John Allison talks The Great British Bump-Off and his career on Off Panel

David. Great to be here as always.

Well, as a professional or professionally trained by the BBC video AV professional, I've done a really poor job of setting everything up. As you know, behind the curtain, things have been a bit iffy. So, I'm just getting used to it at the moment. By the fifth or sixth time you've spoken to me like this, it'll be fine.

It is always kind of funny when you have to do improvisational setups. I really wish I could tell you that mine is super professional. This microphone that I'm speaking into literally just sits off to the side of my desk until I grab it, I select it in the draft of podcasting and put it on my table and then plug it in.

You got to get those egg boxes on the wall, you know? You've got to create that sort of pirate radio look.

Yeah, it's a good audio baffle, isn't it? You just got to create a lot of baffles.

5:30. 5:30.

Well, short form comedy improv is like whose line is it anyway? Where it's very quick. It's like games. Long form, there's a few different ways of doing it. They're all named after men. We're learning the Harold and you tend to do longer scenes with two of you. It's much more character-based. It's not just about firing out jokes as fast as possible. I do like to get as many jokes in as I can, but that's just because I'm a nuisance. So, yeah, you can be in character as the same person for half an hour, 40 minutes or something like that, and then you just get brought in and out of the scene and you have to steer it towards a conclusion, which in short form it doesn't matter if it just collapses because it's only going to last a minute or something like that.

It is because that's what makes it funny. Whereas in long form, I think is a bit more showoffy basically. But it's also very enjoyable because I like character stuff and story anyway and doing it on the fly I find very fun.

Yeah. And I did standup as well. I didn't do it because I wanted to go and do standup in clubs. I wanted to go through a course of learning how to do standup and then at the end we had to perform in front of a club audience and then that was it. It was over. I retired after my type five which was about 8 minutes long in the end. But yeah, it gets me out of the house because otherwise it is an isolating job and if you're writing comics, you got to meet people. So, I just try and find things to do out in the world. I've done all sorts of things. I do pottery and I go out and do life drawing, anything that gets you amongst like-minded people really. And comedy people are my kind of people.

Well, I think you'd be good. Very good, David. I think people would enjoy your company in situations like that. Also it doesn't matter. In the end especially with improv, it's scotch mist, it's gone at the end of it. You might have had a good week, you might have had a bad week, but the next week you can go and make something else up. So yeah, it's just playing really.

Well, when I started in your situation, when I was liberated from my profession and set out into the world like Bambi on the ice, my days were exactly like you just described. I didn't have any structure and I also found my days... a lot of people find this, you end up working later and later and then getting up later and later. I'm a morning person so it just meant that my work got worse and worse. And then I read an interview with Nick Cave, someone who I think is a very interesting person. I can't abide his music, but I do find him very interesting. And he said that he works banker's hours. And I thought, banker's hours, just him using those words, right, that's what I'll do. I'll work 9 to 5 like a banker even though I'm in this free form area. And it absolutely grounded me. I divided my day around a fixed lunch hour. I took very structured breaks and it just immediately everything clicked into place and I became much more productive and happier really because I didn't enjoy just being in that free floating floppy area. But if you've been at work a long time, I think it's natural to just expand out into the available space and not really know what to do with it all.

Yes, definitely. Because I don't want it to leech into the evenings or the weekends either. The only time I've ever let that happen was in COVID just because there wasn't enough stuff to do to fill the time. So I started to do bits of work. For the most part, no, I want to be finished by 5:00 each day and I don't want to be getting up on a Saturday morning. I want to lie in bed when the alarm goes off and go, I can just lie here for half an hour, it doesn't matter. That's really important otherwise you become a drone. And I know so many people do, especially cartoonists with time intensive styles. They just steam through into the night, through the weekend, working on commissions all the time. They never ever stop. And I worry for them because their lives do seem quite painful to me. I couldn't do that. I've got to get out of the mindset to get back into the mindset again.

I've got to leave time for my racy boys. Yeah, that's right. And ladies, if they ever let ladies into the sport, I don't explode them.

Yeah. It grinds you to dust.

In terms... I always worry that it's quite easy for me to drift into a sort of... if I'm allowed to complain, I will. And I feel it's given that I've supported myself for so long as a cartoonist when so many people can't and have to take part-time jobs and things like that, it's very bad to complain. I do feel that I entered the industry at the point at which it was very open and we've now reached the point where a) I'm older. When I started, I was 23. You've got energy to burn. You can live on ramen noodles and beer. And you can do anything because nothing really matters. Whereas now, I'm 48. I'm 49 in a few weeks. And so, my place in the world has changed. My voice in terms of the readership has changed and also the industry has fundamentally changed a great deal. So, the economy has become much more testing. So all of these things, it's kind of like you feel the walls closing in a little bit and they're closing in from multiple directions at once, which is a little bit tricky. So I feel like as a writer and an artist though, I'm happier than I've been for years. As a professional in the industry, I'm more nervous than I have been for years. If that's the best way of putting it.

Yeah.

Oh, no. I do. I feel closer because also what I've immersed myself in especially in the last 15 years comics wise, I feel I'm closer now to what people broadly read. I read quite a lot of manga. I read quite a lot of indie comics by people who are younger than me. I try to get a good sense of what goes on and I feel I do still fit in with that. I just sometimes it's a bit of a struggle to insert yourself because the machinery of how my business works, how it has always worked, it's not easy to turn around. It's like if I try and change course, I'm like a battleship because everything's so finely geared but also slow. If I decide I want to pivot to being like a YA author, or if I want to pivot to writing video games on the side, it will completely torpedo the delicate system by which I do my banker's hours, get pages drawn, get pages written and conserve my limited mental energy that I use to come up with ideas. So, I get offered all sorts of things that could potentially take me out of the way I work, but I'm terrified to engage with them. Terrified might be the wrong word because I like what I do. I don't want to change, but also to change, I might not be able to go home afterwards is my fear really.

Whoa, Tay. Oh, did I put my glasses on just so I could take them off? I'm sorry.

You're right. Because you put a public face on the work in a way that was not possible when we weren't all sort of narrow casters, when we didn't all have access to video cameras. Just imagine, it was unimaginable that we would just be able to show our face and put on a little show, a little song and dance for people whenever we had something to say. And that's powerful. We've been given the tools that were in the hands of like NBC or the BBC, and we've got all of them now. You don't need to broadcast to an incredible quality if you've got a good enough idea to engage with people. And it's part of the engagement economy that people kind of expect this of you. Unless you go the full Olivia James route and erase yourself.

Not so much.

Like I like movies, but I just don't get engaged with them in quite the same way I used to. They just become a bit gray to me.

There was a movie that came out last year called September 5, September 5th, whatever you want to call it. And it was about the Munich Olympics and the very bad things that happened there. And one of the interesting things was it was told from the perspective of an American news crew that was there.

Yeah. And one of the things that was an amazing scene to watch in that was the fact that they wanted to get a camera on it and they literally had to wheel out one of those giant cameras and they had to figure out how to get it out there. And that is like what you're talking about where back then it was functionally impossible to do things like this or things like a lot of the things that people like us have to do. I hear from book market creators who are like, I feel like I have to become a book talk person. I have to be on TikTok so I can do things like that. And you can because you just have a phone and that's all you need. And it is an interesting thing but I do want to talk about the important part of it I believe is how you put it. How are you feeling about comics in the larger world right now and where you fit there?

I think I've gone from fitting well 10 years ago to not really having a place anymore. And I was very lucky. I kind of jumped on the end of the indie comics where I'm one of the last series to get 50, 60 issues, with the exception of your obviously Kirkman type properties. I was one of the last ones to get a really good run. And I realize like James Tynion will manage a real good run on something, but it was rare and especially someone who didn't have any background in the direct market at all to get a run on a book as long as we did on Giant Days was incredible. But then by the time Giant Days finished, all the things that had propped it up in the industry made it kind of impossible to follow it up. So Giant Days, half its readership was on ComiXology. By the end of the run it was getting in the top 10 every time there was an issue released on ComiXology which it certainly wasn't on Comicron in the charts for the regular comics. And then ComiXology just torpedoed. So the place where people went to find my comics, knew they could find my comics, and that effectively kept the series alive for 60 issues or however many it was, 54, it's gone. So that's a plank gone and it's a really important big plank because it's very hard in the era of limited orders for second, third, fourth issues of books in the direct market shops in your local comic shop. So every series I did after that struggled because issue one would go in good, then the rest would trickle down. It's like Kyle Starks was saying a few shows ago, you just watch the numbers tank and you feel powerless because you've worked probably the fourth or fifth issue is probably a better issue than the first one was where you didn't know anything, but that one just dies on the rack or readers can't find it. And sometimes I would say to whoever was publishing, how do I tell my readers how to go and get this because they're not comic shop people. They've been web comic readers. They want to support me. I know that they do because I see how they buy things. But what am I supposed to do to actually sell single issues if every method by which single issues sell just falls into pieces? That didn't feel good. So I made good series that did not do particularly well or didn't get their chance and that then impacted the quality of the work because I wasn't... your legs are furiously paddling and you're going nowhere. Not great, David. Not great.

No absolutely yeah. Saga is something else. It's a book that every local comic shop can hand sell to people because it makes perfect sense the way they describe it and it's good. Whereas Giant Days, everybody who comes through that door does not want that sort of book. The guy who's there for his variant covers will make sense to him but perhaps Giant Days wouldn't make sense to him. Although it did apparently make sense to a lot of them. But here's the funny thing though, I don't know whose fault this is. Maybe it's no one's fault, but it's fascinating because we have ample evidence that something like Giant Days is a good example, but honestly I think Steeple, I think Bad Machinery, I think Great British Bump Off, I think all of them are examples of this. I think that they're examples of what the broader world of people who want stories want more than even something like Saga. If you look at manga, there's so much slice of life in there. We're going to talk about Hi Yasumi later, that is a very successful book that kind of fits in the same vein as the books that you do. And I don't remember who it was but somebody recently told me about their book didn't fit in the direct market but it fit in what people want. And it's just like how do you reconcile the difference between those two things? It used to be ComiXology was the great equalizer and now that that doesn't exist, it's just kind of a fascinating thing because there is a market for your stuff and maybe that's just what you're doing through digital, but I just don't understand how the direct market has gotten to a point where it's reduced itself where you can't reach those people.

Yeah, it's weird because I feel like markets bifurcated and bifurcated implies two equal channels. I don't think they are. If we think about the audience for manga in the English-speaking territories, mine and yours being the two biggest, kids love manga. They read manga in huge quantities. Dark Horse, didn't they say their top selling book is Berserk? That's their big money maker is Berserk. It's not Hellboy. As good as Hellboy is, it's not Umbrella Academy. It's a licensed manga. There's a whole audience, for 20 years now since the original Tokyopop boom of the early 2000s, raised on manga, love to read manga, are still reading manga. But American comics is more expensive to produce. It's not licensed material, so it just costs more to produce anyway. And you're fighting a flamethrower with a tennis racket. You can't beat that tide of material and the audience of manga is used to the way manga is paced. So all of a sudden manga is like the blockbuster movie that just makes sense, the popcorn movie that makes sense to people. And an American comic is like a kind of subtitled movie where the rhythms are different. This isn't what I'm used to. This feels uncomfortable. Some people will get into it, but the audience for Cinema Paradiso isn't the same as the audience for Avengers Endgame. Manga is the only game in town. And there's a reason for that is because it answers all the questions that readers are asking. It's giving them the stories that they want. But also once you've got used to manga and the way it looks, you got to switch your brain over. Especially as a kid, if you're a kid who's just pounding manga, and then you get given a western book, are you going to like the way it looks, the way it's drawn, the way it's paced? You're going to have to get used to it because it's not the same.

Well, that's what I'd hope for because I like to think that I've read a lot of manga and I've been heavily influenced by it. And I try to tell stories with some of that. I can't do it at that rhythm because I can't draw enough pages to pace it at manga pace. I would explode doing it on my own. But I try to capture something of that feeling that you get from reading good manga when I'm telling stories because I love them. So why wouldn't I want to tell stories that are like the ones that I enjoy?

Dave, that sounds great.

That's worse. We're all going to have to sleep on futon mattresses around the house and chain smoke unfortunately which I don't think is going to be good for either of us. I don't think our delicate health is going to survive us constantly caning red Malboro non-stop.

I have thought about it. I think about it all the time because I could just write a book. I'm sure I could get my agent to go and sell a book to a publisher. But the thought of just sitting chewing away at a story for 250 pages with no feedback... It's a lot of banker's hours. And I'd probably have to do all the pencils first and all things. I don't really enjoy that. When I did Steeple for Dark Horse because I did everything myself apart from the colors and the letters the first five issues, I was having to submit all the pencils, all the inks. I didn't really enjoy it. I like a page rolls off the production line and then another page rolls off and I have a sense of completion very quickly.

Yeah, a completed page. I finish every page and then I start the next page. So yeah, the Bad Machinery books were 30, 140 pages. So they were as close as I was probably ever going to get to that, but obviously they were serialized first. I'm not sure I'm brave enough. I mean, for enough money, I'm brave enough to do just about anything. But if someone said to you, John, here's enough money to live on really comfortably for 3 years, and it's going to take you two years to draw this graphic novel, and at the end of it, doesn't matter how miserable you were sitting in your office 9 to 5 doing it, you finished it, and now you can enjoy the lovely money, the rain of lovely money. I think I could take it. But realistically, unless you are someone like Bryan Lee O'Malley off the back of Scott Pilgrim getting a big deal or a Tilly Walden getting a big deal because they are proven forces in the book market, I don't think that's ever going to happen to me.

I want to say the Kilt because... but anyways, that's a different book, the third book in the series. It's just about tartan, you know, different clans. Got to get into that killer. But you've given me a perfectly good book.

There. In fact, that could be my first graphic. I'll just go to Dark Horse. It's 250 pages. I'm going to need a lot of money.

A lot of money. That's the second volume of that. It's arriving in stores on November 25th. I know that because I literally just submitted my picks for my email newsletter for my local comic book shop, Boss, and where I recommend books. And I just submitted my picks for November and one of my picks was that volume for their readers.

Go ahead.

That's right. So, you have those going on. How do you decide what projects you're going to take on at this point?

That's tricky because I really started to feel recently I don't have enough hours in the day to do everything that I want to do at any one time. I'm sure that's common to lots and lots of creators, but sometimes it's just what's in its most realized and finished form when the slate comes clear because I've got so many ideas, sort of synopses of stories. But this year was a little bit tricky. I did the Solver collection. I've done loads of Solver web comics. I did like a 176-page collection, something I thought I'd never print something of that size again. And it did actually sell pretty well through a limited number of outlets and like one convention a year. Thank you, David. That's very kind. And so I thought, well, I can do more Solver, but I can't really go out on the road with big books and sell things because the scene doesn't really support, especially in the UK, doesn't really support me doing that. So I have to think carefully about the sort of books that I'm selling and the sort of things that I'm making. So this year I kind of used up all the ideas I had left over. I had Savage Sword of Susan. I had the Beatles comics that I did. There was only I only even printed that and ended up doing it because Christine Len, who I work with on By Night, said, 'My son's really got into the Beatles and he really wants a print version of your Nems comic, which I did during the pandemic, about the sort of what if the Beatles hadn't been successful and how would somebody from the John Allison comic cinematic universe sort that out?' And then I said, 'Oh, I'm sure I can send you the high-res files. You can print one out for him.' And I thought, 'Or I could print, I don't know, 500 of them and have a go at selling them and I can just send Christine one in the post because by the time I'd sorted it out for her, I was like, well, I can just put this in an InDesign document, draw a back cover for it, and I've finished, and that's another book I can sell.' So yeah, so that was there. And then once having sort of looked at it for I was like, 'Oh, maybe I can finish this.' I did have a script that hadn't worked for a second part. It just wasn't quite finished. It was undercooked. So I got that out again. I was like, 'Oh, if I put another few pages, I can split it into, well, that's 48 pages. That's another book.' And then I had Savage Susan left over from my Conan misadventure of 2024. That idea was kind of on paper and ready to go. I was like, 'Well, this is fun. This isn't going to upset anybody. There's no Conan in it. So I can do that as well. That's another 33 pages. I can only draw about 150 pages a year realistically in color and write them all myself. So there you go. That's best part of half a year just in those three stories. So I'm just rounding out what I'm going to do for the rest of the year now. So to some degree the projects you take on are defined by just what you can and cannot physically do in a year more or less.

I love Steeple, too. I would have loved to have done more of it. There are more Steeple stories. There's more issues worked out in terms of another arc and I love the characters, but I just can't because Dark Horse did the three collections and then they didn't want the fourth collection. I don't want to be responsible for printing a fourth collection of a book that then might go out of print with Dark Horse. And it's frustrating because obviously I can make whatever I want. Contractually I can make as many Steeple comics as I want. They just have the publishing rights. But there are some things happening with Steeple that might give it a boost or they might not. We'll find out. I know that Dark Horse have some ideas for something with it. So we'll see. You did do the Reverend and Lovees one-shot with Max Sarin which is really great.

Yes, I well Max draws the Steeple characters very very well because I got Max to do the covers for the second and third volumes and Max draws such brilliant versions of them. Obviously everything Max draws is brilliant. I just wanted Max to do a Steeple comic that was just its own thing. But if again if the beautiful rain of money would just fall from the sky, the sweet rain of money came down, I would love to get Max to draw another six issues of Steeple a year. But then a lot of my readers don't like it when I give things over to other artists. I have this little bit of a battle between the people for whom other artists are the interpreter and then the people for whom I as an artist am the interpreter. The people who kind of came to me from Giant Days. So it's a bit of a pull in both directions really.

Well, my feeling really is that I want to draw it all myself. If I could have done, I would have drawn all of Giant Days myself. I wouldn't have given it to another artist. I mean, I drew the first three issues and I love drawing it. I love those characters. I think you can see from the even like the Savage Sword Susan and the Batman special, I still love drawing those characters. They're absolutely my favorites. So I had to give them some... I was kind of in the thick of Bad Machinery when I was doing Giant Days. I couldn't draw it. So I went out and found the absolute best person to draw it.

Twice. Yeah. Exactly. Incredible luck. But no, I draw everything. So really, when it comes down to it now, I only really work with one other artist, Max. And so I think, well, what would Max like to draw? Who does Max like out of my characters? What kind of stories work well for them? And that's really been what I've done. So the Wicked Things series, the Charlotte series, and then The Great British Bump Off when Max draws those characters, it's amazing. They really fly. They're different from when I draw them, but why wouldn't you given the opportunity to see things drawn that well, take that chance. That's kind of really it.

Incredible artist really. The sort of artist who again in the industry, it's a bit of a... because it's a bit of a sausage... between Max isn't the fastest artist. A lot of care and deliberation goes in, so getting put on a monthly book not great really. We had some trials when you spoke to Max about this at one point. Max had some real trials working on a monthly book, working on Giant Days. So it's tricky really to be so good, to be such a good artist. I think Max is one of the best artists in comics. Max is like Joe Madureira or someone like that. That level of kind of out on their own, different to everybody else, kind of style-setting artist. Amazing.

I'm just remembering when I was a kid, and I remember when I got my first Mad issue. It was different. It popped. It was big. It was cartoony. It was friendly looking. And that's how I feel. I get the same feeling. I haven't looked at a Joe Mad comic probably... I might have read an issue of Battle Chasers whatever year that came out. But the feeling I got as a teenager from a Joe Mad comic, that popping excitement, I get exactly the same excitement from looking at Max's art every single time. Just out of this world really.

Yeah. I like a feeling of connection between characters in comics because it's one thing that a lot of us are amazing. They can be amazing draftspeople and incredibly dynamic and powerful and sort of real popping art, just fantastic. But you don't get a sense of the characters responding to each other and the way they feel about each other. But here you do. You absolutely do. The relationships between the characters in that comic are so strong and the connection that you get as a reader is so strong. I mean, I'm only on... I've only just finished volume three because again, I feel like I should eke it out because I'm enjoying it so much. But there's something in that. There's a ghost that inhabits that book that I don't think I get. I mean, you can get it from other comics, of course, but that's a good really good example of something where I absolutely love the characters. I'm so there with them for all their little very gentle adventures.

Oh, I did. Yes, I did. Yeah.

Oh, no. No. Because there's something about... the fact that I say I don't want to spoil it... to issue a spoiler for that book. Maybe it's the wrong word to use spoiler because everything that happens in it is quite small moments. But the fact that he kind of flew high when he was an actor and then decided that this isn't for me. I don't enjoy it. It's taken everything out of what I thought was going to be good. I'm going to live a different kind of life instead, but I'm just going to kind of accept things. It's quite a bittersweet book, but it's a book about disappointment, but it's about living with disappointment and learning how to work around it. Because there's all sorts of things that have happened to him that haven't been too good. But he's still always kind of looking for the way to enjoy because he just works at the little fishing place where you go and kind of fish for goldfish or whatever it is. He was making films and he was going to be an actor and now he's just kind of drifting, but he's drifting in a nice way because he's happy. He's accepted that this actually feels better than thrashing away. So no, I love it and I love all the characters in it. I think everything about it is touching in a way that is touching without being mawkish, which is incredibly difficult. If you ever get a chance, you should read Tokyo Alien Bros by Kiko Shinszo too because it was the one before this and before he had a malignant lymphoma. And I think it'd be really fascinating for you to experience the transition between those two.