I'm kind of weird, in that I've been drawing since I could hold a pen, and I've been writing stories since I was old enough to know how to spell - but actually took me a good long while to realise that hey, I could do both at the same time.
Unless you count the illustrated story about trolls living together in a cave in the woods that I made when I was 7 (it was a school assignment, to practise writing), I didn't actually draw my first proper comic until I was about 16. I'd written tons and tons of prose before than - I've got more unfinished novels lying around than you can shake a stick at - but that was the first time I sat down and made an actual comic.
It was, frankly, completely terrible. But I learned a lot along the way, and applied that to the next comic I made, and the next one, and the next - and then kind of never stopped drawing comics.
Comics were present in my life from the very start, though - my mom used to read Asterix to me and my brother as a bedtime story, and I grew up reading tons of Franco-Belgian comics and domestically produced Swedish comics. Never got too into American mainstream superheroes, but somewhere around the age of 15, I discovered Hellboy, and fell entirely in love. Also, about that same time, Sweden was going through the so-called "manga-boom" - Swedish publishers were importing, translating and releasing tons of manga - so I read my fair share of that, too.
