At The Big Draw, Covent Garden (Pic: John Stilgoe) I am a full-time freelance cartoonist based in Broadstairs, Kent, England, where I live with my wife, Kath, and our two children. I am 40 and have been drawing cartoons for about as long as I can remember. When I was about seven I wrote to TV's Jim'll Fix It to see if I could edit The Beano for a day. Jim never fixed it, but a couple of years later I did have a single-frame gag cartoon published in Plug comic, the long-forgotten Beano spin-off. Ignorant as I was of copyright law, it was a total rip-off of a cartoon that I had seen in TV Times! No one seemed to notice though. Throughout my school days I continued to draw cartoons for school magazines and the like. After school, inspired by Viz comic, I set up DoodleBug, a self-published comic, with a group of friends. Portrait of me drawn by my nephew Oscar, when he was nine At university I drew cartoons for college magazines and earned extra beer money drawing caricatures for student union election posters. After college my first attempt at making a living from cartoons floundered when many of the dubious "adult" comics (ie poor Viz clones) for whom I was drawing decided that they didn't really need to pay their cartoonists. Still, I'll always have such prestigious strips as "Crap Alan" on my CV! Eventually I decided to get a "proper" job and I trained to be a journalist. But I always continued to draw cartoons, for magazines and private commissions, as I worked as a reporter for a local paper and later as a sub-editor at the Press Association, the Daily Mirror and The Times. (I've still not managed to shake off journalism, as I'm currently editor of The Jester, the newsletter of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain.) Now I'm a cartoonist full-time. It's a precarious life, there's no pension or medical scheme, but hey, I get to draw silly pictures for a living.