Q&A 43: Hip young gunslingers (Patreon)

Pete Ashton asks:"In the masterclass video you shared [...} you talked about starting Bad Machinery because you didn't want to keep doing comics about 20-somethings so switched to doing kids. It occurred to me that those kids are 20-somethings. Is this inevitable? I was also thinking about how you manage writing young people as you get older without being all "hello fellow kids". I'm in my 50s now and sometimes wonder if I would be reading about these exploits if I hadn't been following your work for two decades. Is it that it just takes a long time to get as good as you are so of course you're going to be writing about younger generations?"

Oscar Leong wants to know:"How are you so "tapped in" to cultural phenomenons from over the decades? As a Gen Z, you capture a lot of specific modern as well as Gen Z aspects in such a funny and real way."

These two questions both address something that is increasingly on my mind as I bear down on my half-century. I am not getting any younger, but the characters I write about are not getting a lot older. Or, at least, they aren't aging at the speed I am.

It's true that I didn't want to keep writing about twenty-somethings, which lead to the switch I made with Bad Machinery. But there was another, more cynical, reason that I made that change - I thought I might have a stab at the middle grade graphic novel market, which was growing fast at the time. But once I started work on Bad Machinery, and had enough work that I could begin to approach the sort of publishers who I thought might publish it, I couldn't get them interested. While I was delighted that Oni Press took it on, my hope had initially been to find a UK publisher who would support it, with whom I could work closely within my native industry, instead of having to straddle a cultural divide.

When I began to see the books racked next to Batman in most comic shops, I realised that this middle grade project wasn't going to happen the way I imagined it, and I got back in my lane pretty quickly.

I believe I wrote at length about the disappointments and vanities of middle aged men, men of my age group, in Steeple. I think I could have written a lot more had it continued. I'd like an avenue to do more of that.

As long as you are observant, it is possible to write about younger generations. It's not like I can't find out what Gen Z are up to. They're everywhere, with their mullet haircuts, terrible tattoos and baggy trousers. No one is more out there than the young! Their activities are constantly recorded, often by themselves, for posterity. The energy that comes off young people is enormous, their activities can be joyous to depict. And in the end, I'm not writing a textbook, comics are sparsely written. I only have to get a few things right to "pass".

If I've tired of anything, recently, it's portraying the modern world. I've done such a lot of it. My enthusiasm for the here and now is at an all time low, with good reason I think. We do not stand on a new frontier. It was a relief in 2025 to work on Savage Sword of Susan and NEMS.

But if I decided to draw cavemen or spacemen from now on, I would still want to spend time with young characters and the possibilities that always lay ahead of them. For the young the road ahead is longer than the road behind, and that's a great place to be in my head. Especially as the road ahead is far shorter when I step away from the drawing board.