John Allison

Jack Christmas wants to know: "I've noticed that for a fair number of your older comics - particularly Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery - you sometimes revised the art when re-releasing or collecting them. What motivated you to update certain comics after the fact - was it due to how people reacted

I did a masterclass for Merseyside-based Comics Youth in November and you can watch it now. We had some A/V issues so my video feed alas had to become a still, and I might sound like I'm talking down an analogue phone line but I consider this "authentic" to my '80s upbringing. During the 90 minute t

Going through boxes of sketchbooks yesterday, I found some of the original artwork I did for a comic called "Ghosts" that I made in 2007. It was a Scary Go Round mini with an odd modus operandi; a simple script, 3 or 4 panels on each page. I've been feeling lately that the time and effort that I put

Kate Beaton would like to know: "I remember a conversation with a mutual friend about writing for online page updates vs a published book. If you are making updates page by page online, each one has to end in a satisfying way, maybe its own joke, while also servicing the larger plot. People come for

If you're reading Kill Or Be Quilt, it may be fun for you to compare the finished issue to my rough breakdown for issue 2 (drawn as I scripted) that I sent to Max. Note that Max did the character designs after I sent the roughs so very few of them are exactly as they appear in the finished issue. Wh

What I'm working on right now. What I'm listening to right now.

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS A SPOILER FOR THE WHOLE FIRST ISSUE OF GREAT BRITISH BUMP OFF: KILL OR BE QUILT. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ A (VERY) ROUGH BUT COMPLETE VERSION OF ISSUE 1, DON'T OPEN THE PDF LINKED AT THE BOTTOM. As with the first series, for each issue of Kill Or Be Quilt, I sent Max Sar

Great British Bump Off: Kill Or Be Quilt is imminent, so here are some sketches from the very early stages of working on it in 2022. Like many things in the "story pool", Kill Or Be Quilt could have been used in another series before it reached its final destination as a Shauna story. Here we see a

I unpacked a box of sketchbooks yesterday and found my 2017 book, which covers a year when I was working very hard writing multiple series. It contains a lot of early versions of things that were eventually made, or weren't made, in a distinctly primitive form. So here are a few highlights. First up

sjlxndr asks: "A question, John: when you are writing, are you also drawing? I mean do you write out a screenplay, so to speak, then flesh o sjlxndr asks: "A question, John: when you are writing, are you also drawing? I mean do you write out a screenplay, so to speak, then flesh out the storyboards?

When I sold an old iPad I found a folder of stuff it had saved to its internal storage in Clip Studio (before it could save to iCloud, thereby spoiing me ROTTEN). Most of it was rubbish but there were one or two interesting things that hopefully I have not posted before. Here are the notes for the B

I made a nice time-lapse video of my drawing a page last month, a page that I don't think you'll ever get to see in context now. Part 3 of Conan featured Little Claire, or "Clara", as Chief Shailey's chief handmaiden. What is going on with Glenn here... you will just have to guess.

The last two weeks have involved a lot of thinking and writing so that I would have something to draw. The cupboard was nearly bare, but i believe it was Dr. Ron Plato himself who said that "necessity is the mother of invention". Turning the crumbs from the toaster tray into a nutritious(ish) meal w

This week I am writing Steeple 18, so here's the cover. I'm trying some different things with these covers because I think that is legitimate. It's not like they will ever appear on any shelf. This one features all the chillwave notions that you love. I hope you enjoy my nutty sky gradients and surf

I've been trying to do a new cover for Giant Days x Batman that doesn't have Batman on it like the original does (this seems wise). I really liked the original, which makes the job a lot harder. I've produced several bad covers, here are two that were okay but I didn't feel really spoke to my "aesth

The new Photoshop beta has the Adobe Firefly AI features built in so I have been playing with them. While obviously I fear AI taking my job (and everyone else's) I do think it has a significant role as a visual aide when built into software when you, like me, are not the absolute king of visual imag

One of the hardest things about drawing a story set in a consistent visual setting, eg indoors, is maintaining consistency. Most of my comics are mostly set indoors and as I've written here before, I've slowly built 3D models of a lot of those settings to save myself having to lay them out over and

Reverend In Love had been in my back pocket since summer 2021 as an idea, and at some point I'd broken it down into a list of pages with a view to drawing it as part of a Steeple volume 4. Then, in December, Max Sarin reminded me that I had said I'd write them something to draw. So I spent a week of

Here's a video of my colouring process for today's nutty page. Some people have remarked that it looks a bit like the old Scary Go Round pages. I thought about making it in Adobe Illustrator as I would have done back then, but the panel wasn't big enough to demand that kind of precision. I'm just dr

To shake off a bit of rust, I redrew a page of a manga book that I had on my desk, Mob Psycho 100 volume 4. This isn't a series known for its super slick art so it's an opportunity to not totally "dispirit" oneself doing a rework (just a little Mob Psycho joke 4 u). I've posted the original page und

Forgive me if I've posted this sequence before - I don't think I have. When I was making Bobbins.horse in its final run from 2018-2020, I got tighter and tighter with the layouts, they became very complex for a little cartoon strip. Towards the end they became brutal. I think, subconsciously, I was

I've been making Procreate templates for fixed-format strips, so I improvised a comic to try one out. I remembered after I made it that Procreate records your drawing by default, so here's the video. The finished comic is below. It is, sadly, near-gibberish. 20220226 Test Strip 2vidfull (YouTube)

Here are my hourly comics from last year. No hourly comics this year, I was marooned in Darlington last night on a broken southbound LNER train and spent the night in a Leeds Premier Inn. Now home, I'm too tired and travelled-out for the odyssey of the hourly. Within moments of arrival at the P. Inn

I just put the best colour version of this that I have up on Instagram, I don't have the hi-res colour artwork on file as it was finished by Sarah Stern (who coloured By Night and issues 1-5 of Steeple), but here's the B&W work with all the bits that were covered by trade dress. If memory serves, I

GOOD NEWS ITEM I'm just putting the finishing touches to a special story that will run on badmachinery.com in February and March. I think it will go down well but I'm never too sure. I could be a smoking ruin after it concludes. But $3/mo and up (Beanie tier) Patreon subscribers will get the whole t

For the last couple of weeks I've been writing and roughing out material that will follow the current Steeple story onto the web. It's a one-off thing, 32 pages, that will run on badmachinery.com on February. Having not drawn "in anger" since mid-October, I've been excited to get back to making comi

Brian Durcan writes: "I saw one of your live streams (during the recent amorphous blob of time in which it's hard to know when specific things happened) and you said something that stuck with me. "Your pencils have to tell the truth." I'm wondering, do you have any other aphorisms like this one that

I'm still trying out new inking styles, with a slightly more chaotic feel. Trying to avoid rigidly straight lines to create movement where the line width itself is stiff and fixed. Here's a test comic strip I made last week. I drew it first then made up some speech bubbles to go on top. The Marvel M

Jen Decay writes: "On your own terms and without concerns for the audience talking in your face, how significant to you personally is the continuity of your sprawling canon, and how do you keep track of it all?" I work very hard on my stories, and when my answers to questions about continuity are fl

The Destroy History Rave On project I was making here has been set aside. I worked out a way to do the story that was worth doing properly. But there was one last, experimental page. I am finding my way towards a new art style that I may or may not use for a proper project. I've taken the speech bal

Ken Kleinman writes: Do you ever get writer's block? How do you decide which of the 12 items on your whiteboard to work on next? Ken's asked a two-parter here, but as neither part was in the form of a statement as opposed to a question, I'm happy to tackle them as a piece. "Do you ever get writer's

I've got one page of Steeple volume 3 left to draw, the 154th page. The book, due next summer, encompasses Christmas With Clovis, the Author Unknown crossover, and the four parts of Clotted Crime. Between the start of February (when that 154th page runs on the website) and volume 3 coming out in boo

Aram writes: "I see artists remake their work quite frequently. I remember seeing some redrawn panels by you (maybe for the printed version of [Giant Days]?) Have you considered recreating some of the vector looking comics from the mid noughts? Why/why not?" I wanted to write a little bit about the

Here's a test comic (well, half of one) that I made in Procreate today. I love the pencil tools in this app. No other program has a pencil that feels so free to draw with. But colouring a page in Procreate is a nightmare, and it's not a lot easier if you take your line work into Clip Studio (which I

N. Forsythe writes: "When you write a new storyline, does it usually begin in terms of a plot idea or with brainstorming snippets of dialogue/banter or a given situation or scene? I ask because your work does feel so dialogue and comedy driven, but your plots and emotional arcs always seems well tho

Part of the reason I set up the Patreon was to be able to answer question for artists and writers and pass on a few things I have learned over 23 years of near-daily comic making. If you have a creative question, add it to the comments on this post and I'll round up a few over the next few weeks. Yo

Working with a different inking technique. You've seen a few tests here over the last year but I'm starting to feel like I'm getting somewhere. I'm trying to reduce emphasis on line weight to focus on my shapes more. I've enjoyed refining my inking on Steeple (a process that started with the Boom!Bo

A cover rough where I tried out some techniques in Procreate on the iPad. I'd like to do a whole comic that looks like this. Maybe in colour, maybe not.

Here's a second pencil practice page just for patrons. This one's a Murder She Writes page. I feel like I got somewhere with this one. But again, I doubt I could do it twice in a row.

In July, I made attempts to harness my other drawing style for comic pages again. All I really want to do is a short story this way. But I still can't squeeze out more than a single page before the wheels come off. Above is an experimental page. Between the first and the second page, an argument beg

More pen and paper practice. I broke a page of my practice script (Giant Days 38) in half and added some new dialogue to make a strip, because doing full size pages was proving a bit much. I think I inked this one a little bit better, following some reading around technique. When I finished, I liked

A couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of a break between stories to spend a week trying out different drawing techniques. Using traditional materials, I drew a couple of pages like I used to back in the day, but I soon remembered why I stopped doing that. No matter how much I love drawing in my sk

Here's a comic that I broke down a plot for in 2016, then set aside forever. I found the notes for it today. It's a 22-page rip on Father John Misty (ahem, "Papa Joe Foggy"). You will agree that it is better left in the vault. As a period piece tied to the old ways, its time has passed. As a cover a

When Bad Machinery was finished, Giant Days was entering its final year, By Night was coming out and before I started work on Steeple, I should have taken a rest, but my mind was a factory making nothing, a machine that would not turn off after 20 years. I have a whole folder marked simply '2018' fu

The second part of Author Unknown should emerge with a cover by an Undisclosed Star Name (it's Milo Manara (it isn't)) but I did a quick dummy cover for the PDF I sent out to my friends once I finished drawing the pages. It came out a lot better than I intended it to. My brief for this cover was "dr

I'm streaming a redraw of a classique Scary Go Round comic this afternoon, plus some reminiscences, come watch and chat! POST-STREAM UPDATE On this redraw stream I tried to take different decisions to those I made drawing the original comic. Here's what I ended up with, plus the original (from Dec 2

I'm trying to improve my traditional inking and to use my lightbox. It's proving hard but there are signs of improvement coming with practice. The most important thing I have to remember is not to trace my pencils, but to draw anew, with purpose, the way I do on the computer. Here's a rare example o

Here are my designs for John Cloake from Circus Windows. I knew what I wanted him to look like, he was based on the circus correspondent from the World's Fair newspaper group, where I worked in 1998/99. That John was pretty old (though I was 22 at the time and these things are relative, I think he w

I did a video interview last week to assist my French publisher Akileos' Giant Days hardcover edition crowdfunder. I go into a few things much more deeply than I have elsewhere - you may find it interesting! If you can read French, and want more Giant Days hardcovers, take a look. Interview John All

I redrew the last three pages of Secret Sentai for Steeple Volume 2 (due in July from Dark Horse). The clock is always ticking for someone to tell me they liked the original version better when I do this, but these three were all drawn when I was having some bad eye and hand problems. I was a brave