So one day you’re a 16-year-old kid. You’re standing in WHSmiths in Reading, Berkshire, and you’ve just paused between shoplifting gel-pens to read your first comic. You’re buzzed-up, you’re twitchy, there’s a weird pinprick of fire in your eyes, because for the first time in your life you suspect this might not only might be A Thing You Could Do, but a Thing You Could Enjoy. In fact, because you’re young and dreadfully arrogant, and frankly still quite lazy, you suspect this might be A Thing you could do Really Really Well, quite possibly Without Even Trying Very Hard.

And then a little later someone shows you how good this “comics” malarkey can really be. That is, when it’s handled by someone genuinely and naturally brilliant. Someone resolutely not arrogant. Someone who really doesn’t need to try very hard - but does anyway. Someone who shows you that comics needn’t be the easy option, or the lazy-man’s chosen storytech. Someone who shows you that just because a lot of comics don't try, don't push, don't demand, don’t gnash their teeth and insist upon showing what they can really do - just because that’s the safe boring frustrating insipid fucking middlezone - doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim higher.

Those “mind-blown” moments… those “this-will-be-harder-but-better-than-I-thought” lessons… it was always his name on the front. Always his thicket-headed photo glowering from the back. 

Today there’s a book with my name next to his. By no means equal in stature nor importance nor respect - never will be, and it’s an indication of how powerfully he’s influenced my life that I’m bizarrely pleased about that - but next to it all the same.

A very, very lovely thing to wake up to.

(Full details on the project are HERE, by the way.)