Having a baby will probably result in either me taking another hiatus from making comics or a sudden deluge of comics about fatherhood and nothing in between… it’s hard to tell… Honestly, I have very little idea about what I’m getting myself into, I’ve talked to lots of friends who are dads and while they’ve all got advice, they all say you can’t really prepare because you can’t know who your child is going to be. Maybe I’ll get into audio books about some weird niche historical period and only do comics about that… Who knows!

The Kickstarter has been going great so far! It was fully funded in under 48 hours (WOOHOO!) so we’re now looking at stretch goals so I can add cool extras to the book (dust covers, fancy stitching, bookmarks and the like). You can still get a copy (or sign up for the scandalously sexy “Deluxe Package”) if you sign up before midnight, May 3rd. It’s all still been a nerve-wracking experience, you can’t know if it’s going to work out or not and I’m doing it on my own so both my boss and my staff are idiots!

What sort of themes can you expect in the book? There’s quite a few gags about historical figures: I like making fun of people that take themselves too seriously and there’s plenty of them throughout history. Failure, depression, rejection, neurosis, all that fun stuff features pretty heavily… I use an old Kurt Vonnegut quote a lot “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward”. Like Mr. Vonnegut, I like to avoid cleaning wherever possible. There’s a few science jokes scattered in there too but not particularly clever ones. I studied chemistry when I left school but dropped out pretty early (hence why the jokes aren’t all that clever!)

The book is dedicated to “my lovely wife”… she’s my rock and my sounding board (so my sounding rock?). She’s a woman of infinite patience and tremendous good humor, she can heal the sick and make the blind see again… okay, now I’m exaggerating… but she’s nice, I like her. I make a lot of bad jokes, I mean, a lot a lot… I mean, these are the ones I thought were good enough to write down, so you can only imagine how bad the ones I make every day to my wife are. I often say the key to a happy marriage is learning how to ignore each other!

I’m a big advocate of pen and paper, though I recently bought myself an iPad and Apple Pen. My review: Like a pencil and paper but not as good and constantly needs charged. Though I have discovered one major upside to drawing digitally: animation. I use Procreate and someone recently showed me how you can use it to animate and, wow, it is fantastic. “Learn to animate” has been on my To Do list for, no joke, 15 years or so and in the past month I have suddenly and inexplicably found the time and energy to do it. I guess it’s probably because I had other more important things I didn’t want to do. Honestly, I don’t think I would ever do anything if I wasn’t avoiding something more important…

TLDR: buy my book, I have mouths to feed!