How reading comics as a boy led to successful career as cartoonist for Milton Keynes author

Paul B Rainey, who is 57, has been passionate about comics since he was seven years old and started drawing his own cartoons.

His first book, Why don’t You Love Me, was published two years ago and became a huge hit, gathering reviews in the New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Print Mag

A science-fiction comedy that tells the story of a couple struggles through their unhappy marriage, it is currently being made into an A24 feature film starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Now Paul’s second book, There’s No Time Like The Present, is due to be published on March 29 by publishers Drawn & Quarterly – and the story is set in Milton Keynes.

The book is described as a funny and tender comic about a world where everyone can see their future. Episodic and dryly funny, it hits on some deep truths about humanity.

Paul, who lives on Emerson Valley, will host a launch of the book in CMK Waterstones at 6.30pm on Wednesday April 23. Tickets are available here.

He said: “There’s No Time Like The Present is about a group of friends with, let’s say, geeky tendencies, and their relationships. Their lives seem boring and pedestrian except they live in Milton Keynes in a world in which time travel actually exists.

"Apart from being able to access the Ultranet, a form of the Internet that allows the characters to download TV shows and movies from the future, life seems frustratingly unchanged for them in what they’re told is a new utopia.”

Paul had been drawing cartoons since he was a child, and remembers using the school photocopier and stapler to produce his own books as a teenager.

"When the internet came along, I started to post my strips online as well as continuing to self-publish them. In 2013, after 27 years of trying, I started to regularly have my work published in VIZ Comic,” he said.

In 2020, after 11 attempts, Paul won the Observer newspaper Graphic Short Story Prize. The strip told the tale of him encountering Madonna in The Cricketers pub in Oldbrook in 1985!