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So, it’s 2026… What’s been going on?

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Unless you were following my Instagram account (@AKAhesir), 2024 and 2025, must have seemed pretty quiet for me looking on here in particular. I’ve certainly drifted away from posting on Twitter, something I thought might not happen as I mainly follow creatives and didn’t have much news or other drama on there. But it slowly all began to seep in… I tried other platforms like Mastodon and I have a Bluesky account that I update once in a while, but still I’ve been pretty quiet…

In truth, I stepped back a little from posting due to the lack of need for the usual cycle of gearing up and socmed promoting for shows like Thought Bubble and the local comic cons I usually attended. This was in part due to making a decision to not apply to attend any shows for a year (which just turned into two, almost without me noticing), that mostly due to an increased workload that saw me setting aside, or at least easing back on, my own projects.

I’ll discuss that workload briefly in a moment, but first, did this mean that I produced no personal work during this non-hiatus/hiatus, well, no… again, I’ll get to those…

So, what have I been working on?

Well, firstly I’ve been continuing to produce more of the Maritime Tales heritage outreach comics for Hull Maritime. The Lily and Jacob comics are now up to Issue 5, all done and all about in the world, and available digitally for those of you able to access borrowbox via your library card.

This has been a great project, and I’ve loved working on it. Getting to both write and draw the books felt a little like working on my own projects, and so I’ve been really appreciative of the Maritime Museum project choosing comics as the medium to reach out to the public during their downtime for their major refurbishment. 

The Ravenser Odd issue of the comic was a particular highlight for me, allowing me not only to work with exceptional people in academia and The National Archive, but also to have illustration work as well as the comic tied to a travelling exhibition that looked at the history and legacy of the now lost medieval island. The process of drawing the island was also fun in that I decided to make the model of the island that the kids in the comics made, built from basic household materials and a whole bunch of charity-shop bought monopoly houses. Which worked out better than I’d hoped.

So what’s next with the Maritime Tales comics? Well, Lily and Jacob, the two kids in the stories, have grown over the four year project and have gone from inquisitive and precocious kids to young people with goals for their future, and this year will see the last issue of the comic being produced to coincide with the reopening of the museum.

So that will be that, sort of… there has been some talk of collecting the books, and maybe expanding them. I guess you’ll have to watch this space. 

There’s also another legacy of those comics, in that they seem to have reached audiences further from Hull and the East Yorkshire than I would have imagined. Some of those people have since reached out and offered projects in a similar vein, i.e. comics as a medium to tell stories related to heritage, history and culture.

One of those was Dr Jon Hogg of Liverpool University’s history department, who presented his idea for a short comic looking at the results of a long research project that gathered the recollections of military veterans of the Christmas Island nuclear tests carried out in the 1950s.

These oral histories, interviews held with in many cases elderly veterans and their families, were not always comfortable reading/listening. It’s a powerfully emotive subject area, with inherently political and social ramifications, occasionally touching on very dark themes indeed. 

Don’t get me wrong, some of the stories were indeed uplifting and beautiful. Incredibly personal stories.

These personal stories were the primary inspiration for the comics we produced, and though we avoided quoting directly the actual oral testimony and likeness of those individuals interviewed, we tried to create a working amalgam of some of the stories told, and cover as much of the difficult legacy effecting the nuclear test survivors and their families.

The comic received a soft launch in a ashcan self published form at the London launch of the film that came out of the same University research.

Out of this work came a second “Atomic Tales” book, current being written and thumbnailed by myself for English Heritage. But more about that as it develops, and is completed hopefully sometime around the summer.

During this time I had also been approached by a musician of some standing, more famous perhaps for their work in the 80’s but still actively touring and writing music. This was with the notion of producing a comic version of a short episode from their youth, a project that had originally been written for another medium.

This book will be just shy of 100pgs, and is currently ob my drawing board, again, hopefully coming to fruition this year (maybe in time for a proper comics launch at one of those big end of the year events, who knows? I’ve applied again this year, I guess we’ll see what happens).

In work for hire land, during my time away from the festivals and cons, I also got to work on more stuff for Time Bomb Comics, not only producing some full colour, digitally painted interior art for Westernoir, and appearing in Time Bomb’s anthology, Quantum. These books made there way into pretty much every WHSmiths across the country, and their analogue airport and rail station newsagent stores in the Low Countries up through Germany and into Scandinavia.

As a bonus I also was asked to produce cover art for the collected edition that will be hitting Kickstarter, I believe sometime early this year.

You can find an interview with the author of the Westernoir Tales issues here:

On top of those, I’ve also recently finished a project in which I was asked to produce a series b/w “comic style” panel illustrations for a combined environment agency project looking at a Managed Flooding/Reintroduced Wetlands project, commissioned in part by another member of the UK comics community who until now have not had a chance to work with. This project is currently approaching completion and was another interesting heritage/culture project.

Outside of comics, I’ve produced a whole bunch of TTRPG illustration over the last couple of years, working on SF, Fantasy and Lovecraftian Mythos related Espionage books, a selection of which you can find below.

And I also got to produce more work for We Evolve’s Aegean books, set during the heroic age of Ancient Greece, I particularly enjoyed working on a slightly different version of the figure of Medusa…

Medusa has been on my drawing board in one form or another for the last few years…

…as I’m still plodding along slowly bringing my comic book version of her story together.

So, it’s been busy. And the world outside has in many cases been terrible. But maybe this year is the year to try and get back to a table and chat to some lovely folk who like to buy comics.

Oh, and although I said I’d not really been working on my own stuff, I did have time to plot out/write and in some cases thumbnail a couple of short folktale-esque comics… one based on a carving at one of the world’s oldest sites of human gathering, the other a strange rehash of Jack and The Beanstalk… maybe I can get one of those done for the end of the year too.

For those of you that liked the model building stuff I did for Ravenser Odd, you might well like my second YouTube channel, particularly if TTRPGs are your thing… – maybe go check out – https://m.youtube.com/@garethsleightholme-hesir

#JustPaperAndInk – a pop up indie comics show

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So, this happened earlier in the year… #JustPaperAndInk (article by Broken Frontier)

June through July (2023) to be precise.

Basically a small independent comics creator pop up exhibition curated by Sean Azzopardi of PhatComics and myself. And, I guess, sort of an extension of the discreet exhibition he had held at his former shared studio space, called, “Framed”. with some of the artists who had showcased their work there, also having work in this show.

The show ran for just over a month, we were based in a shop unit ran as “The Space”, a arts project ran by a local access to arts organisation and pop-up gallery team called Creat-Hive, and we were just a couple of doors along from Hull’s Forbidden Planet store in The Prospect Centre.

I got to spend my days during the show away from my usual working form home environment, and at my temporary drawing board in the gallery space itself which as always was both fun and eye opening. The show itself bookended around the Hull Comic Con weekend event too, which was great as we were able to promote that as part of our show (one of the original thoughts that had instigated our event to be fair).

I chatted to a lot of people over those few weeks, as we had over 700 people come in and engage with the work/exhibition (ie not including the people who came in looking for other things (shops, another gallery, etc) or who left once they realised it was about comics). Which is a fair amount of people. We got to chat to about #MakingComics, comics as a fairly democratised artform, and storytelling medium, and even got to discuss the possibility of further projects with other organisations in the city, and outside of it.

I cant thank enough those people who took time out of their schedules to come and chat, it was very much appreciated, so cheers… you know who you are.

We even did a radio spot with our local BBC Humberside comics fan Kofi.

The show itself was divided up into four main sections, “the big noisy art“ at the front to draw people in (which seemed to work, cheers to Sean for providing those big fun colour pieces). Then we had a section showcasing the work of several “UK indie creators“, with which we added some hard copy examples of the books hung on the wall to show the work “in its natural environment” rather than a gallery wall (to paraphrase Crumb). And we made sure to show the creators SocMed links too, in the hope that even a couple of additional follower always helps, who knows?

Followed by two linked sections looking at “Comics Made In Hull“… which was a surprisingly big section, not only for the visitors, but for us as well. We even had someone come in on the first day and tell us that they made comics in Hull too. Which was great… Comics, the unseen communities, laughs.

…and finally “Hull In Comics“, a section that showed the city itself appearing as a character in some of that local work.

As part of the interpretation in the show, we added a number of text panels looking at other aspects around the world of making comics, so that it might be perhaps more accessible for those who had left comics behind some time ago, or just for those who had never ever really engaged with the medium.

In these sections we discussed the early history of the art form, how comics are seen in Europe by comparison to the UK & US, the balance of traditional and digital comics work currently being produced (and the threats posed by so called AI/Plagiarism Software), the use of comics in education, new voices, representation and the ever present dilemma of “But, Is it Art?”.

Amongst these we scattered a number of quotes by creators, critics and celebrated comics readers from within and outside the medium, who weren’t in the show, but who had discussed important aspects of comics and their value.

We also had a few books from our own collections to chat about and use as examples in discussion.

All in all it seemed pretty well received, and we have discussed holding onto the name of the show #JustPaperAndInk for further shows and exhibitions, workshops etc.

So I guess watch this space!

NB – I’ll consider this post a raw draft… I’m sure I have some better photos than this, I’ll replace them ASAP and delete this note.

Flintlock, wrapping things up.

On By hesirIn Comics Art, Commissions, Uncategorized1 Comment

So my run on Flintlock has come to a close. Working on the three book second half of the series from Timebomb Comics was a real joy, and really pushed me in terms of my art, and art choices. All in all a great experience and so cheers to Steve Tanner for trusting me with his baby (trying to fill the shoes of book 1-3 Artist Anthony Summey was no mean task either).

This last book, was an extra special outing for me as I got, not only to contribute interior art, but to paint the cover for Flintlock, Book 6.

I’m going to miss it, and I though I thought this might be the last time I’d be tackling horses in a while, it’s not, so hopefully the groundwork I did across these three books puts me in good stead, laughs (it seems that when fate takes away horses with one hand, it may well deal you centaurs with the other).

The image below (low res version used here) was used in the Kickstarter as a Print/reward, it was fun to collate a range of the type of imagery I got to draw into one “movie poster” image.

Steve and Timebomb have also produced a beautiful slipcase-like box to house all your copies of the book now too, just in case you wanted your collection to really stand out. And check out their new project Quantum (article from DiwnTheTubes.net), hitting newsstands and news magazine outlets soon.

A Mystery Comics Project.

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I recently received a delivery of the print version of #TheMysteryOfTheWhirlyGig #comic I made for @BarnsleyMuseums during the lockdown summer of 2020 – a project that started out as a digital #interactivecomic to help those families who wished to still participate with the Elsecar Museum activities during lockdown and now continues as part of a full activity/educational pack sent out to similar families, so cheers to Sarah Taylor (thanks also to @HotMetalPress for a great print job) #comics #museums #education #elsecar
#CCSubtitles to the following video are available on YouTube.


The comic in both its internet experience and print versions includes not only the original ten part, 30+ page comics narrative, but also features puzzles and board game style interactive elements in which the reader/players can decide the routes the protagonists take as they move around in time and around the old site on which the Elsecar Heritage Centre us based. There are also “how to…” pages that look at making comics, board games, and how to make the principle object in the story in card, craft and making being an element that features heavily in the story for some of the characters. There was also the use of QR codes which where integrated into images of the technology the protagonists where using, but still allowed the reader to use a QR code reader to add an extra dimension including further historical information, read-along videos with staff, reenactment videos with actors in historical dress and even a “how to cook period food video”.

All in all, a challenging but great little comics project to work on.

The images above where some of the early character tests for the project, from which our protagonists where selected by a panel of young museum goers. One of the villains at the bottom even got to appear as cutout figures as part of an “Easter egg” hunt of sorts around the heritage centre itself.

…and this was the gang they selected and so our main protagonists.

Here you can see one of the devices I used to help convey Harry (a BSL, British Sign Language user)’s use of sign language. i.e a graphic of two hands making the sign for “sign language” attached to the “speech” balloon, the tail of which always points in his case, to his hands rather than his mouth.

Joe Hakim’s Culture Show appearance with Sean Azzopardi – 06/02/2020

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Had fun the other night chatting on Joe Hakim’s Culture Show on BBC Radio Humberside.

Joe invited Sean Azzopardi and myself onto the show to talk about comics.

Joe’s a great host and as he’s a fan of comics he asks insightful questions. We covered a range of comics related topics from the general attitude to comics in the UK and the US versus other parts of the world, the kind of work we find ourselves doing in comics and some process stuff, as well as some specific projects like Sean’s Sea Shepherd project, and my work so far on Pat Mill’s Space Warp.

Plus we mentioned that we’d decided to figure out what Hull has in terms of a local comics creating scene by setting up a Comics, Drink ‘n’ Draw night.


Over the last year Sean and I have been tabling together locally at some of the Indie and Craft markets since he moved up from London. It’s been interesting, as despite us both doing comics, our work is very different. Sean’s work is predominantly autobiographical work, whereas mine is… well, y‘know, monsters and occult detective stuff. Regardless it’s been great being able to hang out and chat to another comics creator, meet up for a cuppa, discuss work (and 70’s rock, laughs) and even pop over to hang out at his studio in Old Town (at HUB-A) every now and again.


It was with that social aspect for comics creators in mind (let’s face it, a lot of us spend most of our time on our own at the drawing board working late into the night/morning) that we began discussing ways to encourage more local comics people come out into the light to talk to each other. And with that Hull Independent Comics Creatives (HICC) was born. It has its own Twitter feed now >HERE<, and we were promoting the idea by putting a HICC label on our respective local comic event stands. It may well be revived or reincarnated in another form at some point. All of which then led into us trying out the idea of the Hull Comics Drink and Draw event at one of old town’s arts friendly bars, The Brain Jar. We’ll see how that goes I guess.

Anyway, you should go check out Sean’s work over at his PhatComics website or on Twitter @seanazz. He has an exhibition of his Sea Shepherd work running over the next couple of months (Feb – April), Sea Shepherd @ ArtLink and a bunch of great books to check out over at his online store.

If you like those, go check out Sean’s Patreon too.

You can also find a link to Joe’s Radio show >HERE<, and his Twitter feed @joehakim