Life on the Fourth Floor

Three struggling writers, Jack (a bad novelist), Michael (an unpopular cartoonist) and Charlotte (a neurotic film critic), live together on the same floor of a tower block and do what a writer does best: procrastinate, obsess, play games and try (unsuccessfully) to find a date for the weekend.

Distracting them further are the other residents of their floor: Shivani, Charlotte's self-assured friend who constantly cajols her into being more confident; Bob, a computer geek who hasn't moved from his chair since he moved in; Amy, the flatmate from hell who is every bitchy queen bee from every high school movie combined into a single entity; and Kingyo, a little purple cat that steals sanwiches.

How do you beat writer's block? What do you do when the guy you're dating is too perfect? How do you cope with criticism? Which religion is the best? How many times should you let your flatmate insult you before you shave her bald while she sleeps? Life on the Fourth Floor offers answers to none of these questions... and many more!

My name is David J. Bishop, I'm the writer and illustrator of Life on the Fourth Floor. I'm 25 and live with my fiancée in England. I currently work a full time job in addition to my duties as a cartoonist, which itself has the same hours as a part-time job.

I've always been good at drawing and I've loved cartoons my whole life. I first found out you could publish comics on the internet in the early 2000s. Shortly after that I changed from filling sketch books with illustrations to working on a comic strip, which featured two characters based on myself and my best friend. I submitted thirty comic strips to the school newspaper, which published all thirty in its first issue and then disappeared without a trace. My cartoons formed 90% of the newspaper's content, so they had essentially published a one-shot comic book of all my cartoons.

Apart from three. One comic strip they hacked up, arranging the images differently around a page that was not in the comic strip format and neglecting to credit me. One comic strip they refused to publish because the girls found it disgusting, even though the boys found it hilarious. The third comic strip they just didn't get. We don't talk about that strip.

2. I never wanted to work with editors again.

For one day I was the coolest kid in school. Pupils kept coming up to me and telling me they liked the comic. They also knew immediately that the bespectacled loser with the brown hair was supposed to be me; they had no idea who the girl he had a crush was supposed to be, but it didn't stop them from having theories. The fact is, I made her up. I created an avatar of myself in a fictional school where I could make anything happen and created an imaginary love interest who categorically refused to go out with him. I might have had some issues as a child.

I realised the web was the place to go, both to reach the widest possible audience and to prevent print editors from trying to mess with my work. My next project was going to be a webcomic.

I started that project when I was sixteen years old. For this one I decided to tone down the autobiographical elements and create original characters who weren't based on myself or anyone I knew, so that people would stop asking me how much of it was real and who the characters really were. I also decided to make the comic about people in their mid-twenties living in a block of flats. In one afternoon, during a car ride to my grandparents' house, I designed five characters I was really happy with and a sixth character whose design wasn't quite right. I came up with a name that I thought was really cool and designed an awesome logo. Then I started drawing and writing the comics. Life on the Fourth Floor was born!

Now I am in my mid-twenties and I really do live in a block of flats. I would go back and correct what my teenage self imagined it would be like, so that the comics lined up with reality. I would, if he hadn't absolutely nailed it. I know, what are the odds?

I created Life on the Fourth Floor in 2004 and launched the site in 2005. I was so embarrassed by the quality of the comics I had drawn the year before that I published my entire thirty-comic buffer in the first couple of weeks, then I began my first job and disappeared without a trace. Since then the comic has established a responsible and consistent update schedule. At time of writing I've been doing this for eight years. It's been the best eight years of my life.