Saturday, September 20, 2025

Disappearing Completely...

About a decade ago (blimey) I started work on a project with Helen Reid at LCI*. Riffing on Stanley Spencer's great unfinished 'Christ In The Wilderness' series, what emerged was a 64-page comic - it became the first of a trilogy of publications that my good friend Simon astutely described as a love letter to Leeds.

In the book, the nameless protagonist holes up in an abandoned office space on the outskirts of the city, where all the narrative stuff happens.

The decaying carcass of that building (the old Southpoint block which - ironically - once housed the councils environmental health team) became more than a location and ended up functioning like a significant character in the story. 

It occupies a weirdly iconic place in the Leeds skyline, but now it's coming down.
It's amazing that it's been left standing for so long, but I'll be very sad to see it go.

Meanwhile though, the comic has since been republished by Valley Press and you can bag a copy of the here from the OK Comics website :)






*Leeds Church Institute





 

Saturday, September 13, 2025

Gigs.


I have a few projects that are about to see the light of day, and I want to tell you about them here. (At some point, I may indulge in crude emotional blackmail in order to get you to buy them - so there's something to look forward to :D )

Gigs is a 270+ page graphic novel that My writer mate Mark and I first began discussing in the Spring of 2019 - it's been a long time coming :)

Published by the excellent folk at Top Shelf, it's due out next June; but in the meantime, there are preview pages available to view in their online catalogue here...

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Graphic Novelling

So I've got a big graphic novel coming out next year.

Written by Mark Mosedale and drawn, lettered and coloured by me, it'll be published by Top Shelf.

I'll be promoting the hell out of it when it lands :)


In the meantime though, I'm working on another one, this time with my mate Simon Hall on writing duties.

It's too early to say much about it - we're only about 20 pages in - but it's going quite well I think.

Here's some photos from my desk today, showing my (possibly unintelligible) process as I wrangle the pagination and panelling.






 

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Exhibition things...



I have a show of work on at the mo, in our local cafe/deli/bistro, the Lidgett Lane Larder.

It's a joint exhibition with my friend Judy Merchant. We've been curating shows in the Larder since 2017, and this is the first time that we've exhibited work in there together - Judy's layered textile and paint pieces alongside my woodcuts and lino prints (dating back to 2010).

These four works are from a series depicting interesting places* in Leeds.

I always listen to music on my iPod when I'm out drawing, and the text on each print here is the opening line of a song** that was playing as I drew.

I like the way that you can read meaning into the words when they're juxtaposed against the images like this, and at the show opening I had some really great conversations with folk telling me what these works meant top them.

And seeing them up together in a set like this adds an extra layer of room for interpretation - they function maybe a bit like comic panels, with meanings unfolding across the sequence as you read them...

It's fascinating hearing where people's imaginations take them.

All the work is for sale (framed prints are a snip @ £40, and the unframed ones go for £25

The show is up till the end of July, and the food in the Lidgett Lane Larder makes it well worth the visit :)


*Gledhow Towers, The Black Prince statue in Queens Square, Leeds Uni's Parkinson Building, and the Dortmund Square Drayman statue.

**'Sennen' by Ride, 'Trellick Tower' by Emmy the Great, 'Teen Angst' by M83 and 'Mathematics' by Cherry Ghost...



 

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Speculative fish thing

 Not much work about at the moment :(


So I'm doing some speculative stuff in the hope of hitting the jackpot with some book ideas.

This one is fish-based.

(Cropped screengrab detail)