I long ago accepted that I have a natural tendency towards the superstitious, seeing signs and portents in every little thing. Unfortunately, I also have a natural tendency towards anxiety-filled neurotic pessimism. As such my personal list of superstitions, carried with me from childhood on, ran roughly as follows:

…and so on. As you can imagine, this becomes pretty hard to live with. There are an awful lot of cats wandering around the place, and if every time you see one it is going to cause you to feel the ICY GRIP OF DEATH UPON YOUR HEART for the rest of the day, things get to be  a bit of a drag.

And so, I grew up and embraced a healthy rational emipiricist snootiness about such ideas, acknowledging the truth that all these happenings are essentially meaningless, in and of themselves.

The thing is though… that that’s not really the point. It’s not about the meaning these events carry in and of themselves, it’s about the meaning you ascribe to them. And while you can know something rationally, somehow it is still possible to feel very differently. In short, to still freak out whenever you spill some salt, even though you rationally know perfectly well that the only bad thing is that you’ve wasted a small amount of salt. Which is fairly cheap anyway.

And so I pressed on through early adulthood, desperately attempting and never entirely succeeding to suppress my own irrational panic-mongering. And then one day my son was born, and – well, to cut a long story short: my head melted.

Suddenly things were very serious, and very important, and all the bad old cognitive habits came flooding back and I could barely enter a room without seeing five or six urgent and troubling Portents of Oncoming Doom.

Fortunately, I came to a helpful and indeed life-changing realisation, which to selflessly improve the mental wel-being of the nation I shall share with you here. It can be summed up as: “ah, nuts to all that.”

I may not be able to do anything about the fact that I am, deep down, an emotionally superstitious person. But I can at least turn that tendency to good. Given that superstitions are entirely arbitrary, simply decide to create your own equally arbitrary new ones, but do so in such a way that they cheer you up rather than stressing you out. And so, in this spirit, I give you my own Brand New and decidedly Super set of Superstitions…

…and I don’t even play the lottery. That is the power of superstition.

You’re welcome.

 Significantly financially better-off. Also, pretty miserable.

Neill Cameron lives in Oxford, writing and drawing comics and being generally delighted whenever he sees a squirrel. His first graphic novel, ‘Mo-Bot High’ is out now as part of the fantastic DFC Library series. Neill is currently working on new projects combining dinosaurs, pirates, monkeys and numerous other Things That Are Awesome for new weekly children’s comic The Phoenix, available now!

Neill’s website: www.neillcameron.com

Neill’s blog: neillcameron.blogspot.com

Describe the place where you write/draw.

In my studio at my computer, surrounded by mountains of paper and with my son poking me with sticks and demanding that I let him watch Transformers instead. At a giant drawing board I liberated from a landscape gardener who gave up on their dream. On massive canvasses propped up on the dining room chairs, while forcing my family to eat off garden furniture. On the sofa, lightbox balanced on my knees, watching Masterchef. In any number of local cafes and coffee shops. On trains, trains are good. Episodes of Pirates of Pangaea, in fact, have been produced on planes, trains AND automobiles. And with sheets of paper held up against a large window in Cyprus.

All over the place, really, is what I’m saying.

I have decided to illustrate this post with photos of the various parts of my house that are becoming overwhelmed by the crushing geological force that is My Work Mess.

Read the rest of this entry »

I desparately attempted to beg off posting anything this month, claiming to be horribly busy with this comic I’m working on, and also to be possibly the least nautically-minded person in this entire island nation. I think port is left, and I gather that ropes are involved, and that is literally the sum total of my knowledge of or interest in boats.

However, thankfully for us all the indefatigable Tilda at DFB reminded me that, hey, that comic I’m claiming to be so busy working on, has  A LOT OF BOATS IN.

And this is true.

However, and this is quite crucial here, the boats in question make it about three pages into the story before they’re out of that boring old ’sea’ nonsense, and into a milieu I’m much more comfortable with: riding around on the backs of dinosaurs. Read the rest of this entry »

It is, as everyone knows, very important to Write What You Know, and that is why my first book was about being a 12-year old girl with a magical giant robot.

Alright, I don’t technically “know” very much about those things, but I do know what it was like to go to school, and in creating Mo-Bot High I really wanted to make something that actually felt – apart from the aforementioned magical giant robots – quite real, and quite true to that experience. Read the rest of this entry »

I find life to be bizarre and inexplicable on a pretty much daily basis, and I’d like to share with you the tale of one recent misunderstanding. I should warn you up front, it’s a baffling and nerve-shredding tale of tension and terror, and you will need all your deductive powers to help decipher it. Join me, if you dare, for…

Read the rest of this entry »