A Look Back On 2020… And A Look Forward To 2021

The Year At Tripwire

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows talks about what’s happened over the past year and offers a few snippets about what we are planning in 2021…

2020 has been an incredibly difficult year professionally and personally mainly because the world has been turned upside down thanks to the coronavirus. However, despite all of the challenges, we have managed to achieve certain goals this year:

•We brought Tripwire back to print. Admittedly we have put the magazine back three times but it will be out the beginning of January. Thanks to the support of many people in the comics industry and our readers and visitors to this site, we managed to fund it through two crowdfunding campaigns and sales through Diamond. We learnt how to to successfully run a crowdfunding campaign. It also marks the published comic writing debut of myself, something that I am very proud of. We like to think that this is the best print edition we have ever produced and plans are afoot to do it again

•We put on a second Tripwire Awards. Thanks to the sterling efforts of Leonard Sultana, we hosted a second awards ceremony online with contributions from the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz, Grant Morrison, Mike Mignola, Karen Berger, the Wassel brothers, Jason Aaron and many others. We are preparing for a third Tripwire Awards for 2021 to be unveiled hopefully around March 2021

•We joined forces with Geek Riot Media for our advertising. Thanks to Kris Longo and Collin Millington, we have increased our advertising and sponsorship reach, something we are very grateful for

•Despite the bloody difficult year, we kept the website up and running and offering the same range of content we have done since we launched it back in 2015, honing and evolving it

So there was no Portsmouth Comic Con in 2020 but our hope is that will be returning in May 2021. We have quite a lot planned for the future year:

•A digital bi-monthly magazine launching in March, clocking in at around 64 pages, covering comics, film, TV, illustration and related fields

•A brand new educational programme which we are finalising currently involving some of the best people in comics. Once we announce this hopefully by the end of January/ beginning of February, it will be a very exciting new project that allows us to do something new

•We are also in discussions with a major US comic publisher, exploring the possibility of bringing out Tripwire books starting in 2022, our 30th anniversary year

•There are also plans afoot to create a new live event in 2022, as part of our 30th anniversary celebrations

There are too many people to thank for making this year far better than it could have been. Leonard Sultana and Olly MacNamee have been great again with their work and enthusiasm and our contributing editor Scott Braden has been invaluable with the print magazine and the website. Tripwire’s senior editor Andrew Colman has also been a huge help with every aspect of our business. David Michael Beck and Russell Walks gave us two amazing covers for the Tripwire Winter Special. My friend Mark Chiarello has also been very helpful

So 2021 looks like a better year than this one hopefully. We are just getting started and thank everyone who has visited us here or supported the returning print magazine

happy holidays to everyone reading this

Joel Meadows

editor-in-chief