The Twenty-Nine Club

I am better than Kurt Cobain.

I am better than Kurt Cobain by two whole years. Better than Kurt, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. (Though I feel most of us are fundamentally ‘better’ than Jim Morrison.)

Today I turn twenty-nine, and have felt the urge to mark this milestone by starting to blog myself senseless. The idea occurred to me this time last year, as I was about to turn twenty-eight, thus outwitting The Rock and Roll Reaper, who claims the most creative, charismatic and cravenly beautiful among us in their twenty-seventh years. Well not me, Azrael! I escaped your Fender Scythe! Truly it means that I have outfoxed The Pale Rider himself! (In no way does it mean that I do not rank amongst the terminally hip, too cool to live, right?)

This would have been a well made and timely point a year ago, but it takes me roughly 365 days to act upon an idea, something my girlfriend and editors at IDW Publishing will attest to. But better late than never, as they say in comics and pregnancy scares. So let this be the point where I make known to you who I am, what I’m about, and how I go about it.

I am called Nick Roche, and I’m a comic-book artist and sometimes writer. The artist bit of me gets lots of exercise, busied as I am toiling away at my dream job on IDW’s Transformers (Various titles, but I’m currently cutting a swathe through Maximum Dinobots, an Eisner-botherer the kids will by hopped-up on over the coming months.) the writer side of me, less so, and the human being side of me gets the shortest of shrifts. Shrift so short that your father would not allow you out of the house with such skimpy shriftage. So this blog will hopefully be me narcissistically flexing my textual muscles whenever time allows. But apart from the words you’ve just read, and the ones after that, and the few that bring us to these ones, I’m writted Spotlight: Kup for IDW’s TF line, and scripted and co-scripted eight local pantomimes in my native Wexford town. By dangling my blog so scandalously in public, I will hopefully shame myself into a few minutes of writing everyday, so that when I’m approached out of the blue by the BBC for my sitcom idea, by Pixar for my Wall*E-thrashing high concept money-spinner, or by IDW for the Kup maxi-series (I intend to draw the maxi-series on a pad. I hear you can get ones that will absorb the dickens out of your art) I won’t be too rusty for the task.

I also intend for my bloggagery to serve as a lifeline to my friends, family, admirers, and potential victims. I’ve let myself down quite a lot recently, mainly in the personal hygiene stakes, and frequently in public, by voiding myself at children’s puppet shows. But also by not being as attentive to those who purport to love me and be my friends. To be honest, I suspect most of ‘em only stuck around because they thought they’d inherit something amazing following my sexy death aged twenty-seven, or be able to sell a sordid story to The Wexford People following my demise. To them I say, hi ya! Sorry I haven’t been out to play; been a bit busy. But I want all of you to pretend that these blogs are personal emails to you, carefully crafted with appeasing you in mind.

Apart from words, there will be art posts here and about this blog. I endeavour to do a few minutes worth of a doodle each day, separate from my paying, meaningful work, and post those. So sometimes there will be words from me, sometimes there will be drawings. Sometimes both. With that in mind, here’s a well-hasty pic I did on this very day one year ago, with this very blog in mind. Back then, I was ready to embark on a Doctor Who miniseries…but then the wheels fell off me ‘ol health, like. The fact that my health was sporting wheels should have been a giveaway that my physiology was entering a phase of abnormality. Alas, I was unable to complete a single whole issue of that career stepping-stone, and what art was turned was, what the French refer to as, a load of old arse-scrapings. So, I post this sketch of The Doctor as a reminder of my abject failure to complete an issue of that series, or to crack open a blog until now.

That’s me for now. I’m off to enjoy some Black Forest Gateaux, and possibly the number 31 from The Dragon Heen , aka: The Legend. I’ll discard the vegetables with you all in mind.

Better than Kurt. Let’s meet up in five years time when I shall have surpassed, in most ways that matter, Jesus Himself. (Let’s face it, it’s probably the next time I’ll post anything…)

Nick