Comics

Meet Vern and Lettuce, a sheep and a rabbit who are best friends and live in a tower block in the town of Pickle Rye. Originally published in weekly installments as a comic for The DFC (now The Phoenix Comic), you can read the whole story in Vern and Lettuce, my book of the collected comic strips, published by Bog Eyed Books.

Before Philip Reeve and I started making books together, we dared each other to make a story for The Phoenix Comic: I would write it, and Philip would do the drawings. We did it (although I did the final colouring), and it ran for four pages in Issue 44. Years later, it was the inspiration for our book Jinks & O'Hare Funfair Repair!

Way before David O’Connell and I made our Jampires picture book together, we did a comic jam: we started with the title, Jampires, and decided our comic would be 24 pages long. Then I drew a page, he drew a page, I drew a page, he drew a page, etc, and we took turns emailing the pages back and forth until we had a finished comic. We never consulted with each other while we were making it, and I had SO much fun waiting for the next page to arrive! Afterward, Dave printed it up and we sold the little book at indie comics festivals. We brought the comic to David Fickling and he commissioned us to turn it into a picture book, which became an entirely different story with the same title!

I made Riding the Alaska Marine Highway on a family trip to Seldovia, one of the locations that inspired the house in Oliver and the Seawigs and the Snowdovia setting in Pugs of the Frozen North, two of my books with Philip Reeve. My husband, Stuart, makes a special guest appearance with his comic, included at the end of this one.

I love making travel comics! Here’s a book-length comics journal I kept on a road trip around China with my family in 2011. The idea wasn’t to make a perfect comic (too many bumps in the road!), but to capture the wonder of being in a fascinating new place.

Here’s a 24-page comic I made for a 24-Hour Comic Marathon, as part of the Lakes International Comics Festival. (A whole comic book in 24 hours and no sleep!) You can buy it as part of comics anthology called 24 by 7.

Airship is a Comics Jam I did with my friend David O’Connell. We choose the airship as our theme and took turns drawing one page at a time, with a one-hour time limit per page, aiming to finish at 24 pages. We never knew where the other person was going to take the story next, and it was loads of fun!

Cyrano de Bergerac with Gérard Depardieu and Anne Brochet is my all-time favourite film, so I made a fan comic, focusing on one of the more minor characters.

Hourly Comic: this one’s quite old, from the days when I worked at home instead of the studio, but I still love it.

Seattle comics artist David Lasky sent me a beautifully letter in comics form, so I sent him back this one.