Borderline Comics Magazine

Borderline is a comics magazine created by former Comics International news and features editor, Phil Hall. Borderline was the first PDF comics magazine available to read on a computer or as a print out.

Borderline is a cross between The Comics Journal and the NME with a heavy mix of mainstream American and world comic books. Comics from countries such as Brazil, Poland and the Philippines were featured alongside well known American and British comic book icons.

History

Borderline was launched as a free download, in August 2001. By issue #3, the magazine gained an audience of over 150,000 readers. Due to the large aduince the magazine had exclusive interviews with people who didn't normally do interviews.

At the 2002 National Comics Awards in the United Kingdom Borderline won the Best Specialist Magazine or Website award.

Despite the success after 20 monthly issues and one special, the magazine folded in the March 2003, when the magazine started to charge. Only an average of 100 people paid to buy the magazine with the majority of sales from either South America or Europe. Sales in countries where the magazine was intended to target, UK or USA, had less than 10% of the total sales.

There was a special issue released the following summer, which was though to be followed by a new volume of issues, but new volumes of issues never appeared.

In October 2003, Phil Hall and Martin Shipp attended the Łódź comic convention. Invited as one of the major guests for the event (along with Pat Mills and Clint Langley), Martin Shipp said in an interview that it was 'one of the most humbling experiences of my life. A place where the people behind the scenes are just as important as the people who produce the actual comics.'

Notable Contributors

The principal contributors to the Borderline Comics Magazine were: Phil Hall, Martin Shipp, Mike Kidson, Andrew Cheverton, Jay Eales and the press and publicity was handled by Danny Black.

Others involved in the magazine's creation and continuation included: Mike Conroy, Pete Ashton and Andrew Luke of Bugpowder, Paul Gravett, Ian Richardson, Frazer Irving, Selina Lock of Factor Fiction Press, artist Terry Wiley, Christopher Spicer, Paul Rainey.

See also

*Comics
*Magazines

External links

* [http://borderline-pdf.blogspot.com/ - Some of the Borderline issues]