My Earliest (Finished) Work - The Space Invasion

As a kid, I’d spend hours creating characters and writing and drawing comics about them. Recently I found a huge box, carefully archived by my mother Jo, with dividers containing loads of these childhood artefacts sorted year by year, so I know how old I was when I drew each one of these masterpieces. One of them contained The Space Invasion, which unlike most of those early efforts, is finished - a 24-page comic with a beginning, a middle (of sorts) and an end. Again, sort of. Well, I was only eight years old so my skills at crafting a satisfying ending were as-yet-unrefined.

This is how I learned to write, learned to draw, and became visually literate - by making comics, throughout my childhood. In fact, I never stopped making them - they were my pathway to eventual careers in several creative industries, one of which, funnily enough, includes making comics and graphic novels. In person, I’m fond of making the point that childhood inspirations go a long way, which is why we need them and why we need to fire up and inspire our children’s imaginations.

If you’d like to read the full, unexpurgated version of The Space Invasion, you can download a PDF here. It features a special guest star (with apologies to Terry Nation and the BBC). Hey, like I say, I was only eight.

if you’d like to see more of my childhood comics, follow my Instagram account.