I once

wrote a comics script.

Actually, that's not strictly true.

Once upon a time, in my callow youth, I both wrote and drew a number of comics, few of which I ever finished. They ranged from 'zany' comedy comics with titles like Invasion of the Killer Lampposts to supposedly more realistic stories about, er, alien invasions and Monty Python-style weights falling from the upper atmosphere onto my family's terraced suburban home (don't ask). A couple of them even saw print, after a fashion: the first part of a series called Invasion (I think) appeared in a friend of mine's horror fanzine when I was maybe sixteen; and for a time at college in Manchester I had a regular strip called Nothing Man running in the polytechnic magazine, Pulp. It was, I believe, universally loathed. Christ knows why they continued to run it. Presumably they couldn't think of anything else to fill the space with.

And then I stopped making comics. I carried on writing, but as a music journalist, not a writer of fiction. Later I moved into editorial, and that's where I've been ever since, editing genre magazines, and then books. A few years ago, however, my friend Martin was looking for contributors for an anthology issue of his superhero soap opera The O Men, and foolishly agreed to let me write a short strip for it. As it turned out the anthology never saw print, but I've just noticed Mart has put the script online.

And here it is.

Incidentally, little of my writing about music or genre stuff can be found online; I was freelancing before the internet became what it is today. There is one feature I wrote for Mixmag that's lurking online though, and it's also one of my better ones, on a subject that sent me off on a thrilling tangent in my life and which changed the way I thought about all sorts of things. Here it is.