Joshua Wood, Managing editor for Metal-rules.com has written a very extensive piece on the history of Canadian heavy metal publications and BraveWords is featured. Ironically, today marks the 26th anniversary of Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles the company. We initially started out as a magazine in 1994. Here is some back story in President/CEO “Metal” Tim Henderson’s words:

“After a stint with M.E.A.T. magazine, the “Metal” Tim Bits fanzine was launched in 1993 as a stapled freebie I typed, photocopied, and handed out to customers at HMV’s flagship superstore in downtown Toronto. Upon uniting with Martin Popoff in early 1994, it soon became Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles (named after the infamous Agony Column album which has been metallically blessed by the band!) and the first published issue appeared in March. 

A scant few (200) copies were produced of issue #1 and Canada’s longest running metal magazine was born! BW&BK (as it would soon be known) became the chain’s biggest selling magazine, eclipsing both Rolling Stone and Spin combined, and was distributed in over 100 stores. Soon the magazine would be available in over 40 countries around the world, with a production run of nearly 50,000. In 2000 we launched BraveWords.com (now simply BraveWords), covering the hard rock/metal world with the most up-to-date news, features, reviews and of course our famous playground the BraveBoard. In 2008, BW&BK in print was sadly put to rest, our final magazine being the much sought-after issue #113 with Metallica on the cover. By that point we’d transitioned from the magazine funding the website, to the website funding the magazine! And here we stand 26 years later, with our dedicated team of scribes continuing to build one of the greatest metal websites on the planet with our brave words!”