I was born in June 1969. My Scottish father was a civil engineer, working at the local council, and my English mother was a nurse. This, she said, helped her keep a level-head when it became apparent that I had been born with quite a serious rare congenital condition that saw me have thirteen major surgeries by the time I was six years old.

Because of this, I missed a lot of school, but my mum used the long hospital stays to teach me to read, partly by supplying me with comics to keep me occupied (despite patchy school attendance, I was ahead of my class at reading). She also supplied me with pencils and paper to draw on, so comics - reading and making them - became a very important form of escapism from the unpleasantness of hospital.

The earliest comics I remember were Asterix and Tintin - my mum used to buy me one a year for Christmas, alternating between the two. I also read The Dandy (I only read The Beano occasionally because I didn't approve of Dennis the Menace!) and titles such as Whizzer & Chips and Cor! As I got slightly older I became obsessed with adventure and war comics, my favourites being Battle Picture Weekly, Tiger, Warlord and Victor, as well as the DC Thomson Commando Picture Stories. If a comic had a free gift, I'd sometimes buy two copies and sell the gift at school - though I'd keep the comic.

When I was seven my parents divorced and my younger brother and I lived with our mum - at first we shared a couple of houses with other families, but we soon managed to get a council house of our own. Murray and I spent every other weekend with our dad, where he would take us swimming and then to the cinema, cultivating my love of films. We saw Star Wars on one of those outings, and became devoted fans. Within a few years dad moved to the United States, eventually settling in California. My mum, brother and I spent summer and Christmas holidays with my grandparents, leaving me with a nostalgic affinity for film musicals (The Wizard of Oz and Singin' In the Rain especially).

1982: I read 2000AD with my brother, and me reading Tiger with a cricket bat I later cut and made into a samurai sword!

By now I was reading 2000AD, and it not only became my new obsession, but made me realise my love of stories in comic form could actually be a career ambition. I'd also discovered American superhero comics and had a two or three-year flirtation with those. I picked at many different titles (they were sold in newsagents back then) but Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans emerged as my favourite. (I never really took to Marvel Comics, always preferring DC for some reason.) In my early teenage years I discovered Dez Skinn's Warrior magazine, and the potential of comics opened up to me in a way I'd never imagined thanks to stories such as Marvelman and V For Vendetta.

My teenage years saw me get into role-playing games in quite a big way - another form of escapism, especially since I was being bullied at school, and I would sometimes stay at home and spend all day writing and drawing, continuing the poor attendance record of my younger childhood. It was role-playing games that led me to discover the fanzine scene, and it wasn't long before I was self-publishing my own. A few months later, on my 16th birthday, I sat my final exam at school, and was quite glad to leave for good.

In the same year that I started my first fanzine and left school (1985), I started another life-long love, karate, and at the end of the year I went to live in the US with my dad. We lived in Glendale, California, where I studied karate with Shihan Takayuki Kubota, did a bit of painting and decorating for money, produced more fanzines, and got introduced to Apple Macs in the form of a Macintosh 512k.

It was a great year, but I got homesick and decided to return to England and see if I could get a place at art college. This didn't prove as easy as I hoped, but I eventually got accepted onto a general art course at the local technical college, staying there for six months before realising that I wasn't really a 'proper' artist and that my desire to tell stories in graphic form would never be catered for, so I dropped out.

The next few years saw me in and out of jobs while trying to get established as a self-employed illustrator, and continuing to self-publish comics (including starting to develop The Rainbow Orchid). After doing manual labour at a mushroom farm, an airport hotel, cleaning at a gym and designing newspaper ads, I undertook some intensive self-learning of several computer software packages and landed quite a nice job as a multimedia developer. As well as attaining my karate black belt, I played bass in a band, edited a local entertainments guide and became involved with local amateur dramatics - one year appearing in seven different productions! Tragically, after a misdiagnosis, my mum died of breast cancer in 1995. My creative output became all but a trickle for a couple of years.

1995: I'm in the middle in this scene from the Michael Frayn play Noises Off, playing Gary Lejuene.

Throughout all this I slowly got more and more illustration work. Using my writing and drawing ability in conjunction with my multimedia skills, I wrote an interactive food safety course which got bought up by a big health and safety company and, along with my brother (a computer science graduate), we were made directors of their new software division. This resulted in a very prosperous couple of years in which I also married my girlfriend of 10 years, Elyssa, a magazine editor.

But creatively and professionally my first love was comics, and eventually my spare-time illustration work grew enough to allow me to go freelance. With the British comics scene in decline, and realising that working in comics basically meant drawing other people's stories commercially, I stuck to book and magazine illustration, and decided to concentrate on making comics just for my own pleasure.

This resulted in me creating The Rainbow Orchid, which was at first serialised in a quarterly comic called BAM! I then collected and self-published it before taking it to a wider audience online. Soon after this, comics started to have something of a resurgence and I started to get interest from publishers. I was asked to create a strip for The DFC, a new weekly children's comic from David Fickling Books, and for a short while worked with Philip Pullman. Interest in The Rainbow Orchid led to me getting a literary agent, and finally to publication with Egmont UK in August 2009.