About Borderline Magazine

Borderline Magazine

Borderline was a British comics news and criticism magazine published monthly from August 2001 to March 2003, running to twenty issues plus one special. It holds a distinctive place in publishing history as the first PDF comics magazine: a professionally edited periodical distributed as a downloadable document at a time when most comics journalism still lived in print or on simple websites. Created by Phill Hall, the former news and features editor of Comics International, it was published by Mediahall and edited from Northampton, and at its height it reported an audience of over 150,000 readers.

Borderline's achievement was to combine the speed and reach of the early commercial internet with the standards of a print magazine: news, criticism, history and interviews, including conversations with Chris Ware, Steve Gerber and Charles Burns. It won Best Specialist Magazine or Website at the 2002 National Comics Awards. Its collapse in 2003, after it began charging and attracted only about 100 paying buyers per issue, became an early, much-discussed lesson in how difficult it was to make readers pay for digital publishing, a story Hall himself retold in a multi-part memoir for Bleeding Cool in 2011.

Phill Hall and the Road from Comics International

Phill Hall came to Borderline with a professional background unusual among early online publishers. As news and features editor of Comics International, then the leading British print magazine about comics, he had run a news operation, cultivated industry contacts and learned what readers expected from comics journalism. Borderline was his attempt to carry that operation onto the internet without losing its structure: regular issues, edited features and a recognisable editorial voice, rather than the rolling, informal coverage of a website.

The first issue's editorial address, preserved in the archive.org scan of issue 1, was 45 Fullingdale Road, Northampton, in the English Midlands. That domestic-scale base was typical of the venture: a national and, as it turned out, international magazine run from a house in Northampton by an editor with print experience and digital ambitions. Hall's later Bleeding Cool memoir columns, published in several parts in 2011, remain the fullest insider account of how the magazine was made, who wrote for it and why it ended.

Why a PDF? Publishing at the Turn of the Millennium

Borderline's defining decision was its format. In 2001, publishers experimenting with digital magazines tried websites, email newsletters and early e-book formats. Hall chose the PDF, which preserved a designed page: columns, images and layout that looked like a magazine and read in a fixed order, while being distributable worldwide at almost no marginal cost. As the first PDF comics magazine, Borderline tested whether the rituals of print, an issue, a cover, a monthly rhythm, could be transplanted into a file.

The choice had practical consequences. Readers downloaded a complete issue and could keep, print or share it, which helped the magazine spread far beyond Britain. It also meant each issue was an editorial product with a beginning and an end, distinguishable from the endless scroll of web coverage. The limitation was commercial rather than technical: a file that could be freely shared was hard to charge for, a problem that remained theoretical while the magazine was free and became fatal when it was not.

Twenty Issues, One Special, August 2001 to March 2003

Borderline appeared monthly from August 2001 to March 2003, producing twenty regular issues plus one special edition. Sustaining a monthly schedule for a digital magazine with a small team was a significant editorial achievement in itself, requiring a pipeline of news, reviews, features and interviews assembled to print-magazine deadlines without print-magazine revenue. The consistency of the run is one reason it was taken seriously by the industry it covered and by the awards juries that honoured it.

The magazine's positioning was deliberate. Hall and his contributors aimed at a point between The Comics Journal, the American magazine known for rigorous criticism and industry scrutiny, and the NME, the British music weekly known for attitude and cultural coverage. That midpoint, serious about comics as an art form but readable as entertainment journalism, described a readership that print comics magazines had struggled to hold: adult readers who followed comics as culture rather than only as collectibles.

An Audience of 150,000 and a Brazilian Surprise

By its third issue, Borderline reported an audience of over 150,000. For a free PDF magazine edited from Northampton, the figure demonstrated how completely digital distribution had changed the geography of comics readership. A print magazine with that circulation would have required a major publisher; a downloadable file needed only servers, word of mouth and readers willing to pass it on. The number also explains the confidence with which the magazine commissioned international coverage.

The most striking feature of that audience was its shape. Borderline's coverage of Brazilian and South American comics, including the work of Mauricio de Sousa Productions, the company behind Brazil's hugely popular Monica comics, drew a large readership in that region. A British magazine found part of its public in South America because it covered comics that Anglophone journalism ignored. The lesson, that digital publishing rewards underserved audiences wherever they live, was one the wider magazine industry spent the following decade learning.

Coverage Beyond Britain and America

Alongside its Brazilian and South American material, Borderline covered Polish and Filipino comics as well as the American and British industries. That breadth distinguished it from competitors organised around the American direct market. Polish comics had a distinguished history under and after communism that English-language readers rarely encountered; Filipino artists, meanwhile, had been central to American comics since the 1970s while their own domestic industry received little Anglophone attention. Borderline treated both as subjects in their own right.

This internationalism was editorially principled and strategically shrewd. It gave the magazine content no rival offered, and it built the overseas audience that produced its headline readership figures. It also reflected the reality of the PDF format: once distribution costs nothing, there is no reason for a magazine's curiosity to stop at its own border. Borderline's table of contents, moving between British small press, American independents, Brazilian bestsellers and Polish history, anticipated the genuinely global comics conversation that social media later made routine.

Interviews and Contributors

Borderline's interview list signalled its critical ambitions. Chris Ware, whose meticulous, melancholic comics redefined the graphic novel's possibilities, Steve Gerber, the writer known for Howard the Duck and for hard-fought battles over creator rights, and Charles Burns, whose stark black-and-white work brought literary horror into comics, were not routine publicity interviews. They were long-form conversations with creators whose work rewarded serious discussion, and securing them placed a free digital magazine on the same footing as established print titles.

The regular contributor base included Martin Shipp, Mike Kidson, Andrew Cheverton and Jay Eales, names familiar within British comics writing and small-press circles. A monthly magazine lives on such contributors: specialists who can file reliably on history, reviews and scenes they know first-hand. Their presence across twenty issues gave Borderline continuity of voice, so that readers encountered a recognisable team rather than a sequence of one-off downloads. Much of the magazine's archive value today lies in that sustained, bylined record of British comics culture at the start of the century.

Best Specialist Magazine: The 2002 National Comics Awards

In 2002, Borderline won Best Specialist Magazine or Website at the National Comics Awards. The category itself is a period detail: a specialist magazine or a website, as if the two were interchangeable contenders for the same honour, which in 2002 they increasingly were. Borderline, being neither a conventional magazine nor a conventional website but a designed periodical delivered digitally, fitted the category's uncertainty perfectly and beat more established forms at their own game.

The award mattered commercially as well as symbolically, at least in intention. Industry recognition was evidence, for advertisers, sponsors and potential backers, that the magazine's large free audience was also an engaged and respected one. That Borderline folded within a year of winning shows how little protection prestige offered a digital publisher in that period. The infrastructure of online payment, subscription management and digital advertising that later sustained online magazines barely existed, and goodwill could not be converted into income at the necessary speed.

The Paywall Experiment and the End in March 2003

Borderline folded in March 2003 after it began charging for issues and attracted only about 100 paying buyers per issue. The contrast with a free audience of over 150,000 is one of the starkest early statistics of the internet economy. Readers who valued the magazine enough to download, read and recommend it would not, in sufficient numbers, complete a purchase for the same product. Bleeding Cool's account also records that the magazine closed after a business deal went south, compounding the revenue problem with a failed rescue or partnership.

Hall's later memoir treated the collapse candidly, and it is often cited in histories of digital publishing for that reason. Borderline was not a bad magazine that the market rejected; it was an award-winning magazine with a six-figure audience that the market, in 2003, had no mechanism to support. Its story preceded the wider newspaper and magazine industry's struggles with free online content by several years, and its numbers, 150,000 free readers, roughly 100 paying ones, remain a cautionary ratio for anyone who assumes reach and revenue are the same thing.

After Borderline: Borderline Press and the Archive

Phill Hall later returned to comics publishing with Borderline Press, announced in 2013 and covered by Bleeding Cool, reusing the name for a book publishing venture. The revival of the name suggests the original magazine's reputation had outlived its finances: within British comics, Borderline still stood for ambitious, internationally minded publishing. A press could build on that goodwill in a way a monthly PDF, dependent on continuous production, could not.

The magazine itself survives through digital preservation, including the scan of issue 1 held on archive.org, which preserves everything from the editorial address in Northampton to the design that made the PDF experiment distinctive. For historians of comics journalism, the twenty issues and special document a transitional moment: print values, digital distribution, global readership and no viable business model. Borderline's editors understood the future of comics coverage earlier than most. What they could not do, in 2001 to 2003, was make the future pay.