It’s burned my retinas off, and given me horrific third degree burns.

I was a child of the 70s/80s, my golden years I grew up with computers that used punch card (for those people that had computers) and televisions that were deeper than they were wide (when the bbc still would announce a programme was “IN COLOUR” in case your tv wasn’t)

I grew up optimisitic about the future, about self driving cars (that hovered), computers that could fit in your hand and robots with ai that promised to relieve humanity of all the aches and pains of work and its associated worries.

Which is stupid really because I also grew up reading 2000ad and it very much spelt out what that world would actually look like. Hovering drones used to surviel your every move. Dredd? Robots with smart AI likely to destabilise employment leading to a world where people can’t work even if they want to? Dredd? A class of people so bored by work free life that they attend ultra violent sports to numb their day? I mean, come on.

The thing is, maybe it’s my age, but it feels like I’ve run out of optimisim for science. There was a while there, when I’d read about the potential of CRISPR-9 (described as a copy and paste for DNA edits) you could hold some optimism, and then my god, the miracle of being able to decode the dna of the COVID-19 virus and swiftly build a Vacine in record time. Self driving cars looked they were on the cusp of happening, AI! Flip CHAT GPT!

All of these incredible technologies appeared and suddenly you’re faced with the crushing reality, CRISPER-9 still has some hope, I think, if we don’t turn entirely into a planet of the anti-intellectual anti-vaxxers. Self driving cars, turns out that last little 5% or so of getting these things to work properly? that’s the real hard stuff. That’s the getting the last bit of sauce out of the ketchup bottle that’s still stuck to the sides of the bottle, there’s no easy way to do that. Chat GPT? AI? Turns out that’s basically a chinese room that doesn’t really know what’s saying and will just make stuff up.

(A Chinese room, is an old metapor about intelligence, which suggests that intelligence might be like putting a person who doesn’t speak chinese into a vast room filled with boxes with chinese characters on them, and a slot that he receives input from – the input are chinese characters and he goes and builds a response by matching his input with the boxes around the room. Needless to say, the man doesn’t speak nor read chinese, but the responses he delivers to the inputs make sense, because he knows how to build answers based on the input – and that’s what’s sort of happening with chat gpt, a little computer man who doesn’t speak any language is getting input in english and going to his massive database of boxes and matching a response to what he’s been asked, he doesn’t know or understand the question, but he does know that if he gets the words “What planet is this” he looks it up in his big ol’ database and gets answers from box 1, box 255, box 1090 and together they read “it’s planet earth”.

On reflection this is a terrible metaphore but I suppose we needed it before everyone had autocorrect, which, in essence is also a chinese room and as such prone to being useless)

Anyway, turns out Chat GPT will lie, and WORSE it turns out, people respect a certain authoriatative voice which means it lies convincingly.

I still cling to a certain tech optimism, I have my Iain M Banks books, thank you very much.

But it was all so much easier to believe the future would be perfect before we started living in it.

One thing I’ve been mulling over recently is about how to get better, but specifically it’s how to get better at comics and get better at being yourself, I suppose, and one of the problems I have with it, is… well, how do you measure where you are compared to where you want to be?

One of the earliest ways I tried to get better as a comic artist was a fairly simple metric, comics require an artist to produce 22 pages per month so the question was… could I draw 22 pages per month? I got a script off my pal Mal Coney (this was around 1997?) and set about trying to draw one comic in one month, I was working (and I may have been at university too at the time) but i certainly had no other larger commitments (no kids!) so I sat and tried and … I did it. 22 pages (actually think it was 25) and that proved to me, that whether I had the quality of art to do comics at least I knew I could draw enough pages in a month to do it.

One of the second metrics I used to use was about storytelling. Very hard to tell where you are with storytelling – because you’re sort of part of it, but one thing you can do, is you can ask someone you know and trust who doesn’t read comics, to look at a page of art and describe what’s happening on the page – let them walk you through what they think is there, try not to nudge them – let them tell you. You’re not after a subjective opinion (“this is good/this is bad”) you’re after objective stuff (“That guy is talking to this other guy and it’s night. No, it’s day time. Wait, is it night or day?”) that will really help you improve.

Now, it may be a coincidence, but years later I think I have two strengths, one is speed (at my best I can hit 50 pages per month) and the other is clarity in story telling (I think my storytelling chops can be rock solid).

So the question now is what other metrics can I measure, what subjective elements can you tease out of comic art (not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious if you have any answers) and if you can tease them out can you work on improving them?

The truth is I have no idea, numbers of lines on a page? The Mike Mignola-Jim Lee scale. Is your perspective convincing? (does it matter?) white space/black space balance? (that’s a metric you could measure, but literally does it mean anything?) Is the art delicate / beautfiful or blocky / brutal (and what use is that metric if one thing doesn’t neccessarily make it better than the other)

There’s long been the old two-of-three things (applied in comics, but in pretty much every industry you’ll ever read about) You have to be fast, good or easy to get along with – as long as you’re two of those things!

I can control fast (well, I can measure fast).

I can control how well I am to get along with (which really in this means, are you a nightmare or a pleasure for an editor / writer)

Can I control if I’m good? I dunno.

There’s a part of me wants to make a radar chart of a bunch of different, very successful artists and then plot myself in amongst them to see what I could do to improve (sure I could try and make better art, that seems easy … but how HOW?)

Look at Jock – amazing artist, and then look at Bilquis Evely and see the gorgeous filigree noodling of her line and realise that those artists both amazing but polar opposites in some regards. So how do you push yourself?

Anyway these are the thoughts filling my head the last couple of days. The truth is I’m a decent, sometimes great (sometimes not) artist who may never rise above journey man (which you know, that’s not bad) but I do wonder if I could figure out what I need to unlock to get really good, would I be able to do it?

I think my earliest memories of Doctor Who are pretty clearly Tom Baker, but less the tv show and more the cut out and keep weetabix models. Toys were a scarce commodity in those toys and tie-in toys to tv film or tv even scarcer.

I mean look at this advert from 1977 – this, for the period looks like incredibly high production values for something printed on the back of a cereal box

There are earlier DR WHO cardboard cutouts, but this is the one I remember, and it spurred in me a need to make more cardboard cut out toys. My earliest memory of 2000ad is also cardboard related. Making the Justice-1 spaceship out of computer punch card with my uncle (not only were tv/film tie in toys a rare commodity but even paper and cardboard was hard to come by in the 70s)

I remember creating a little motorbike bay area for the Justice-1 spaceship that was perfectly to scale and had Judge Hershy, but memory is kind sometimes (and cruel other times) and thinking back there’s absolutely no way it was anything but rubbish.

Around the time of Return of the Jedi (1983, and by this stage I was 13 and probably still a little too juvenile for my own good) I went with the next door neighbour to go to a toy shop so he could measure the snowspeeder toy they had so he could go home and build one out of cardboard (these things were wonderouly expensive, way out of my family’s budget – at least for another few years until we were doing ok and my young brother – by then the perfect age for all things star wars – ended up getting things like the millenium falcon and the deathstar…)

The papercraft landspeeder met a fiery end as many of his papercraft toys did. Me? I’d’a held on to that thing. Again memory being what it was, I remember it as being a perfect 1:1 replica of the plastic toy.

Anyway this has all be spurned on by the fact that the BBC have just put online all of the Dr Who’s it’s within their power too. To be honest, this is what I want from the bbc – every tv show ever produce stuck online, give it to me! let me press pause on getting older and wallow in the nostalgia of my childhood viewing (way back when dr who was appointment viewing, when any random channel at any random time of day I could wander past and tell my parents exactly what it was on tv, because man I had not much else going on).

I thought I’d start by going back to the Sylvester McCoy era, because I did NOT enjoy that series – but I was 17 turning 18 when it aired, and man Dr Who was uncool enough without this goofball turning up and ruining it all. (I mean, he probably didn’t, the beeb was desperate to destroy doctor who by that stage so who knows). I never looked fondly at the over the top drama-school-ness of some elements of Dr Who, but boy I loved mad scifi ideas.

BUT! BUT! I didn’t – I’ve gone back further to Colin Baker (like many who watched at the time, Baker’s choice to play a deeply unlikeable doctor stung, especially since I LIKED Davidson Doctor Who was like a kindly uncle or something, Baker was too much acid after the calming balm of Davidson). So I’ve started watching Series 26 The Trial of the Time Lord. Some shabby acting (from actors I know can do better) some obviously massive budget constraints (the doctor was forever fomenting revolution in places where the local tribe was like 15 people) and a big ol interesting-silhouette-but-obviously-man-in-a-suit villain, and a plot that is so typically doctor who that it feels like a big old dr who cliche. But I’m overlooking it all, because deep deep down, the sight of Dr Who and the cardboard sets always brings me right back to being 12 years old.

The 5th of November is the twentieth anniversary of my mum’s passing. It’s been a raw wound for a long long time. She died aged 50 and so I’ve outlived her by three years so far.

She passed three months after my wife and I married – Annette and I had been together nine years by this point and mum and my younger brother (Who was exactly 25 years younger than me, and born a couple of months after Annette and I started dating) had become part of our entourage when we went places. To the point that mum used to joke that she’d come with us on honeymoon. We got married in Barbados, and mum came with us. Well, for a bit. We’d booked two weeks in barbados, the wedding would happen one week in and we invited everyone who wanted to go with us (they were all paying their own way, though we had secured a bit of a deal) so in the end we had a fair number with us. All for one week. Except mum “well, if I’m going that far, I might as well go for two weeks – so I’ll just come with you” No, mum. I love you, but you can come out one week early and stay for the wedding week and Annette and I can have a week alone. And that’s what happened.

When mum died, I was working in IT support for a charity and got a phone call telling me to come home. I can’t remember a lot of what happened, it all became a bit of a blur – there was a 16 year age gap between me and mum, and in an odd way we grew up together, I think. Mark, my brother one year my junior, died age 26 and so I felt very keenly that with mum going there were memories that I had that were shared between her, me and mark, that no longer existed for anyone but me.

It was a rough time. I think on the day, I ran into the bathroom (multiple times) just wanting to hide. I found it very difficult.

And for years, there was a numbness. I remember I used to day dream about what would happen if I won a million quid, and I remember one day, after mum died, having the same thought and suddenly cutting it short with “Well, if you’re going to make any sort of wish, you dickhead, why don’t you wish your mum were still alive”.

Mum was cremated and her ashes put in a grave with my brother’s ashes. A grave that, after his death, I used to go with mum to so she could clean it. We’d joke about stuff and it was far from a sombre thing (mum and I shared a very dark and dry sense of humour), it was kind of joyful. Mark and her never got on as he was growing up, it wasn’t until he left home at age 17 that they started having any sort of respect for each other. And at the grave mum would fuss around it with a tenderness I think she wished she could have expressed to him when he was alive.

(As a side note, and since I’m baring all here, Mark died aged 26. Mum and Dad were in Canada, and one of his friends had been in touch to say they hadn’t seen him, so they contacted me and got me to pop round the house. It was locked. From the inside. So I phoned the police, who came and knocked the door in. Once the door was down, I asked if I could go first, because – well, it felt like it would be more appropriate. And Mark was lying on the floor, having fallen off the sofa, eyes open and long passed. I had to phone them in Canada to tell them. It was awful. Coroner reported death by natural causes, Mum and Dad were convinced it was Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – which, at the time, wasn’t something many people had heard of or believed in. Northern Ireland being the centre of crackpots though, and Mark, at the time knowing pals who were in to witchcraft, the Judge decided there may be something more sinister going on – I stood up and pointed out that had he died two months earlier he’d’ve found a bunch of star trek books and that’s as likely as witchcraft to be the cause of his death.)

But, that, of course, made me visiting mum’s grave all the more difficult. Bad enough it’s where mum’s ashes are but it’s also – the drive up, the standing at the grave, the tidying of it – all reminders of mum being alive.

So I’ve been a handful of times, usually at the suggestion (if not prodding) of my wife. And it’s been difficult.

But this year, twenty years, the wounds don’t hurt. There is, of course a gap in the heart where my mum is, but it’s a gap that’s slowly grown over with new tissue.

I’m going to go up, say some goodbyes, and phone my aunt – her sister – who she used to talk to pretty much every day and I’m sure felt the loss as keenly as me.

And I think the hurt will stop.

Here’s the comic strip, I bring out every so often when I talk about my mum, that I drew now five years ago. It all remains true. There are, of course, more things I’d add, I’d like to tell mum about the house, about my brother John about Nathan going to university, about Thomas’s starting GCSEs. But she knows. She knows.