Tripwire: A Look Back and A Look Forward

Making Plans For The Future

♦Tripwire’s editor-in-chief JOEL MEADOWS takes a look back at 2016 and outlines a few of our plans for the year ahead…

2016 was our second year as a website and we have learnt a great deal about the advantages of having a home on the web compared with a monthly print presence. The year was a very significant one for comics, film and TV. The comics industry lost two major artists (Darwyn Cooke and Steve Dillon), the film schedules were packed with even more genre product than the previous year and television continued its love affair with all things genre with the likes of Westworld, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Game of Thrones.

Tripwire has always been about quality interviews, talking to the movers and shakers in each industry that we cover and I like to think that we offered more of this in 2016 than we did in our first year as a site. We also covered the art and illustration side of what fascinates us as well, hopefully providing something different from what people get from other places. We have always intended to drill down into comics, film and TV to really get to the heart of our subjects. We also try to make sure that we do facts correct and that we spell people’s names correctly as accuracy is something that has always been important for us, which stems from a long career in journalism.

So what now for Tripwire? 2017 is an important year. April marks the second anniversary of the website and perhaps more interestingly, the end of February is the 25th anniversary of Tripwire as the magazine launched in February 1992. So we shall be marking the latter milestone with a number of events and hopefully a series of workshops. 25 years is an impressive achievement and we would be remiss if we didn’t commemorate it with something.

We are beginning to build up a decent list of contributors too and 2017 will see more contributions from the likes of Andrew Colman, Hugh David, James DC, Ed Hipkiss, Peter Mann, Leonard Sultana and Alisdair Stuart. We have recently been joined by Olly MacNamee from another comic website and we are excited to see what he shall be offering in terms of quality of comics content. We don’t intend to rest on our laurels: we have come pretty far since we launched on the web but there are more things that we would like to achieve. We want to offer more original content like the Howard Chaykin interview that proved so popular in 2016. 2017 is another massive year for genre film and TV and we shall be there to document it. Comic conventions and shows continue to grow unabated and we shall be on hand to cover these hopefully in greater depth than we have been doing before.

So thank you for visiting us in 2016 and we hope to see everyone in 2017