"Why don’t you take over Comics International and return it to greatness", "CI needs you to make it worth reading again", "Can’t you contact the publisher and offer to save the magazine from an undignified death", and a couple of others which basically echo the above.

While Dez Skinn will argue vehemently and passionately that I had absolutely nothing to do with the success of CI and that my contribution to the magazine was negligible; anyone who knows anything about this subject will know that he also has a pretty serious problem with me, personally, and he wouldn’t recognise the contribution I put into that magazine as long as he’s got a hole in his arse. Skinn’s problem with me extends back to the day we parted company; the most contested one minute exchange between two people in the history of comics. Skinn has always insisted that his personal vendetta against me is because I threatened to "take the magazine down with me" after he fired me for sticking up for my employee rights. Whether anyone believes it or not, my actual words were "I’ll take you down with me, you pompous bastard" (although I might have said ‘cunt’). Anyone who knew me in the 1990s would back me 110% when I say that I loved Comics International like it was my own child. I defended it; I fought for it; I ruined my own reputation over it and I would never have wished for anything bad to happen to it (whereas my wife couldn’t give a shit about CI while praying every day, even now, that Skinn contracts not only a terminal disease, but one that causes him immense pain and discomfort every second of the rest of his life).

It’s easy for me to say that my contribution to CI was clear and prominent – I’m good at bigging myself up. During my 9 years of working on the editorial staff (the other two years were as a columnist), the magazine came out 13 times a year in all but one of those years (in 1994 it only came out 12 times because I had a holiday booked just prior to a deadline, Skinn couldn’t be arsed to produce the work himself so the schedule was altered! Oddly enough it was one of the few times he was actually contrite.); I helped introduce some of the most popular and innovative columns – Movers & Shakers, Networks, Hotshots, Hallmarks, Q&A, Toy and trading card news; world comics features, more exposure to the small press and independents, plus a few other things. CI was also selling over 20,000 copies while I was there, it’s true that wasn’t directly my achievement, but if I hadn’t been there coming up with new ideas and making sure that Skinn had an efficient production manager, then CI would never have been read by as many people because it would have come out about 8 times a year (or whenever Skinn could be arsed). It would also have had nothing but dull, boring, middle-aged content.

Whenever Skinn attempted to do anything that involved me having less involvement with the magazine it tended to backfire and he would return to me, with cap in hand, asking me to help bail them out. You’ll love this one (while probably thinking I’m an idiot, but it’s worth repeating): in January 1997, my mother died; it was unexpected and as you might imagine unbelievably distressing. She just happened to be so inconsiderate that she died a week before the deadline. Obviously under considerable strain, I rang Skinn and got a certain amount of sympathy, but when I asked if he could skip my columns for that month, I was told that it was not professional for the magazine, he couldn’t say, ‘sorry readers, but Phil Hall has had a bad month, so he didn’t supply any of his columns this month, normal service will be resumed next month!’ because the readers wouldn’t be interested, they just wanted their monthly fix of CI. So, reluctantly, I finished the columns to the best of my abilities.

The next shocker came a couple of days later, when Skinn expected me to go to the Finchley office for deadline, despite it falling on my mother’s funeral. He was actually pissed off with me because I put my mother’s funeral ahead of his magazine. Three days after the funeral and that issue of the magazine was finished, I received an email from Skinn sacking me. He fired me on the grounds that my work was not up to his expected standard and that even though I had mitigating circumstances; they were not good enough reasons to have supplied him with substandard copy! Out of interest, just what would have been good enough reasons? Probably my own death.

Fucking amazing, eh?

After much negotiation, I managed to get about 50% of my job back [I needed some income and it was hardly the time to be trying to find a new career], but I was relieved from my duties as News Editor – despite having built CI’s news coverage up from the reprinting of press releases into something akin to a real newspaper. Skinn’s reasoning behind this was that while there was nothing wrong with my news, I had to spend more time on my other duties to make sure they were as good! Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make sense. You don’t take a great goalkeeper out from between the sticks because he needs to improve his outfield skills! I wondered who was going to be doing the news from now on and Skinn said he would do it with help from some of the freelance contributors. Whoever did it set it back 5 years.

In actuality, Skinn took the thing I was best at away from me and gave it to the man currently responsible for making Comics International the laughing stock of comics magazines – Mike Conroy. You know, good old Mike Conroy who everyone has the time of day for because he’s a nice cuddly affable bloke – who just happens to be a cold calculating devious ... He was CI’s news editor for an entire year – uncredited – without anyone at the mag telling me. Because he was an old friend of Skinn’s, he was given half my job because his comics shop went out of business, therefore he needed an income – very good of Skinn to take away with one hand and give to someone else with the other, but that’s him all over and that’s why we eventually parted company (for that little bit of symmetry). Conroy quickly realised that he couldn’t possibly do everything I did, Skinn had no inclination to do it which was why he negotiated with me to come back and do all the shitty, time-consuming, jobs. Conroy got the best parts, I was left with the listings and the two columns I’d invented (Movers & Networks). Conroy has never been able to build up the relationships with creators I managed and his writing style has always been flat and uninspiring. He set the news back 5 years; but to his credit, at least he tried to do it the way he felt it needed to be done.

By 1999, my position at CI had changed again; I’d proved, at crucial times, to be impossible to replace and I was given more and more editorial responsibility. My relationship with Skinn changed, I was no longer in fear of my life from him and probably for the first time in our working relationship, we actually became friends – real friends. But what was worse in those times was that I had to sit there, listening to Skinn crucify Conroy constantly because his work was so poor and substandard – in very much the same way he did with me.

The ironic thing is that by 2000, Skinn was seriously considering dumping Conroy because not only did he think his work was far inferior to mine, he also believed the man was trying to undermine him – which he was, he was constantly in contact with the guy from TwoMorrows publishing in the USA, trying to come up with a viable way to launch his own rival to CI. So it was even more ironic that Conroy put the bullets in the gun that I eventually used on the fateful day I parted company with CI. I doubt I would have got off my high horse so readily on that fateful June day had Conroy not sat on the phone with me for over an hour banging on about how out of order Skinn had been with the distribution of freelance work that month. So you can dispense with the idea that I’m going to be kicking a good man while he’s down – Conroy schemed his way to where he is now and I for one am gloating with glee at what a shoddy job he’s doing of a one time great British comics magazine.

By the time I parted company, CI’s sales were as low as 8,000 per issue, but Skinn continued to say the magazine was still selling upwards of 20K. In reality, the sales weren’t even 8,000, because a good percentage were on SOR and 8,000 was the actual print run and we’d have at least 300 copies delivered to the CI office, God knows how many Direct Sale unsolds there were floating around the country, but in reality CI was probably being bought by about 6,000 people.

Within a year of me going the much loved Movers & Shakers had been axed; this was for two reasons, one was that Skinn couldn’t find anyone to write it that had the same tone and style as me. Plus it was very much a Phil Hall product and Skinn wanted every last vestige of me removed from the magazine. Various other Phil Hall created things changed, and eventually all the really interesting parts of the magazine were replaced with mates of Skinn’s who could bore for England. Skinn also needed at least two people to replace me, mainly because where I was prepared to work all the hours under the sun to make sure CI came out on time, changes to employment laws meant new people coming in knew they had more rights and were holding out for them. It’s no wonder that he decided to sell the thing when he did. Apparently, he was faced with mounting staffing costs, piss poor sales and a massive law suit hanging over his head regarding the true ownership of Marvelman – I don’t know for sure what happened. But I should think that when Conroy and his Cosmic Publishing buddies came along, Skinn must have thought all his birthdays had arrived at once.

I can criticise Skinn for many things, but he at least managed to keep CI on some kind of schedule over his last few years of publishing it; once the Cosmic Publishing/ Mike Conroy combo took over it stopped being the organ of the industry and became a huge vanity project. But of course the worst thing about it now is that it has come out only four times in the last 12 months and the new owners must be looking at their investment and thinking that Conroy has not only conned them but is now taking the piss as well! I feel strangely liberated. Or is that vindicated?

So, here I am, telling you how brilliant I am and why it was really all my work that Comics International became as popular as it was. It wasn’t, of course. It worked because, despite the personal relationships, we worked as a good team, we all had targets we set ourselves, and we felt we would let ourselves and others down if we didn’t achieve those targets. Skinn is many things and a motivator of people is pretty close to being top of the list. The magazine was at its best when the people who worked for it had passion, ability and a desire to make it better every month.

I have a copy of CI #203. It is quite heartbreaking to look at. It is also a bit of a joke, especially as it describes itself as, "the de facto bible of the industry. With its short lead times, it can get your ad to the entire comics community of publishers, creators, retailers and fans within two weeks of submission." Um, sorry? Could you run that past me again? FOUR ISSUES IN ONE YEAR is not any of the above’s mission statement. Let’s conveniently forget about the fact that publishers and creators couldn’t give a shit about your adverts, or that it’s never ever been the ‘de facto bible of the industry’, or that the lead time is a lie and very misleading. It should say that "Comics International comes out when the new editor can be arsed!"

Now, I’ve heard that Conroy has struggled with contributors being on time and he hasn’t got the right software or hardware to cope with the influx of stuff he gets. I’ve also heard that he was trying to entice Martin Shipp to join him, because he believed that it was Martin that was responsible for Borderline coming out regularly and looking good. No disrespect to one of my best pals, but Martin was a copy editor who took on the publishing role when we needed him. There was only one person responsible for Borderline, its schedule, look and feel. That was me. I managed to produce 12 issues a year of a magazine that had more varied, interesting content and had better people working on it; plus it was free and I did it for love. But most importantly, all of my contributors did it for the same reason and I managed, absolutely brilliantly, to get each and every one of them to contribute on time, in a format that I could read on my PC. Design and layouts were never Conroy’s strong point, by the sounds of things he hasn’t got someone on board who can do that kind of thing with the ease of a Dez Skinn or Phil Hall, so he’s struggling.

I think it’s clear that while Conroy has coveted CI since he usurped me as News Editor, he hasn’t really got any publishing or editorial acumen. Well, its obvious he hasn’t, not only is the magazine almost an afterthought now, it reads like it hasn’t been anywhere near an editor who can edit. There are people out there who have as soft a spot for the old magazine as I did and that’s why I think they’ve been flattering me with their wishes.

It isn’t as simple as me just taking over the magazine. It doesn’t work like that in real life, I have had no direct contact with anyone from Cosmic Publishing, and I doubt I will. All we can do here is hypothesise about what I would do if I was given carte blanche with it…

The first thing a relaunched Comics International needs would be a guarantee of stability, because that has all but disappeared. I’d send letters to every retailer in the country, informing them of the changes and encouraging them to get behind the new magazine because it would be something very different from the current beast. I would emphasise my intentions to work with the retailers to help generate sales for them, regardless of whether they advertise with me or not.

Out would go variant covers – I mean, what century are the incumbents in?

I’d be looking at having a set number of pages per month, probably 80, but that would be dependent on the advertising revenue and I’d be looking at reducing the cover price, even if it meant having to reduce the overall quality of the magazine. If comics are essentially an ephemeral thing, then comics magazines are even more disposable and shouldn’t have aspirations of being anything other than a resource. Pretty but throwaway!

Out would go long-winded news articles about stuff that can be Googled and found in a dozen free websites – it should be obvious that the term ‘exclusive’ is even more time considerate than ever before; exclusives are now measured in minutes before the viral nature of the Internet circulates the news faster than a good press department could imagine [which, of course, is one of the reasons why comics companies don’t advertise and get you to do most of their PR]. It also must be acknowledged that most people have Internet access now and the necessity for the current kind of news coverage is obsolete. There is not a lot of point in reproducing information that the public domain has already been saturated with. In fact, there’s more chance that new readers are attracted to comics because of the Internet.

The news would have to be approached from a different angle; there would be more emphasis on intensive features or specific projects. I’d be looking for stories about projects that have potential and are being overlooked by the major comics sites; I’d be talking to creators about their projects, but asking them questions that aren’t being duplicated in 20 other places. I’d run biographies of the characters and the creators behind them – some fans actually like to know a little bit about the people who are entertaining them. I’d throw away the rigid design for the news, introducing fluidity and motion; I’d afford the readers with the intelligence I actually know you’ve got (you might all be sad fuckers, but you can read write and have meaningful conversations, even if it is just about the size of Sue Storm’s tits). The important thing would be to have a news section that acted both as a catch all for stuff that isn’t widely available and as a complimentary resource. It’s nice looking at pretty pictures on the ‘net, but it’s also nice to see them sitting on paper in your hands – it suddenly becomes more tangible.

I’d get rid of all the non-paying listings (apart from the events diary); with Diamond Previews outselling Comics International there is absolutely no point in having an advance comics listings section; nor is there any need for most of the Directory, the only things that should remain there are the paying adverts; all other information should be put on the website, which should act as the archive for the resource. I’d also get rid of Networks for all the same reasons why I’d revamp the news; unless Networks is going to scour the deepest darkest depths of the Internet, there’s no point in reprinting stuff from popular sites because most of your readers will already have read it or heard about it. Networks needs to be a webpage of useful links and would need to be regularly updated by someone dedicated to doing the donkey work. Again, continuity is the key aspect of making CI work again and if you’ve got a website, you have to make sure the site is maintained, updated and handled with professionalism, not just kicking around as a half-arsed, half-baked, idea.

So, I’m happily chucking things out of the magazine, I’m still intending to have a lot of pages and I’d like an advertising to copy ratio of about 60/40, with copy outweighing adverts; what’s going to come in?

First up, I’d resurrect a few of the Borderline ideas; I’d introduce a couple of pages dedicated to showcasing new artistic talent; the people on the cusp of breaking into comics who will be given the exposure they deserve. I’d have more BIG interviews, not your Jonathon Ross styled ‘what product are you plugging to be here’ chats, but picking icons at random, sitting down with them and giving them the definitive interview – even if we have to split it up over two or three issues – I don’t want to be TCJ.  I’d commission features; I’d have retrospectives; I’d make sure that my retailers got a fair crack at shifting dead stock by trying to introduce new comics readers to classics from the past and not just any old tat, there have been some great forgotten classics over the years that warrant some kind of exposure – everyone has their own favourite failed comic.

There needs to be humour, I’d be trying desperately to locate a guy called Chris Spicer, because I think he’s one of the funniest guys to ever write spoof comics articles; he was the fella that wrote the World of Heros column in Borderline. I’d get him to unleash his unique brand of humour on the unsuspecting public. I’d be knocking on Matthew Lawrenson’s door asking him to write a monthly column for me and I’d give him carte blanche to write about whatever he wanted to as long as he could tie comics into it somehow. I’d patch up an old friendship, approach Mike Kidson and ask him to don his multiple comic hats; to educate people about the history of comics, while overseeing a world comics section of the magazine that would make it truly International. I’m not talking huge page amounts, so don’t panic if the thought of finding out what’s happening in the comics scene in Micronesia induces a catatonic state; it would be there for those that want it and as comics fans are such a diverse group of people I’d rather try to cater for some of all of you than all of just one faction.

I’d get Martin Shipp, as well as writing a column, he’s got a lot of publishing experience and he deserves it more than most. I’d be looking at having two or three people running the news section – they’d be given specific briefs and I’d be in constant contact with them to find out how they’re progressing. I’d also approach a number of creators, both established and maybe up-and-coming, ask them to write monthly articles – not a regular column, because they sometimes tend to wander self-indulgently, but guest editorial style columns from creators given 1000 words to talk about a burning issue.

There’s one other important recruit I’d seek out. Someone who I believe entertains enough to make it a pre-requisite that he be included. I’d approach Dez Skinn and ask him to write his Sez Dez column. No strings. No hidden agendas.

I’d also make it a British magazine. I wouldn’t be concerned about sales in the USA. My experience in this industry has told me that if you attempt to force something on US comics readers they tend to reject it hard. CI seems to have attempted to infiltrate the USA a number of times by trying to get the Yanks to think there’s going to be something in the magazine that isn’t available in the US, when they know that simply isn’t the case. So, what I’d do is simple, I’d make it available to the US if they wanted it, otherwise I’d forget about wasting my money. I’d concentrate on building sales in the UK and establishing the magazine as a necessary monthly purchase again. Let word of mouth and the Internet spread the news that Comics International is a different beast, that’s when I’d expect to see foreign sales start spiking.

A lot would depend on you. I’d be listening to you, running polls on the website, gauging your opinions on what you’d like to see in the magazine – I might not take any notice, but I’d be looking at trends and taking notice of comments. I’d also have to persuade many of you that someone with absolutely no love of the medium any more could successfully run a cornerstone of comics history. All of this adds up to a lot of work, possibly a lot of outlay and with no guarantee of success. But something should be done with that great old magazine. However, what are the options for Cosmic? Do they just write off their investment? Or do they give it to the right people?

Comics International might just be coming to the end of its natural life; there might not be a market for it any more, or at least one that’s big enough to make it a worthwhile investment. The problem is, with every passing month the magazine loses just a bit more of everything that made it good and its chances of salvation become increasing limited. Conroy has done himself no favours at all by remaining silent while faced with mounting dissent from his customers. It’s like it’s just going to drift apart, be forgotten about, and it deserves better than that.

And so concludes the sales pitch.

Phil Hall… Can I just plug my forthcoming other Comics Village column. It’s called The Unearthing Diaries and I think it might possibly be one of the most unique comics columns you will ever read.

Phil Hall