As a child, Nixon spent much of his time drawing and sketching, and his artistic skills were recognised when he was seven years old by teachers at Cromwell Road School which he attended in South Bank.
Although his time at art college was cut short by the death of his father, Nixon gained employment locally as a lithographic artist and left in 1965 to pursue his career as a full-time cartoonist, initially for DC Thomson of Dundee.
During this transition, Nixon met and married Rita Kelly and after living in Middlesbrough for several years they moved to Guisborough, North Yorkshire, where they raised their four children Paul, Tony, Wendy and Catherine.
In The Beano, he started out drawing Little Plum in the early 1960s after Leo Baxendale left DC Thomson.
Nixon returned to DC Thomson in 1984 after being asked to by new Beano editor Euan Kerr, and began drawing Roger the Dodger again, as well as creating Ivy the Terrible in 1985.