Interview: Comics creator Neill Cameron

The brain behind MEGA ROBO BROS and X365

My son was born in 2012, the same year that a new magazine launched here in the UK for younger comics readers. Called The Phoenix, it has delivered weekly original comics without any corporate tie-ins and free from annoying plastic tat stuck to the front cover. It’s a special thing.

I remember buying my son an issue when he was a bit too young to really get it, but even back then there was a particular strip that really stood out and caught both our attentions: MEGA ROBO BROS, a punchy-punchy story with cool art about robot brothers hitting bigger robots.

A few years later he was an avid reader and the perfect age for The Phoenix. We also picked up the trade paperbacks of MEGA ROBO BROS to catch up on the long-running story. At which point we realised that it was a lot more sophisticated than just punchy-punchy robots (although there’s a lot of that too). MRB is a clever comic about growing up, discrimination, gender, identity and lots more - wrapped up in a funny, action-packed story with fantastic art.

Back when I was producing the Writing Life podcast, I chatted with MRB creator and writer-artist

Neill Cameron 🤖

. There’s lots of good stuff in that interview about writing for younger readers and how The Phoenix came to be:

Today I’ve go a brand new conversation with Neill, all about his latest project. X365 is very different to MEGA ROBO BROS. It’s an experimental comic that started life as a one-panel-per-day challenge Neill set for himself during 2020 and which has slowly evolved into a singular volume. The book has just been successfully Kickstarted, which made this a good time to catch up with Neill about what he’s up to.

(incidentally, there’s only 10 days left on the Kickstarter, as of when this newsletter goes out, if you want to grab yourself a copy of the book)

SKJ: It sounds like X365 was a ‘crazy New Year idea’ that grew into something much bigger.  Where did the initial concept come from?

NC: Yeah, the idea came to me on New Year’s Eve, 2019, and it all just came from the weird sudden realisation that the very next day, it was going to be 2020. 2020! The year that Evil Future Iron Man came from, you know? This almost parodically ‘future-y’ sounding year, the very word just conjuring images of cyborgs and neon supercities and flying cars. 

(It is just possible that I read way too many comics as a kid in the 1980s.)

And it was actually going to be here, in real life. It felt weird, and sort of momentous, and like I should mark the occasion somehow. And so I had the idea of doing a comic that would kind of take that 1980s-comics-vision-of-the-future version of 2020 and mash it up against the real world we all found ourselves living through. And if I just did one panel a day, all year, that would just about be manageable and sustainable and hopefully I’d have a cool story by the end of it.

If I had known going in what kind of year 2020 would in fact turn out to be… there is absolutely no way I would have attempted this.

SKJ: How much planning and prep work did you do on X365 compared to your other projects? Did you know where you were going with it?

NC: No, not at all! That was the joy and the terror of it, really. Usually my work is thoroughly planned out in advance - something like Mega Robo Bros¹ in particular, where it’s going to appear in a weekly comic but then it also has to be collected as a graphic novel, and particularly as we reach the end of it and it has to pay off everything that we’ve done in this whole years-long series so far… there’s so much to consider, and you have to plan it all so carefully. 

So just making something up as I went along, with absolutely no road map to follow, felt liberating and terrifying and incredibly exciting.

SKJ: Did you have thoughts about the story (stories?) from the beginning, or did it start life purely as a  structural thing of doing 1 panel per day?

NC: I started with a vague notion that there was going to be a cyborg private eye from the ‘future’ version of 2020, with a big X for a head, and his name was going to be X365, like the strip. And at some point he would have a neighbour who was from ‘our’ world. And that was honestly about all I had going in. But that’s the joy of doing a panel per day, you can buy yourself some thinking time. So when I started on January 1, still half-sure the whole thing was a terrible idea, basically the whole first week was a slow zoom in on this futuristic-looking city block, while I figured out what this thing was actually going to be.

SKJ: Did you ever draw more than one panel per day, or did you stick strictly to the schedule? People always struggle with being consistently productive and this seems like it would be a great approach for artists.

NC: I never managed more than one a day, no! One a day was plenty, believe me. 

But yeah, honestly I think as a creator I respond really well to that kind of enforced discipline. It became like an article of faith with me: wherever I am, whatever’s going on, whatever else happens, I am going to draw my panel every day. Which became a bit of a psychological life-raft to cling to, as things turned out.

SKJ: Was it always intended to eventually become a longer-form, collected book?

NC: I think I was always making it with the idea that it COULD be a book, if I actually made it to the end. But at the time I was making it, just getting through it was pretty much the only consideration.

SKJ: Did you ever consider publishing each panel as they were created, every day, via a newsletter or Twitter or similar?

NC: I did, yeah! I posted panels as I went along on Twitter, as one giant Twitter thread. But I learned very quickly that this was not necessarily a great technology for comics. The thread became very unwieldy and difficult to navigate, very quickly. And it just really seemed like The Algorithm did not favour the endeavour. As I got to the end, I’d hear from so many people who follow me on Twitter but genuinely hadn’t seen it in their feeds, had no idea that I’d been drawing this giant mad thing all year.

SKJ: Yeah, that’s interesting. I had no idea that you’d been working on this until the Kickstarter went up. Stupid algorithm. At what point did you start to think it was time to combine the panels into A Book?

NC: Well as I say, I always thought it would make a cool book but at the time, just getting through the daily panels was already more than enough to deal with. And then when we got to the end of the year I pretty much collapsed in a heap, and then immediately had twelve hundred other things to deal with. So it’s only now that I’ve finally been able to force myself to take the time to put the book together. I figured a story about 2020 literally gets less relevant with every day that passes, so I should probably crack on.

SKJ: What was the technical process of taking all of the individual daily panels and compiling them into a book form that made sense? Did you redraw any panels, or are these the original daily creations? Did they fit into a page layout as-is?

NC: Because all the panels were square, that actually gives you a lot of options for how to put them together as a comic, and quite early on I started to do the mental arithmetic of ‘so if I did the pages as a 12-panel grid, what kind of comic would that be? If I did them as a 6-panel grid, what would that be?’ And I quickly leaned towards doing 6-panel, 2x3 grids. Because it’s such a classic, timeless form of comics, it’s kind of the default layout for a page of comics. But because of the nature of what I was doing with these panels I thought it would have that kind of formal classicism, but look really striking and different. 

The panels are all the original versions. I did of course feel the urge to start redrawing and ‘fixing’ stuff but then I thought no, that way madness lies. And I quite like the idea of preserving the thing exactly as it came out, of it being a kind of memento of that whole time.

SKJ: I like writing in a serial form - one chapter per week - because it changes a novel  from being a scary massive endeavour into manageable chunks. With X365, did it feel like a single major project, or lots of mini ones?

NC: A bit of both, really. I was able to use the fact it was a yearlong project to kind of give it a built-in structure straight away. Each month was one chapter, so each month had it’s own rhythm and pace and, because of what I ended up doing, its own very different aesthetic and tone. And that meant that as a creator I got those little jolts of excitement of Beginning A Thing and Finishing A Thing on a regular basis, which is really good for motivation. And I think that for readers, it means they get that jolt of excitement from getting a Cool Exciting Cliffhanger every chapter as they read through it, too. 

SKJ: At the very least I’m aware that you’re writing weekly strips in The Phoenix for MEGA ROBO BROS, plus your new Weirding Waves story, plus the re-releases of MRB collected editions. Oh, and the Freddy books. And schools work, and cool story museum exhibits. How do you balance all that work?

NC: I don’t know! When you put it all like that, it sounds exhausting. 

I guess all I can say is, while my kid was very young and childcare was very expensive, I got very diligent about time-management, about working as hard as I could in what time I had time available. And happily, those habits seem to have stuck.

SKJ: I had a similar experience when my son was young - the need to use time productively, because there was suddenly so little of it. I’ve heard of comics artists having to really look after their physical wellbeing, and suffering from hand/wrist injuries. How careful do you have to be, when you have such a busy workload?

NC: Yeah, this is a big and ongoing issue for pretty much every comics artist I know. My hands and wrists have been okay so far, touch wood, but I have had some neck and shoulder trouble from the long hours hunched over a drawing board. The best thing is to take regular breaks and diligently do your stretches, both of which I am terrible at remembering, but I’ve been doing a lot of swimming and even started some yoga lately and those things seem to help a lot.

It’s easy to let those good habits and self-care go when it’s crunch time, when you’re up against deadlines. But as a comics creator in particular, you have to remember: you’re *always* going to be up against deadlines. You have to find a way of working that’s sustainable, and won’t physically or psychologically ruin you.

I am slowly getting better at this.

SKJ: You’ve put the completed X365 up as a Kickstarter project, to fund the final production. Have you crowdfunded a book before?

NC: Nope, this is my first attempt! I think I was always scared to, to be honest. Partly because I knew it would mean having to figure out print runs and postage rates and stuff, and I cannot overstate how much I hate all that stuff. And partly because, well, it’s scary, isn’t it? You’re kind of putting yourself out there, in a very public way, and if no-one backs it and the whole things just dies on its arse, well, you’ve kind of humiliated yourself in the town square, you know?

SKJ: Did you expect it to hit its goal in the first day?

NC: Absolutely not. Apart from anything else, I felt very aware that my usual audience (a) aren’t old enough to be backing Kickstarter projects, and (b) I assumed, weren’t going to be interested in my weird personal experimental pandemic comic anyway. 

So I don’t quite know how it happened, to be honest. I guess a lot of my usual audience… have cool parents?

SKJ: I can confirm that to be the case. Any plans to release X365 more widely, after the Kickstarter?

NC: No, this will do me for now. I really just wanted to make this book exist, for myself and for the people who’d followed along with the project back in 2020. If a few more people discover it and read it through the kickstarter then I’m very happy, but I’m not really trying to conquer the world with this one. I kind of need to get back to the day job.

SKJ: You’ve just recently started a newsletter, joining a really exciting group of comics creators on Substack. What can subscribers look forward to?

NC: To start with I’ve just been figuring it out, using it to post updates about what I’m up to and show a bit of my creative process, that kind of thing. But just the other day I did my first experiment in posting some actual comics in the newsletter, in that vertical scrolling one-panel-at-a-time way that seems to fit that format nicely. And I have to say, I thought it worked great, and made me really excited to try making some new comics specifically to be read that way. 

SKJ: Any thoughts yet for your 2023 new year creative project?

NC: Ha! See, now I’m already starting to get excited about the possibilities of Substack newsletter comics, and daydreaming about doing an X365 sequel or something in weekly newsletter instalments…

…and then I remember how much work I have on my plate already. 2023 is, touch wood, the year I finish work on Mega Robo Bros, and it’s such a big project that honestly I’m pretty much psychologically incapable of seeing past that. If I make it through that in one piece… we’ll see?

---

Huge thanks to Neill for taking time out from that busy schedule. At the time of this newsletter going out there’s still about 10 days left to jump on the X365 Kickstarter, and it sounds like there isn’t likely to be another chance anytime soon to grab a copy of that book.

Incidentally, one of the best things about interviewing comics creators in particular is being able to include some of their incredible art in the newsletter! All images in this are, of course, by Neill Cameron and used with permission.

1. It turns out that Neill himself doesn’t write MEGA ROBO BROS in all-caps, which I find slightly disappointing. I will continue using all-caps, no matter the cost.