TRIPWIRE: 20 YEARS OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING
Joel Meadows
It started off as just a bit of fun. The year was 1991 and I was still at sixth form college up in Barnet. My then-neighbour, Simon Teff, had been talking to me about the fact that there were no decent magazines that covered comics and music. That year, we put out one issue of what we called The Review, a hand-pasted fanzine with a Prince caricature on the cover by another friend of mine, James Cooper from Barnet College. It didn’t go down particularly well as we didn’t have a bloody clue what we were doing and the printer we used was a very dodgy character who had a print shop in Philip Lane in Tottenham. So, not exactly an auspicious start. But it obviously triggered something in all of us because, rather than give up, we chose to try and learn from what we had done in The Review and in February 1992, TRIPWIRE Volume 1 #1 came out. It was a stapled, A4 fanzine with a blue coloured cover and we got it ready for the Alexandra Palace comic show, which ran that weekend. We put copies for sale in a few comic shops like Gosh and Forbidden Planet and did sell a handful.
Buoyed by the first issue, we decided to make it a semi-regular event. So we put out the second issue in September 1992 in the same format and it also sold a few copies in the London comic shops. When we started, I really didn’t know how to conduct interviews and we began to get a little bit of a reputation for pissing creators off. The first one was Peter Milligan, who I interviewed and took the piss out of one of his answers in our interview. But we gave him right of reply and his column was the first of many to be written by a number of future comic superstars. We attracted people like Mark Millar, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Gordon Rennie to write columns for us. I think what appealed to them was the fact that there was very little editorial interference so they could write pretty much whatever they fancied.
Something seemed to click with the two issues we brought out in 1992 and so we increased our frequency in 1993, putting out three issues. We covered the now-defunct Vertigo UK office, got an exclusive Ian Gibson U2 caricature for the magazine and built up a bit of a cult following, getting copies around the country. We still didn’t really know what we were actually doing but we were enjoying it.
I was at university by this point, doing a Writing & Publishing degree at Middlesex University in Tottenham. I had started designing the magazine myself using QuarkXpress and we had settled into a sort of rhythm. In 1994, we ran a two part chat between Grant Morrison and Simon Bisley, the Bisley/Morrison Tapes. It was crazy, disconnected stuff but it did get us quite a bit of attention and built on our increasing following. In the same year, we continued our association with DC’s Vertigo thanks to an Invisibles and a Face cover. We published four issues in 1994 but I still didn’t really think that TRIPWIRE would be anything other than a sideline for myself while I was looking for something more longterm to do with my life.
1995 was an important year for TRIPWIRE as after three years, we decided to get it out to a wider audience and we offered it through Diamond Comic Distributors. The first issue we offered through Diamond was the one we put out in December 1995, with a Mark Buckingham Death cover. The following year was also a key one for TRIPWIRE: we got our first real designer on the magazine, Michael Grover, who came up with a new logo for it and changed the page templates. In 1996 we started our association with Mike (Hellboy) Mignola, one that has continued to this day and built on our rapport with Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, covering their Flex Mentallo series for Vertigo. We got four issues of TRIPWIRE out in 1996 including a preview of DC’s Kingdom Come, drawn by Alex Ross and it had become a habit for myself.
1997 was TRIPWIRE’s fifth anniversary year and we kicked it off with Volume #1 #16, which was our first issue with a full colour cover, an exclusive 2020 Visions cover image by Frank Quitely. We got an introduction by Grant Morrison and we packed it full of features and interviews with people like James Robinson, Jamie Delano, Mike Mignola and Steve Seagle. We launched it at UKCAC1997 and by this point, rather scarily, we were part of the comics establishment in the UK, or at least a familiar face at UK comic shows.
In the summer of that year, we did try an experiment with our format: we published our TRIPWIRE Summer Special 1997, which was 99p and in US comic format. We printed it at the long-dead Canadian printer Preney but it turned out to be a pain in the arse to print at this size and outside the UK so we chalked it up to experience and returned to the format of the fifth anniversary issue. We kept the 48 page black and white interiors with a colour cover from Autumn 1997 for a number of years, until 2002 in fact. We did play around a little bit again at the end of 1998: in an attempt to increase our frequency, we put out two lower-cost Specials, #A and #B, which had Batman/ Hellboy/ Starman and Earth X covers.
They sold extremely well but for reasons lost in the mists of time, we carried on with the 48 page colour cover with black and white interiors format. We published on a bi-monthly schedule and despite a few cockups from our printers, including misprinting entire runs, we kept it going for a while. In 1999, we had another crack at doing TRIPWIRE monthly, charging 99p for a slimmed-down version. But we made the mistake of investing too heavily in a Star Wars Episode One issue, thanks to some poor advice from someone we knew and so the monthly didn’t make sense. So we relaunched again, dipping our toe back in the water with TRIPWIRE Spring Special 2000 in the first quarter of that year. It was here that we began our run of themed covers, running pastiches of comics, film and other kinds of images with a logo that was specific to that particular issue. Also, by this point, we had dropped the music and brought new partner Gary Marshall on board, now including film and TV coverage, which was a much better fit than the music. The Spring Special, which we published as Volume 4#1 for the US, had a Victorian circus poster pastiche to get attention for our Alan Moore feature. It was a lot of fun to do the pastiches: we did a Hellboy pastiche cover, a Mighty World of Marvel pastiche and our nod to Russian expressionist posters. But this approach did have its downside: having no recognizable logo is a disadvantage for a magazine. So with Volume 4#9, published in December 2001/ January 2002, we unveiled our new logo on the cover to our Dark Knight Strikes Again focused issue.
We hadn’t given up the idea of going monthly so we thought we’d have another go, this time in 2003. So we wrapped up Volume 4 in late summer 2002 and even got ourselves an office. In 2002, we put out a tenth anniversary book to celebrate the magazine’s birthday, which did pretty well. Unfortunately, the three issues we did in our colour monthy format were a total disaster. Our newstrade distributor shafted us and so we wrapped up TRIPWIRE in the summer of 2003. After the truly horrible fallout of this, I went off to become a full-time freelance journalist and I had assumed that TRIPWIRE would be in my past from this point onwards.
Fast forward to 2007 and I had been speaking to my friend, Andy Grossberg, in the US. He was trying to encourage me to bring TRIPWIRE back in some shape or form. So, after a little coaxing, he convinced me to do TRIPWIRE Annual 2007, which was in a new thicker format. It did pretty well so it set the format until 2011. We did five Annuals and a Superhero Special between 2007 and 2011. We got to interview people like Matt Groening, Guillermo Del Toro, Drew Struzan, Martin Asbury and feature things like production art and production photos from Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and Iron Man 2. We even commissioned a new Futurama cover from Fox in 2010. In 2011 we began to think about a 20th anniversary book to commemorate this milestone. Then in the first half of this year, we began correspondence with Unbound and in May, it first appeared on their site.
It has been really interesting, a little like a trip down memory lane for me to rifle through old issues of TRIPWIRE and I have been reminded of the great content we have had in the magazine since 1992. I have also cringed a little at some of my writing in the earlier issues but I wasn’t a professional writer at the time. The market has changed significantly in the magazine’s lifetime: you now have digital and online magazines, making a dent in the print market. It has also gotten harder to get advertising from the comic companies as they’d rather do digital advertising and promotion through things like Facebook and Twitter, so 2011 may be the last print magazine we do. There are also fewer outlets to sell magazines, with the death of Borders in the UK and the lessening in influence of places like WH Smiths.
Despite all this, I have always loved print and so we felt we had to do something to mark the twentieth anniversary. I wanted to create a book that I would buy myself. So TRIPWIRE 20 will feature reprints of classic interviews with people like Mike Mignola, Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Frank Quitely but it will also include brand new trend pieces looking at what has changed in the last twenty years. There’ll be articles like the best and worst superhero/ comic movies 1992 to 2012 and the 20 most prominent comic creators who have come up in the last two decades. There’ll also be artwork, new and rarely seen, from the likes of Mike Mignola, Chris Weston, Dave Dorman, Howard Chaykin, Mike Mignola, Duncan Fegredo, Drew Struzan and many more.
We have gone for the crowdfunding model because it seemed to work with other comic-related projects. TRIPWIRE 20 will be a very exciting project and if your interest has been piqued by this blog post, please check out the Unbound page and pledge if you like the sound of it. We really can’t get this out without the support of people who pledge on it.
TRIPWIRE has been a major part of my working life since 1992 and it has created a legacy that I am very proud of. Thanks for reading.
Joel Meadows, as well as being editor-in-chief of TRIPWIRE, is also a very experienced journalist, writing about film, TV, books and genre for publications like The Times, Time Magazine, Independent on Sunday, The Guardian, Time Magazine and Big Issue In the North. He also has a blog, Walls and Bridges, where he reviews film and talks about whatever else takes his fancy. Additionally, he is also a photographer, shooting portraits of creative people and landscapes and architecture. He has a flickr stream. Tripwire website