People say I'm morbid, just because I know I'm going to die.

Wait. Don't start celebrating just yet - I don't mean immediately (though of course that's always a possibility, at any time). I mean the fact that I'm going to die, as we all will, in the future. Sometimes it's a hard train of thought to shake. Sometimes I don't think about it all.

But mostly it catches me unawares - when reading a book, or staring off into space on a train, that sort of thing. And sometimes it makes me wonder why we bother. Why do some of us put ourselves through so much effort and stress in our lives, when at some uncertain point in our future (though the outcome itself is always certain) everything will stop, and we won't even realise it? Everything we've learnt, everything we've read or seen, will be lost. All of it.

(No, I'm not a religious man. You may have guessed.)

A few weeks ago I was at the San Diego Comic-Con. I crossed the Atlantic in a steel box with the other members of Ninth Art's editorial board, knowing that I'd be meeting many people at the convention who I'd either met before or had come to know over the Net. Which I did, and the whole thing went well. A pretty damn good time was had by all, and everyone left with a smile on their face.

'For a long time, I was fairly convinced I wasn't going to reach 30.' But one of those people - an artist, best-known for his work on a quality comic which should, if there were any justice, have a readership a hundred times what it does - posed me a question. A simple, casual question, which almost certainly wasn't expected to elicit the soapbox speech that it did.

He asked me what I was working on for the future, and whether I was soliciting work with The Big Publishers.

The short answer should have been, "Loads of indie stuff, and no."

But of course - this being me - he got the much longer, rambling answer. Which is where death comes into this conversation.

For a long time, I was fairly convinced I wasn't going to reach 30. Hell, for a while I didn't think I'd make 25. And while 30 is still a year off, having made it this far past 25 I'm reasonably confident that I'll still be waking up each day for the next twelve months or so.

So my 25th birthday was an eye-opener for me, to say the least. It made me look at many things - life, love and death - in a new light, coloured by the prospect that I may well still be around in thirty years.

See, I wasn't expecting that. My 'plan for life' up until that point had been a farce, and it was a rare day I gave any thought to long-term plans. So waking up to discover that not only was I 25, but was in reasonably good health and could probably expect to see a few more birthdays, forced me to think about the future. Insofar as any single event can be held accountable for a decision, that birthday was what finally made me get off my arse and start working on what I'd been meaning to do for years, but had continually put off:

Leaving something behind.

It's what every artist (and I use the term here to mean 'person who creates artistic works', whatever their discipline or profession) wants to do. Don't believe anyone who says it's not true. Writers, musicians, artists, sculptors, actors - if they tell you they're not hoping that people will still enjoy their work long after their death, they're either lying or insane.

The 'Legacy' can also mean a way of bequeathing one's children, of course - making enough money to ensure that the next generation doesn't have to scrimp and scrape Like What We Did. That form of legacy is common to almost everyone, not just artists. But artists will have the former instinct too.

Everyone wants to be Shakespeare, in their way.

The upshot of this isn't a revolutionary thought, or even uncommon. It's simply this:

We're only here for a short while, and every moment is precious. Why spend time creating something - something which, if your desires are realised, will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come - if you don't believe in it?

There are several valid answers to that question.

One: Because it will make you a shitload of money. There's nothing wrong with this. Western society is built upon people reaping huge amounts of money from business decisions in which they have precisely zero emotional involvement. The problem with this course of action - especially for artists - is when it becomes the consuming reason for working, and prevents them from doing any work at all that they believe in. This is how hacks are created.

Two: Because it brings enjoyment to others, even if not yourself. This sounds altruistic - philanthropic, even - until you consider that this is how Joel Silver justifies spending tens of millions of dollars producing works such as DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, which even the most charitably-minded critic would be hard pressed to label 'culturally significant'. And while there's nothing wrong with pop entertainment, even the Beatles grew up eventually. Ask yourself which album still gets played more often - PLEASE PLEASE ME... or REVOLVER?

Three: Don't. Just don't.

This isn't a quality issue. Ed Wood truly believed he was making landmarks of cinema, and look how they turned out. But he believed in what he was doing, and so the two reasons we remember and still watch Wood's films are because they're "So Bad They're Good!" - and because it's obvious to any sympathetic person that Wood had an unbridled passion for cinema and his stories, no matter how badly executed the final result.

'You can tell when an artist believes in their work. You can feel it.' It also has nothing to do with genre, target audience, sales figures or the size of your cheque. But you'd guessed that, right?

The old saying goes, "You can't take it with you". While you're alive, money is necessary and life is full of compromise. But when you're dead and buried (cremated, eaten by vultures, whatever) then the amount of money you earned will matter only to your inheritors and the taxman.

And your work will be judged solely on its merit.

Funnily enough, the comics business is full of compromise too. The common and sensible route in the industry as it stands - the 'traditional' way of working in comics, even though said 'tradition' is barely thirty years old - is to take a little of the first two attitudes above, bank your cheque and then spend what other time you have working on those projects that, yes, you believe in.

Seems to be happening less and less these days.

Because you can tell when an artist believes in their work. It's evident in every medium, and comics is no exception. That intangible something you get upon reading a particular comic that tells you, "Wow, this is powerful stuff. Heartfelt, even." Don't ask me to explain it - it's unquantifiable and intangible. But when it's there, you damn well know it is. You can feel it.

Newsflash: This is no longer 1989. The larger comics companies can ill afford to take more than a few risks, and generally move at speeds slightly faster than a polar ice sheet. Smaller, more agile companies are catching them in terms of long-term sales, with little to none of the attendant bureaucracy that has hampered artistic vision time and time again.

And in forty years' time I will be dead. I want the work I leave behind, or at least the great majority of it (because yes, I have a day job - one which no-one will even know existed in fifty years time, much less remember) to be something I believe in.

I apologised to the artist who'd been foolish enough to pose the question, feeling sure this was far more information than he'd actually wanted to know. To my pleasant surprise he replied, "No, I agree. I feel the same way."

Next question?

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

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