On Friday, April 29, 2016, Broken Frontier launched the Broken Frontier Small Press Yearbook 2016 at Gosh! Comics in London. The book follows Broken Frontier Editor in Chief Andy Oliver’s Six UK Small Press Creators to Watch in 2015: Rozi Hathaway, Jess Milton, Danny Noble, Emma Raby, Alice Urbino, and Adam Vian. It is now available for purchase in North America and Europe.
The yearbook culminates a year’s worth of coverage on these six creators in Oliver’s “Small Pressganged” feature. It expresses the column’s mission of finding the best in small press and bringing self-published work to larger audiences.
All six creators contributed an 8-10 page story on breaking frontiers. The book also has stories by established names in UK indie comics, including Gareth Brookes (The Black Project), Gill Hatcher (The Beginner’s Guide to Being Outside), Jessica Martin (Elsie Harris Picture Palace), Mike Medaglia (One Year Wiser), EdieOP (Maleficium), Owen D. Pomery (Between the Billboards), Alex Potts (A Quiet Disaster), Paul B. Rainey (There’s No Time Like the Present), and Donya Todd (Buttertubs), as well as guest contributions from Rebecca Bagley and Kim Clements.
“The prime philosophy of the Small Press Yearbook is to provide a promotional showcase for last year’s participants in our ‘Six to Watch’ initiative. To that end we’re sending out a significant proportion of the print run for free to selected publishers, micropublishers, and comics commentators as we seek to raise the profile of 2015’s half dozen stars-in-the-making across the medium,” Oliver said.
“Rozi, Jess, Danny, Emma, Alice and Adam have very diverse stylistic approaches to the page but what they all share is an innate understanding of the storytelling possibilities of the form and an eloquent fluency in the pure language of comics,” Oliver added.
“Broken Frontier have demonstrated an ambition to elevate not only the form of comics, but the different people who are exploring it,” Simon Moreton (SMOO Comics, Plans We Made, Minor Leagues) said in his foreword for the book.
The Broken Frontier Small Press Yearbook is just £6 for 100 pages (83 of story) in color and black and white, in order to make its contents as accessible to as wide a readership as possible.