (now long gone and unforgivably, given its importance as a historical record, not even archived online) who were centring small press at the very heart of our coverage missions. Over the years many more would spring up, putting much needed eyes on the vibrant UK self-published comics world. But just as things expanded in the 2010s so have they contracted in the ’20s and it’s a depressing picture.
The excellent Pete Redrup-led Quietus comics column is long gone. Pipedream Comics who took so much pressure off us over the years, especially with their genre fiction reviews, shut down a couple of years back. A Place to Hang Your Cape has largely stopped posting and appears to be something of a shell site now. The Big Comic Page seems to have mostly stepped back from self-published comics reviews in a relative sense. I could go on. But the point is all these platforms were once a vital part of the UK small press comics coverage infrastructure, doing important work in promoting grassroots creators, and there’s an obvious domino effect when we lose so many. I can’t even link to all of these resources as some domains have now been taken over by gambling entities. (And, of course, further afield respected sites like Comic Book Yeti have mostly stopped running review coverage, Women Write About Comics is on hiatus, and Comics Bookcase is no more. It’s not simply a British thing.)
There are still a handful of sites giving a voice to the small press but reviewing opportunities are few and far between. The ever supportive John Freeman’s essential Down the Tubes does sometimes. But John’s remit in comics is a far wider one. And Comic Book News UK is a more recent and enthusiastic addition providing regular reviews. (If I’ve forgotten anyone big in the small press world for written coverage let me know and I will add them in here.) But the harsh truth in the UK is we have an ever growing pool of self-publishing/indie creators wanting reviews and an ever shrinking number of people that can do that for them.
Appreciation is important
We have been feeling the pressure like never before in the last couple of years at BF. Our community in the UK is wonderfully understanding about the realities of how much we can do (check out our Thought Bubble 2024 coverage for perhaps the best example of our commitment to promoting our small press comics practitioners.) But even with our prolific output the frustrations from the tiniest minority have been making themselves more apparent in recent times. It’s not pleasant, for example, to wake up to an angry several-hundred-word DM rant from someone telling you what a “pretentious c*nt” you are because they don’t like your reviews policy and coverage ethos. In fact, that kind of behaviour is exhausting.
As a sidenote here… do we also really need the endless cycling back on social media to the whole “the state of comics reviewing is terrible” discourse? This usually seems to be levelled at the serial comics arena, and super-hero comics reviews in particular, but even in a rapidly diminishing era for comics commentary you do not have to look very hard for strong writing about comics if you really want to find it (for the moment anyway…). Given that so much of this kind of support for the form is being done voluntarily, with little or no financial remuneration, it’s often grossly unappreciative of the people putting the work in. (And let’s not even get on to the sub-discourse here of “if you don’t make comics you can’t write critically about them.” I don’t brew my own beer either but I know when I’ve been served an off pint.)
Workload and financial commitment
It is bloody hard work putting together something like Broken Frontier. It’s often not fully understood that this is not my day job. It’s my hobby and I do it around full-time employment elsewhere, often working as many hours on BF in a week as I do in the office. You can see how much I put into Broken Frontier both on the site and on all our off-site community initiatives in this diary piece from a year ago where I detailed two weeks of my work as BF’s Editor-in-Chief. Our wonderfully hard-working team are all in similar positions. It’s also an incredibly expensive operation. Since I took over as the site’s owner in 2017 Broken Frontier’s running costs have resulted in a five-figure loss to me personally. That’s a lot of money with nobody funding us and while we occasionally remind you of our Ko-fi for donations we are well aware that these are not easy times for many for anything but the most essential outgoings.
So where have the last few paragraphs led us? Well, essentially, the points I’m making here are there are a number of reasons why you are seeing so many comics commentary sites disappear. People feel unappreciated. They can perhaps no longer justify so much effort to keep things alive in challenging times. And the financial costs, with little or no income to offset them, are monumental.
The wider BF picture includes events organisation and community activities. Nora Goldberg and Andy Oliver hosting the Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw above.
The collapse of social media
There’s one other reason here too that perhaps isn’t being brought up so much. We became so reliant on social media platforms to bring in visitors as a major source of our audiences that when everything started to collapse on that front we took a noticeable hit. And from my discussions with our peers elsewhere we were certainly not alone in this. The hiding of posts with links across all social media, Elon Musk wrecking Twitter, and our decision to step away entirely from that platform despite our huge following there because… well… we’re not into fascism, saw our traffic tailing off noticeably through 2024 and into 2025.
Added to that too is probably an unquantifiable factor about the ever evolving way people are now (urgh-word incoming alert!) “consuming” information, and how we have to work all the harder to drive people in. It remains to be seen what part Google’s AI summaries will affect us in the long-term but having discovered my own words stolen by them, while the BF link to the actual review they are from sits further down the search results page, it’s certainly not going to help matters.
The future
So where do we go from here? Broken Frontier is built on an ethos of bringing the work of marginalised and/or emerging creators to the widest possible audience. From that perspective, and from our position as a community hub, a paywall model that could work for other sites would be entirely inappropriate for us. So we remain reliant on our monthly running costs being minimised by any donations we get. And, while we massively appreciate that support, at the moment it represents less than 8% of our monthly running costs.
But there are other, non-financial, ways you can support us and all our other colleagues across the comics commentary-verse. Primarily, and I am practically imploring you to do this, please share any posts linking to reviews or features that we put out on social media. If you enjoy something don’t just ‘like’ it, share it. In fact, don’t even wait for us to promote something. If you enjoy it post a link yourself. Link to us in your newsletters. Promote what we do to your peers in the industry. And just keep spreading the word about us and all our other colleagues working so diligently behind the scenes.
Support the people who support you. Because otherwise we are going to lose even more comics journalism sites and we will be left with nothing but commentary about super-hero movies, anti-progressive podcasts and YouTube channels, and whatever the hell it is Comicsg*te are vomiting out this week.
We all deserve better than that.
Article by Andy Oliver
