Q&A 29: Where I go back in time

Loricah wants to know:
"If you could go back in time to say something about comics to an earlier comics-making version of you, what would you say? And would younger you have been able to receive it?"

This is a good question, because it is one I have often asked myself. I first tried to make comics for real, rather than as a continuation of childish play, when I was 19, in the first year of university. It was the night of Pyjama Jump, a Sheffield student event characterised by a bacchanal of heavy drinking and the promise of, how to put this, "trapping off". It seemed so at odds with who I was at the time, but at the same time I felt not to participate was to miss out. I think I went out early in the evening, was not into it, but went back to my room and felt that a vital energy was not being spent. And I started to draw comic pages at my desk, pages that would be recognisable to you as my work, until about 5am. No one else has ever seen them, and I don't want to go and dig them out now, but it was the first proper manifestation of what became what you read now.

But I didn't continue with it. Instead I tried to integrate myself into what I thought student life was, and wasted many valuable days hung over and unhappy. I ignored my creativity vs how other people seemed to be living their lives, largely because I had surrounded myself with friends who weren't creative at all. I hardly knew of anyone who made art at university. I struggle to think of one person. Bear in mind that one year I worked with Nadia Shireen (now one of the UK's foremost children's authors and illustrators) on the university's online magazine and I didn't find out that Nadia drew until 10+ years later.

On the surface, a lot of my creative dissatisfactions stem from my young adult years, when I had time to burn and no responsibilities, and I wasted years when drawing and writing should have been a comfort and a pleasure, on a lifestyle that did not suit me physically or psychologically.

With regards to my art, I was lazy, unimaginative, and timid. I never went to comic conventions in the era of Deadline and Tank Girl, I never made connections, it was a world that may as well not have existed to me. There was no "career" there that I could see. But I did spend the best part of two years voluntarily interviewing bands, subbing other writers and writing dozens of reviews, so I wasn't doing nothing. I learnt how to make websites before almost anyone else, working for Sheffield Electronic Press. I was busy! But not in comics. I also taught myself to play guitar badly. I do not remember how to do this (even badly) any more.

What I did learn was how to network, how to manage contacts, how to roll up and talk to people I didn't know, what happens if you upset a corporate entity, and many other lessons. There was no room to be lazy, unimaginative and timid. I had to have a go, in my young adult years, when I had time to burn and no responsibilities!

Would I have been a better artist if I'd spent time in those university years drawing? I don't know. I don't think that cornering my young self and telling him to sit down at the easel and knuckle down would have been the right thing to do. When the moment came, a couple of years later, I did that anyway.

And if I went back in time to 1996 and possessed the young John Allison, with all the skills I have now as an artist and writer, and the (failing) memory of every story I ever wrote, would i want to try to write them all again, but slightly earlier? That sounds like a living nightmare.

Every mistake is a building block, a more resilient building block than any created by success. All success tends to do is make me think I should try to do the same thing again, which tends to be impossible because the moment has passed. I often wish I'd honed my skills as an artist on natural media rather than switching to digital, but I know deep down that I had gone as far as I could with that way of working.

So even the big mistakes I made - like agreeing to create By Night when I had no energy left to write it, or making the Conan comics without considering the trademark implications, came with upsides that only became evident later. I'd love to go back and talk to my younger self, but it would be for my satisfaction, not his. So I will let him labour on in blissful ignorance.