Goblin Library Dispatch July 2025
July has been a time….
The first week of the month saw the ending of my girlfriend’s residency. It was an incredible three and a half weeks of puppets, hare, mushrooms and buzzards. It was busy. While in my mind a residency is a time to wander and dream and ruminate on the world, in reality the pressure that came with having to make the most of the gift of time and space was a lot.
Crash landing back in the city, my girl goes directly into another project and I. Make. Comics. I started drawing goblins when I worked in an Edinburgh coffee shop. You’ll know it by all the goblins that are everywhere. My ongoing goblin comic collaboration with this place keeps me in ink, pencils and biscuits and I love that I still get to make stories for these little monsters.
Our co-working space at The Lavender Menace has become one of my highlights of the month. A relaxed place to be chipping away at everything from comics and scripts, to PhD reading and admin, this wee group of queer creatives makes my heart sing. This month I drew comics for fun. I moved the pencil around the page and didn’t worry about what I was making. It remains a liberating few hours and I cherish it.
2024 finally caught up to me. The Shenk was a wild endeavour and it’s only now that I’m feeling like myself again. I am told time and time again that Burn Out is Real but it was only when the fog of the exhaustion began to clear these last few weeks I realised that’s what I had done to myself. Between writing, drawing, colouring, promoting and selling 240 odd pages of comic, making Comics for Palestine, weekly goblins and working on commissions I was a dried out husk of a person. Finally, by the third week of July, my brain said No More.
I lay on the couch for a week. It wasn’t even like I was having a great time. I couldn’t move.
I feel better for it. I highly recommend doing it sooner. Having a holiday, you know? Freelance brain can be relentless and I am still working on not running entirely on adrenalin and dread.
My partner and I finally went to a Riso Workshop with Typewronger. You can read all about that and see what I made here . Of course, then I got carried away and decided to turn a series of my Palestinian comics into a Riso’d book. I wanted to take them to Sequential Scotland on Saturday in the hopes of raising money for Animator Haneen’s work because I can’t imagine a life where I don’t have access to art as a tool of survival.
Obviously redrawing 16 pages worth of comics, then making two colour separations of these comics meant I had no time to actually send it to anyone who could print it.
I refigured the layouts so they were two colour digital prints and have sent it into the world with my fingers crossed, hoping for the best.
Watch this space.
I am making spells, cutting lino and packing up comics for Sequential. What I am most excited about is seeing other folks work. Being surrounded by other Scottish and Scotland based artists, zinesters, graphic novelist and comic creators.
Seeing other artists making art in the face of everything makes me feel strong.
Are you coming too?
Stay inky and outraged,
Goblin Out.