EP50: LAST STAND OF THE FECKERS

what's the irish goodbye you invented that

it's the currency hello it's like um yeah i i definitely was i definitely knew what like fandom what it was to be a fan like i was my first thing was snooker and then it was Knight Rider and then like it was that sort of kind of thing of like you know what do you mean James sorry

sorry just the snooker gateway drag I mean we've all been there right

Hey, look, there's a lot of diagnoses weren't available in the mid 80s.

But it was that all consuming sort of thing.

Like I wanted to be a snooker player.

I knew I couldn't be Knight Rider, but I really wanted my dad to be Michael Knight.

And it was that same thing of like.

I couldn't stop thinking about something and that's how it definitely was with Transformers once I started being aware of the fiction of it and my way of relating to something and as James's would have been ultimately too is to make stories about those things so I would have been drawing little Knight Rider storybooks and Herbie storybooks less so snooker fanfic though i did like to draw like lots of that would come later with me me and james would write one later yeah legitimately uh but um i definitely would start so i started making i meant he-man would have been i would make little story books comics about he-man before transformers and then once transformers came in like i literally have i think one of those copy books where the first story in it that i did i still have it is a masters of the universe story

and then

I literally stopped that story and the next page is a Transformers story and I'm pretty sure I didn't go back to doing He-Man until

six

weeks ago when I started drawing He-Man for Dark Horse.

Oh, he's getting the plugs in already.

Very good.

But that's a good definition, actually, of really becoming a certain type of fan, a fan that produces, even if it's unofficial.

I started writing fanfic.

I didn't conceive of it as that at the time, but I started writing fanfic when I was at primary school still.

The school jotter was just the right place to do it.

And

you drew as well, though, at that time, didn't you?

Yeah, well, you know how at school, particularly at primary school, the artists are identified early on, right? And it's like, oh, you're a good drawer.

And

then how do you draw, right? And I was one of those.

But then, again, as Dick will know, the weaker artists fall away pretty fast, right? And I was, I fell away.