Well, David Baillie is February's featured man, expect a couple of reviews up on his works this month (including the great Tongue of the Dead). It was brilliant having him answer some questions for us here at IndieReview, this guy is easily one of my favourite people working in UK indie comics today (because of the superbly wacky A Dog's Tale - the first 5 pages are tacked onto the end of the review!). Hope you all enjoy it!

I've always wanted to make comics - well, ever since I was about three or four. I drew Star Wars comics before I had seen the film or really knew what comics were. My Luke and Han were much better. I think they were brothers. I harboured the ambition of being a comics creator all through my school years, teens and then University - but did very little about it. I expected 2000AD to knock on my door one day and say 'I don't suppose you have any ideas for a new series, do you?'

When I was about eighteen I joined SCAAM, a Glasgow cartoonists club which met up once a month in the basement of a pub. I'd go along and hang out with Mark Millar, Grant Morrison, Alan Grant, Frank Quitely and Big Jim 'Ganjaman' Stewart. That was really exciting and there was lot of small press action going on there, and I finally produced a comics.

It was years later before seeing great small press stuff like Gordon Johnston's Virginia Gallery and Flying Monkey Comics spurred me into doing something myself.

The hyper-prolific Matt Badham had been writing a small press column for Judge Dredd the Megazine, which combined insightful introductions to indie creators and reviews of their work, which had been really well received. I know everyone who featured in it was absolutely thrilled, and I dare say it made them all rich. Matt decided he'd taken that as far as he could and wanted to concentrate on longer articles for the magazine, and suggested a few replacement names to Matt Smith, the Megazine editor, one of which was mine. Matt (Smith) then got in touch with me and asked if I'd be interested in taking the one page slot and using it as a sort of 'diary of an indie creator'. Of course I said yes, and shortly afterwards a thousand small press creators emailed me to ask why I wasn't writing about them.

The first thing that happens is I have an idea. Then I write it in my notebook and forget all about it. A couple of years later I'll come across it when trawling for another idea (which I will never find), then realise the concept has been fermenting in my subconscious all this time. Usually a couple of months later I'll have some drawings - a new style, some character designs, whatever... And from there I put together scenes, building to the depressingly cataclysmic finale I'm undoubtedly aiming for. This will all be in pretty much full script, although I'll toy with it until the thing is actually printed. Then I chain myself to a desk (or a tree if I'm in the park) and draw the thing. But the process for each comic is different - if that weren't the case it would get dull as quickly as everything else in the world.

I've sent copies of my stuff off to various editors whose work I enjoy, in the hope that they'll like it. But whenever I've been approached by a publisher it's usually because they've heard 'good things' about me. So I'd really like to thank whoever it is that's saying these 'good things'. I think I owe them a drink.

I was asked to pitch a GN length story to Vertigo last year, which was really exciting. I crafted a detailed synopsis and script and the artist drew a half dozen pages - it looked incredible. The editor in charge said he really liked it, but that it wasn't quite what he was after. In fact, that's pretty much last year in a nutshell for me - I have dozens of such unrealised projects in my inbox. It'd probably be depressing if I thought about it, but I'm too busy working on the next thing!

I'm constantly surprised by the warm reaction I get to a Dog's Tale. My brother thinks it's my best work, too. Maybe I should write and draw all my books in 24 hours.

I find it hard to read my work without spotting all the 'mistakes'. It's tempting to do a Herge and go back and redo my older stuff, but I know I don't have anywhere near that sort of patience. I still really like Kwot though despite all its flaws.

There's nothing I don't like... If I took the trouble to draw it, then there was at least something there worth pushing out to the world.

Although when I went home for Christmas I came across a comic I drew when I was about twenty and it was terrible. It will never see the light of day!

That actually came about because I was writing a column for Judge Dredd Megazine in which I recommended that indie creators have a regularly updated website, and suggested that the best way to do this is with a comics strip. I had just got to the end of the sentence and thought - I should really take my own advice on this. So I went and drew the web banner - put a start date on it, which was just after the date the coloumn would be published, and wrote 'Start a web comic called The Belly Button Bubble Chronicles' in my ToDo list. As soon as it was printed in the Megazine there was no way I could back out.

I'm really enjoying it, and deliberately doing it without a 'buffer' as I want each episode to be about what's on my mind this week. Of course this means that holidays, sickness, etc. disrupt the schedule. My aim is to have 52 episodes complete and posted a year after it all began and hopefully get a collection out for the end of 2008.

I have designs and plot sketches for a book called Electron City sitting in front of me as I type this. It really needs to be in colour, which means I might have to go a different route to get it out, but that's next up.

I'm also hoping to get a collection of my old mini comics together for convention season - and of course the awesome London Underground Comics stall (Camden Lock every Saturday, folks!). Apart from that an anthology of short work from myself and the hyper-talented Marvel scribe Douglas Noble called The Charm of This Team should be out and about soon.

Because if you want to make comics then you should stop talking about it and just make comics. Many people have said that the small press scene IS the comics industry in the UK, and there's a lot of truth in that. Never before has this country had such an incredible array of talented creators self-publishing, and new avenues for getting your work out there and in front of readers are appearing every couple of weeks.

Yeah - why is everyone reading this? You should all be creating comics instead.

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