Freeze Frame: John Allison on the Realities of Living the Dream
- D Haller
- 59 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Credits: John Allison
John Allison has forged his own unique path from novice freelancer to Eisner Award winner through a career defined by perseverance and experimentation. Within this article, he discusses his experiences of self publishing, the strangeness of the Eisner Award Ceremony and his Conan webcomic (which is sadly no longer available on his website).
What attracted you to the medium of web comics specifically?
Zero cost at the point of entry, and back in 1998 when I started, almost no one else was doing it, so it was the ground floor of an audience and a community when I was just learning my craft. Obviously, it has vastly changed since then. ‘I knew how to make a website when almost no one else did’ might be the key to this.
Throughout your career, you’ve mostly self published your work. Why have you chosen to do this?
Initially, because no one would have me! I was very raw. Then I continued to do so because the early deals I was offered by indie publishers were so poor. I remember an offer by Slave Labor Graphics to publish Scary Go Round which took my breath away. Self-publishing is the easiest way to make the most money possible from your work. You do everything yourself, and besides what you might pay to an indie distributor or lose in wholesale pricing, you get to keep all the money after costs. There is a quote I like by the publisher Felix Dennis - ‘Overhead walks on two legs.’
I’ve gone back to self-publishing recently because the direct market, where I had success with Giant Days, is in flux, and I have a backlog of material from my website that I have never printed. I think it will always be in the mix.
Scary Go Round originally followed the barmaids Tessa and Rachel but regularly changed focal characters. How did you balance exploring these characters' stories whilst making sure it still felt like Scary Go Round?
Can I be honest? I don’t remember thinking about it. I just wrote whatever story occurred to me. The Tessa and Rachel characters were central because initially it was a project meant for the early paywalled comics site Modern Tales. So I worked out a spin-off. When Modern tales proved not to be a good fit for me I redeveloped it to roll in characters from my first series Bobbins, a soft reboot if you like, more story-driven. But I was just learning my craft. Scary Go Round is all experiments, done on the hoof.
Your comics Bobbins, Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery are set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Tackleford. How did you try to make it feel authentic to Yorkshire?
Yorkshire is where I grew up, and Tackleford was just a way to amalgamate areas that were familiar to me into one fake city. A simple case of ‘write what you know.’ I try to bring a sense of authenticity to everything I do, even if it is only through small things. I find a certain strand of ‘Yorkshire pride’ overbearing, all the by eck appen tha mun be reet stuff. Growing up, my nearest town was Ilkley, and all people know about Ilkley is “Ilkley Moor Bar T’at”. Once you’ve heard someone parrot that back to you the hundredth time, something might just crack inside you.
Bad Machinery serves as an indirect Scary Go Round. What motivated the decision to shift from Scary Go Round’s young adult protagonists to kid detective ones in Bad Machinery?
Scary Go Round had run its course for me, just as a sprawling project that felt very messy, and done. I was tired of it, but also just tired generally. I wanted to do something that felt neater, and more narratively compartmentalised, and also to explore a cast of younger characters and the opportunities that might present outside self-publishing. It didn’t really work out the way I hoped, I didn’t become a titan of middle-grade comics like Raina Telgemeier. But it was a good change at the time that opened me up to new ways of thinking outside the young adult webcomic mode.
What are the struggles of writing child protagonists organically as an adult?
I didn’t find it that hard. I just tried to think back to how I felt back when I was eleven, twelve. It was a vivid time for me. My main problem with Bad Machinery was the ageing of the characters by a term with each story. That was a conscious decision, but it lead me down a certain path, and changed the comic as things rolled on. I would have to recalibrate how the kids thought and acted with each tale. They started very wild and ebullient, and a few stories in, they’d somewhat gone inside themselves - as hormonal adolescents do. Managing that was the hard thing. It also made the series more complex to navigate tonally. If a 10-year old kid might read book one, and go all the way to book 10, where the mystery team are nearly 16, there are certain places I can’t go in the 10th book. I was less able to be honest. I wish I’d taken the timeline more slowly and explored the energy of the earlier books more carefully. But I’m still proud of the series, and the flaws are part of it.
Previously, you published a Conan web comic before you were asked to take it down. What drew you to the character?
I have a lot of female characters in my comics, and I enjoy that world, but I wanted to draw someone very beefy and male. And I draw almost exclusively contemporary settings, but I enjoy fantasy, so I thought I’d have a go at that. I do find genre writing quite easy, if I’m familiar with the genre. Conan was out of copyright, and there was already The Cimmerian by Ablaze, so I thought he was fair game. But even though I fell afoul of the people who own the trademark I did really enjoy drawing those comics. I had no affinity for the character at all prior to starting the work. I have still never read a Conan comic other than the ones I have drawn myself.
Credits: Max Sarin
You won two Eisner Awards for Giant Days in 2019. How did you feel attending the award ceremony?
I didn’t attend when we won. I was nominated for Bad Machinery the year before, attended with my editor Ari Yarwood, and lost. The Eisners is fun, but strange. You eat a catered dinner on the floor of the venue while there is raked theatre seating behind you for the audience, and it slowly fills up as you dine, before the awards ceremony begins. Being watched as you eat is a non-mainstream experience.
Several times in my life I have been trapped in front of a stage just as the event begins and the audience's heads swing towards you. Before the Eisners, I was somehow caught carrying two overfilled cups of tea on saucers, very slowly, back to my table. I still don’t know how this happened but it is definitely part of a pattern that I have had to accept. One must style it out.
My category was one of the last to be announced, and it was a book where I had done everything, so just one trophy. If a book had multiple credits, there would be multiple trophies, for the artist, writer, etc. The trophies were lined up, in the order of the categories in the program, along the back of the stage. By counting along, I could work out a full two hours before my category was announced that I had lost. At my table I was sitting next to a comic writer about the same age as me whose work I really liked. He did not turn his head to speak to me all evening. I went off his work after that.
So how did I feel? Discombobulated.
As a previous winner, do you feel that the Eisner should be open to all comics rather than American comics?
It is open to all comics. As long as work is submitted, it is considered. I can remember the LICAF 24-Hour Anthology and the Nelson book being nominated. It’s limited to English language comics, but I think that is fair as anything else would require the judges to be multiply multilingual.
How do you want to be remembered?
A good writer, a good artist, and a good person.
What's the next big thing for John Allison?
Every five years or so in my career, things have changed, and I've had to change things up. The industry has changed a lot in the last decade, and I am - frankly - getting older. So how I interact with my old readers, my new readers, editors, is changing. Things that worked for me in 2015 are not always going to work for me now. So I don’t know what the next big thing for me is. There might not be one! All I can hope for is to sustain myself. I’m lucky to be able to pretty much get to do exactly what I want. That’s a big thing in itself.
If reading this article piqued your interest in Allison’s work, check out his webcomic Destroy History: NEMS which has recently returned for its second part. All his webcomics can be found on his website, linked below alongside his socials.