So, it’s 2026… What’s been going on?

On February 12, 2026February 12, 2026 By hesirIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

On November 7, 2023 By hesirIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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.}

The Margin – a fantasy comic / work in progress

On March 23, 2023March 23, 2023 By hesirIn Comics Art, Sketchbook1 Comment

Well, I’m still trying to figure out what this might look like on the site as it progresses. But I thought rather than leaving everything in script limbo, I might as well throw some art down, even if these things/pages are little more than scrappy or rough thumbnails. It will at least make the task quicker and more fluid as I pull any final version together. But here we’ll be able to watch the early version unfold (even if things change as it turns to print), and that might be fun.

So firstly, what is The Margin? Well if you read the rambling post that was “Making use of this thing”, in the latter portion I talked about wanting to do a fantasy comic, something a little more high fantasy, probably allied to my rekindled love of playing, writing and running fantasy TTRPGs, but also part of something older that I started writing way back (on the BBC Writing site and DeviantArt under the name Hesirion). Regardless, this new effort is definitely allied to the ttrpg art I’ve been making of late.
–

So this, *gestures broadly with arms*, will be that. Likely as not it will be a little clunky, as it’s an experiment, a little more freeform and meandering than even my usual standard, but it will be a way of working the kinks out of the visual storytelling whilst still, making/finishing something… even if that something I’d less polished and, well… finished. Or that’s what I’m going to tell myself. So, I guess I’ll sett up a page in the side bar dedicated to this one particular storyline, and we’ll see where we go from there. It will be something I’ll be doing between other more pressing (ie paying) projects, but it will hopefully trundle along at its own pace. Oh, and it will be in rough colour too… here the first few pages.

So “Welcome to Azhereon”…and The Margin.

Those Vikings are still lurking about…

On February 18, 2023 By hesirIn Art, Collaborations, Comics ArtLeave a comment

As I mentioned earlier in “Half Of Something…”, I have some unfinished books in the wings, some have been hanging about longer than others. But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten them. Case in point, the third and final book of the Viking Saga trilogy, instigated by Rob Jones of Madius Comics (now legendary comics letterer in his own right), with art and interjections by me.

The first two books, The King’s Leap and Ake’s Trial seemed to hit their marks, getting some favourable reviews even from non-fantasy comics fans, and we had planned the third book, almost immediately.

Life, however, sometimes gets in the way, and other things needed to be dealt with. I pencilled the book, and started inking it, but it just didn’t get all the way to the finish line.

I’d like to think I can get it (that third book) there this year, but I’m not going to make any promises. We’ve even talked about a full colour collected (and maybe expanded) edition, but that will be further down the line still.

The book/s was/were supposed to be a cycle, both in the mythological definition and in terms of the actual narrative structure itself. So getting the complete trilogy done would really make sense of it all.

In the meantime, here’s some pencils with the text overlaid, a preview of things to come, if you will. Enjoy…

Making use of this thing…

On February 18, 2023 By hesirIn Comic Cons, Comics Art, Conventions & Festivals, Sketchbook1 Comment

The Pandemic… Lockdown… it feels like it was an event horizon. It pulled a whole bunch of time toward it, stretching it, making it both vast and now weirdly disconnected and disorienting as we figure out how to go on.

In all that time it seemed like I was busy with other things, I seem to have just utterly failed to use this blog, this site, whether to update anything about my comics work of late, or to just post the occasional piece of art.

I need to change that.

Going forward, it would be good to use this thing not only for promoting work or the thing I’m currently working on, but to add process stuff and again, and maybe get back to doing some reviews of other peoples stuff.

But changes are afoot. The livery of my show stands has been pretty CONsistent for the last few years… with that clunky old b/w image of Harry from The Cthulhiad making my stand look like an old grainy silent movie cover on a shelf full of contemporary blue rays, laughs.

But this year I’m going to look at changing it up, to try and match the way my work output has changed…

The images above show the artwork for my new Con/Event Banners.

It’s odd, but I had a whole bunch of plans for my comics, first just before Brexit, then just before the Pandemic Lockdowns, both events unceremoniously brushed those plans off my drawing board and into the bin beside it… these plans may get revived at some point, but at this moment it’s not really worth going over.

Then, as happens, other things turned up. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but my work sort of diversified. No sooner did it seem that I decided to go full time in comics, and had started to build up a steady-ish stream of work and on going projects, things that I could showcase at Comic Cons and other events than the lockdowns seemed to close some of those doors. But as those doors creaked half-shut, occasionally banging against the doorframe, another set opened. Namely those into the world of TTRPG art. I’d been a fan of fantasy art since I first was able to buy my own books. And my early art output was definitely influenced by that genre. I’ve always kept a hand in, but this was a chance to really go for it and try to split my work down the middle.

On the one side, my expanding work in comics, mostly indie, mostly black and white, with a typically historical, 18th/19th century illustration influence, or with a focus on creatures/monsters, and other genre stuff.

On the other, full colour painted, fantasy art, whether as illustration for ttrpgs or as prints (and maybe somewhere further down the line even a high fantasy genre comic (check out lower down the post for more details on that).

All of this allowing me to lean into my love of fantasy art and characters that you can see in my Sketches From The Margin sketchbook (above), and in my supplement for DMsGuild (ad’ video below).

So, that’s that for this post… not much more than a regret that I haven’t posted more, a note on how my work output has split into two distinct types of work, and a tease that I might well be looking at writing a drawing something akin to a fantasy comic…

And on that note, some fantasy comic art in the wings…