2025!

It has been a magnificent year. It has been a long year. It has been a year full of drawing, editing and learning new ways to make pictures and tell stories.

From the Lethbridge Film Festival poster I designed last February, to Lavender Menace’s Past Shelves, to Catcophony, this year has brought all of the Riso. Thanks to a workshop with Typewronger Books and taking some wild leaps, I have loved learning how this process works and the shapes it makes.

As the Genocide in Gaza continues, comics have been a source of learning and solidarity. A small self published collection of my comics has raised over £200 for Animator Haneen, who continues to run stop-motion workshops for women and children in Gaza. Unrelenting bombardment, new annexations and hunger strikes see in a new year in Occupied Palestine. I will continue to bear witness in panels.

I was lucky enough last year to have time to experiment with illustration, building on the style I developed during 2024, The Year of the Shenk. For a moment last spring I got to revisit a collaboration with a good friend Fiona, who runs Skylos Ecology with her wife Tracey in Australia. They work with detection dogs to research, manage and monitor ecology on the continent. I don’t usually have time to play and experiment. I try and make up for that in the diary comics. It’s almost why they started. But to work larger and with someone else’s prose is rare gift.

It has been a wonderful year for commissions. Past Shelves and the LIFF poster, I’ve already mentioned but there were a couple of others of note. Ian from ACE Records hunting me down to design the cover for Bob Stanley’s Vietnam era compilation ‘Safe in my Garden’ was a real highlight. Then in November, Edinburgh Book Trust gave me one of the short stories from their Scotland’s Stories project to illustrate for Book Week Scotland. It was an honour to be trusted with the interpretation of someone else’s words and I have grown to really love this little 12 panelled comic.

And then there is Little. After The Shenk’s completion and subsequent publication of ‘The Book of Murmurs’ I didn’t know how to leave the Fault. I also didn’t know how to stay. These little 3 panel vignette’s have taken root and may yet develop into something bigger. For now, they remain a pebble in my pocket I can run a thumb over, reminding me of the shore where I found it.

Leaving Instagram and the shifting currents of how I make work in the Post-Murmurs world, have made these diary comics harder to keep up. They were such a staple for my creative life during lockdown and in those strange, otherworldly post-pandemic years. Now I wonder what outlets they will find going forward. I am in a transitional moment with how I write and what I share and I wonder what new shapes will manifest in 2026. The back catalogue of these panelled dreamscapes and streams of consciousness can be found here.

The Book of Murmurs. A title that was gleaned from The Shenk collection by my very patient and incredibly kind editor, Conrad Groth. The Year of the Shenk was such a frantic dash, it was hard to find the energy to go back and make the edits required of me. I’m unable to write about the process yet. I still haven’t truly been able to appreciate that those comics are going to be a book loosed on the world in a little over two months. This is a detail of the cover we finally pulled together over summer. Keep your eyes peeled for a few celebratory launch events this March! I would love to see you in real life and shake your hand.

I attended my first comics fair, Thought Bubble, at the tail end of 2024. My girlfriend and I dragged approximately 1 Billion Shenks and some other nonsense to Harrogate via Accrington (all hail the cats Helen and Sprout!). It was overwhelming, overstimulating and utterly brilliant. I wanted more.

In 2025 I realised how early you have to apply for comics fairs by missing every single deadline except Sequential Scotland and Edinburgh Zine Fair. I drew such creative strength and energy from the artists and comics lovers I met at these two excellent events! I remain eager to do more in 2026…if I remember to apply on time…

So here we go into a New Year. I have dreams and schemes. I have The Book of Murmurs coming out and new work itching to be realised. I will leave you with these cats who were experiments made at the beginning of the year. They are how I started last year, working out how to draw again for no other reason than the joy of covering paper.

2026 remains a blank page ready to be filled with unfamiliar lines.

Let us draw boldly with love, hope and the tireless curiosity which cannot help but tell new stories.