25 Years On part 1 (Patreon)

Prior to publishing the first Bobbins comic online, I hadn't published anything. I'd barely shown the comics I'd made to anybody. When I did, they didn't really have any frame of reference for what I was trying to do, and generally people just couldn't understand what I was making them for. I remember after a productive few weeks in 1997, tacking a load of pre-Bobbins comics on my shared university house wall to review, and one of my housemates looking at them like it was a serial killer wall and I'd flipped my wig.

Emailing Peter Zale and Jon Rosenberg took a bit of courage. I can't imagine emailing a cartoonist I admired just to show them my work now. They were kind and generous about it, and their links to my work were the first building blocks of my readership.

But my rejection letter from King Features remains one of my most treasured possessions. For all that the submission packet I sent was about as good as the first 25 newspaper strips anyone ever drew could be (ie, not very good at all), it was full of positive comments from the then editor, Jay Kennedy, who was younger then than I am now (he died at 50, in 2007).

To receive such encouragement - which seemed barely merited at the time, the work was so crude - was so wild a contrast from the reaction I got from the few people I'd shown my comics to that I felt that I had to continue to develop my strip. At 22, I wasn't totally daft - I knew it more of a "don't give up" than "you're comics' new genius", but I was just daft enough to want to pump my evenings and weekends into what was now a second job as a result.

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If you want a part 2, I'll have a go.