Goblin Library Dispatch August 2025
Dear August, you raced by like you didn’t care I was there at all…
The month began with a 6 am wake up call. The first Sequential Scotland was being held in Glasgow and I was tabling and panel talking at the event. I scrambled at the end of July to have new things to sell and a super human amount of coffee was required to get my girlfriend and I there when the day was suddenly and quite cruelly upon us.
Chris made sure my stall set up was more than just a pile of comics emptied out of a bag while I wept beneath a red table cloth. After Thought Bubble last year I figured I would be a little more prepared this time but no… she was out buying tiny pegs, string and other accoutrement even after the fair was open.
My disorganisation aside it was a beautifully curated and run event. I sold a few complete Shenk (a very limited number remain now…) and raised £130 for Animator Haneen’s GoFundMe with the Comics For Gaza Collection.
This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival invited to me to run a comic workshop and I agreed. And so we fed another Saturday into August’s relentless maw.
Despite always getting very nervous before these events and thinking about what I would have done differently for a long time (forever, mostly at night…) afterwards, I love seeing folks make zines and comics. I love getting people to draw. I love seeing how their minds work and what wild, beautiful and unexpected story telling gets put out into the world.
I cycle to work with my girlfriend three days a week. It’s an 18 mile round trip and there are ever changing seascapes and thistle heads turning to powder and I can’t think of a better way to start the day.
The secret wild places you find in and around Edinburgh never cease to amaze me.
There is a lot to be working on right now. My mind is electrically charged with new and old projects and I could spend my life at my desk flitting from ink to paint to typing and back again. It’s important to regularly take my whole body out of the house and put it on an adventure. My bicycle was my birthday present from me to me in 2021, and I adore it.
I was cycling through a graveyard to the supermarket and I spotted Georgia Hardstark from My Favorite Murder and loss my mind a little bit.
It is a lonely road, this illustration business. And since I started pursuing it seriously in 2010, podcasts have been one of my constant companions. There is radio, Youtube playlists and sometimes, good old fashioned albums (in digital form on my computer…) but MFM was drawn so deeply into some of the more complicated pages of The Shenk I can hear the episode when I look at them. Like a really modern and not very frightening stone tape…
I finally get to announce that Fantagraphics are publishing The Shenk. It’s going to be called The Book of Murmurs and should be out in the Winter of 2026. I can’t begin to express how exciting this is and how long it took to get here and how last year was a pretty intense way of going about it that I only half regret.
One of the last things I had the energy to do in 2024, in the throws of comic delirium, was send a complete collection of The Shenk, with spells, to Fantagraphics on a wing and a prayer. I can’t believe it worked out.
Follow your dreams! It’s really stressful and exhausting but worth it I think probably!
The razorbills are on the sea once more, their black and white penguin bodies keeping steady on the water, appearing and disappearing like magicians.
Their return makes me think of Gaza.
The third comic I made after October 7th was about razorbills. In comics I’ve made recently, I’ve tried to seek out and write about living Palestinian culture. The ferocity of both the diaspora, and those who remain in Gaza and the West Bank.
But it is hard to write about life amidst all this death. Above all things, September starts with ‘Free Palestine’ resounding in my very marrow.