My dog Rusty is sitting around manifesting my own feelings, panting and looking restless and cross. He’s just turned 7, so perhaps he’s having a midlife crisis as well.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be taking part in an exhibition called “Nature”, put on by my friend Sharon King-Chai. If you are able to get to Archway during the week of 9-14 June do stop into The Gallery at The Playroom - I think it’s going to be a super show.

Thinking what to do for “Nature” took me a while. I thought of revisiting my Hidden Planet comic idea from 2019…

Which feels topical for Sir David’s centenary! I also considered nature/naturism…

But this is a family-friendly show! So I’ve done a picture about dinosaurs, and will look forward to showing that - here’s a section…

On the final day of the exhibition, I’m running an hour-long workshop for children, with all proceeds going to Booktrust - the UK’s largest children’s reading charity. I will write more about Booktrust in another post, but if you have any children keen to do some drawing that Sunday 14th June, please send me an email!

My friend Nick has just turned 50, and requested three Star Wars posters - three turned out to be too ambitious, but one was manageable! Although I would really have liked to get to grips with Jabba… here it is, and please avert your eyes from poor old Chewbacca :((((

I guess that’s it for now. I’m back at pottery, so look out for photos of more badly formed “vessels”! See you soon!

Her beautiful new book, Receipts from the Bookshop, a collection of her Substack diaries, is coming out on 4th June!

Isn’t the cover beautiful? It’s by friend of The ReposiTORy Lizzy Stewart!

Katie asked if I’d like to join her “blog book tour” in the run up to publication, and I said MAIS OUI! She offered me some snippets from the book to inspire a drawing, and I chose this one:

…as a business, we’re just about clinging on. Mostly because we're relentlessly supported by some incredibly devoted book buyers. Think of them like that army in 300, except instead of loincloths and six-packs they've got tote bags and loyalty cards. They're a force to be reckoned with, and I reckon it'd be all over for us without them. We're very lucky to be able to continue to serve them, our warriors against the threat of a bookshopless-town. Ultimately, a town decides if they want a bookshop or not, and for now, we're grateful that ours still does.

Well, that was a must. I haven’t seen 300, it always looked scary and boring at the same time. But what if the mob in Katie’s book had tote bags and loyalty cards AND loincloths and six-packs - what if they… HAD IT ALL???

Well they look devoted and dashing! I had a looksee on Google maps for the bookshop street view, and finished the picture.

They’re in the rain, because that’s sticking close to the 300 poster (ahem, verité), and also because judging from Katie’s newsletter, St Annes is as rainy as Thermopylae in 480 BC!! And we all know that place could POUR!!

Thanks for stopping by, Katie - I am really looking forward to buying the book in June. Katie’s newsletter is one of the few I always read start to finish, and now I feel I know what it’s like to run a bookshop - and soon, you can too! ❤️

Pre-order Receipts from the Bookshop

Ruby suggested Embalma which I love, but I think maybe Cadavera works best. And Thursday was an easy one! But then when I was actually drawing them, the jokes aren’t as good unless it’s the same names… AFTER ALL THAT.

I’d definitely like to explore these off-brand guys a lot more… but how to fit them in between exploring my off-brand Smurfs?!? Truly, a conundrum to wrestle with.

Here was the card I made for Jess. ❤️

See you soon!

Anyone else remember Muzzy??

Be warned - these comics are rather BLUER! Some Smurf comics from this week…

Thanks for reading! Happy Bank Holiday weekend, UK pals!

Rusty likes any activity where we’re doing something practical - his especial favourite is changing the bed sheets. ❤️

I am festering in London this week, revelling in Bologna Fair FOMO and the fact that I managed to make two of my deadlines in the last month, and am feeling very relieved.

Last week I finished (bar a few tweaks) the artwork for the third and final book in the Boss of the Underworld trilogy - PHEW!!! I thought I would post a couple of sections from the book that didn’t make it in, but I thought had some nice bits to them.

At one stage during the writing, I had a gorgon character I was keen to include. She was a holdover from the first book, where she was called Redusa (like Medusa - weak!) and the idea was that she was a gorgon and a social space invader and it was awkward that you couldn’t make eye contact with her. That never worked, but in this book she came back, now called Morgan (slightly less weak!¡¿) and I tried a section with her and some rocks.

I couldn’t give this whole bit an arc to make it work, so then Morgan lost her gorgon status and was became a general untrustworthy baddie. In this bit, Shirley and George have just encountered Morgan with her finger in a hole…

I think the solution to this problem was that this cap-wearing character had hands that could freeze water into ice, solving the issue… but not very convincingly. Anyway, Horton Hatches the Egg/Dutch finger-in-dike-boy fans might recognise the general vibe of this one!

Hoping those going to Bologna this week have a wonderful time. I’m going to turn to all the bits of boring admin that have been piling up behind my deadline, much like water piling up behind the dike that the boy was plugging with his finger 😌

Arrivederci amiche!

Last year was brilliant - so many enthusiastic comics-loving children, and I’m betting this year will be great too. If you have some young comics fans in your life, I really recommend coming by!

I’ll be there on a table near friends Shelley Revill, Marc Jackson, Jim Medway, Gary Northfield, Lauren O’Farrell and more - have a look at the exhibitors’ map below. Like last time, there will be workshops, a comics library and a quiet reading space, and this year the cafe will also be open for food and drinks.

A few months ago Helen Hancocks, illustrator, writer, bookshop owner, pal and extreme picture-book-enthusiast/connoisseur, asked me to contribute a comic for the third issue of Shelf Review, the magazine she publishes about picture book matters. That issue has been out for a bit now, so I’m sharing the comic here. Do check out Shelf Editions and Shelf Review, both excellent resources for picture books.

I’ll be selling some A3 prints of this and other things on Sunday, along with BOOKS, yay! Including both parts of Boss of the Underworld.

Hope to see you there!

I think originally the gardener Al was a serious weird-plant-breeding baddie who bashed Jessie on the head and tried to feed her to a carnivorous plant, but I must’ve been in a soppy mood, as look what happened instead. Absolute whimsy! ❤️

I’m not sure why the whole process took them so long. My suspicion is that it actually didn’t. In the weeks between sending off the sample and receiving the results, I got loads of emails telling me what stage the sample was at, what the lab technicians were up to, what heavy science it involved. The best minds of my generation were destroyed by madness parsing my dog’s DNA!!

But I’ve seen some movies, and I know some intern will have dropped it into a test tube and centrifuged it for 10 seconds (probably mixing it up with other rubes’ dogs’ samples) and it would have been ready to go. They probably could have had it back to me by next day’s post. I’ll admit the emails and time-lag amped up the excitement, but then that just made the results more underwhelming.

Well! I don’t want to say that Rusty’s ancestors were a licentious bunch of thieves and scoundrels. So I’ll let the Wisdom Panel™️ DNA testers say it for me.

I mean, my hopes of Rusty’s acceptance into the peerage were dashed fairly early on by our first vet, but to call somebody a Prague Ratter seems needlessly offensive! Ovcharka sounds a bit more the thing to be, but 2% doesn’t do much elevating.

So, that’s £[redacted] I’m never getting back, and I consider it money ill spent. But the true treasure is the realisation I gained along the way: what are genetics when put against the reality of the yummiest chunk this side of a Segugio Italiano??

Good day sir. I said, good day!!

I remember rewatching the first season of Sex and the City sometime in my late thirties, and realising that I had become older than Carrie and co. I guess life is (if you’re lucky) a parade of aging past characters who once seemed totally ancient. What a shock! Not just that you are, improbably, getting older - but that you are getting older than old people!

Grown-ups I Have Aged Beyond:

CJ is a model of adult competency. Why aren’t I this capable?

I can’t remember what Hank did for a living, and therefore whether he’s making me look bad. But my sister Jess told me he got a bad back from sitting on his lawnmower, and I relate to that.

How can I be older than Tony Soprano! He was running a whole mob empire. Makes you think a bit.

I also looked up how old Freddy Krueger was - he was supposed to be 25!!! So I passed him by him pretty early. Well, there are obviously a million more of these... Perhaps I’ll revisit this idea when I age past Driving Miss Daisy and the pensioners in Cocoon.

Anyway, feeling bad about and remonstrating with myself is VERY 2025, and I’m not here with that energy. Instead I’ve gathered some stuff from the last month or so, but must begin with the fact that I went to see Wuthering Heights last weekend.

Reasons I was excited to see this film:

1. The branding (of all three of Emerald Fennell’s films) is very appealing to me. I love the poster for WH in particular - not only for the classic Gone with the Wind pose, but also the font - it’s giving such “cover of Virginia Andrew’s books” feelings! “W”s like daggers!!

   

2. I like both these actors - I enjoyed Jacob Elordi being a handsome jerk in Euphoria before he was a handsome jerk in this film, and he’s excellent at it! Also, so tall - I imagine the average-heighted actors’ agents sending them frantic emails telling them not to be caught next to him on any red carpet. But his tallness and Margot’s long neck make this pose work very well:

3. I was a gal who loved the book as a teenager, and definitely saw in Catherine and Heathcliff’s love an aspirational and healthy romance template for moi. So I’m generally up for any Wuthering Heights-inspired media! Plus, trawling for more ideas for my eventual pastiche comic…

So, my lukewarm take is that I enjoyed it and had a good time, but suspect it’s not a film that would stand up to rewatching.

I saw last week on Drawn & Quarterly’s instagram that there is a new Edward Steed book coming out - which reminded me to post these drawings I made last year about his first book, Forces of Nature…

If you make a good joke around me, I’ll probably remember it. And in less appealing news, if I make a joke, I’ll definitely remember it, and perhaps repeat it for years to come!

Thanks for reading! I’ve missed posting here - it’s mainly because I’ve been on some tight deadlines, and doing quite a few school visits for Boss of the Underworld 2. I’m really enjoying it, but struggling to be a bit more balanced with everything!

Sometimes I still dial my heated pad up to 9!! What can I say, I like to sit hot!!!

Shout out to the NHS who’ve saved me twice with their mole-spotting abilities. ❤️

Shirley is back on the publicity trail, this time with new pal Peels at her side!

In this introductory part, Shirley lands in the Under-Underworld, where she meets two new characters and has a horribly familiar conversation…

Thank you once more to Rachel Wade, for taking a chance on an unknown Shirley, Fliss Alexander, a really kind and engaged editor who I’m going to miss working with, and Jen Alliston, the BEST designer I could’ve asked for - I’m really grateful to you Jen! ❤️

Boss of the Underworld: Shirley Vs The Huge Beast is published TODAY by Hachette in the UK and is available now in all the bookshops you know, maybe also in the dark secret bookshops you don’t know, and is hopefully good for readers 7+! And if you read it, I hope you will enjoy it!

Phew! It always takes longer than I think it will!

Hallie Bateman, whose work I always enjoy, posted today about her idea, #journuary! I’m going to join in and have a go at making a diary comic for each day this month, and will post here when I’ve got a week’s worth to show!

Going to backdate them to January 1st, because I can!

My new book, Boss of the Underworld: Shirley Vs the Huge Beast publishes in 14 days!

In the scene below, Shirley falls into a rubbish compactor. I remember being absolutely horrified/fascinated by these kinds of scenes in adventure films of my childhood. The trash compactor in Star Wars, the bit in Temple of Doom where Indy and Short Round are almost impaled in the room of spikes, the conveyor-belt incinerator scene in Toy Story 3.

IS SHE??!?? You KNOW how to find out for sure!!

Boss of the Underworld: Shirley Vs the Huge Beast publishes on January 15th and is available from all bookshops you know, and especially from Shelf Editions and Storytellers, Inc.

Speaking of Shelf Editions, the new issue of Shelf Review is out now. There’s lots of good reading inside, including features on Enchanted Lion Books, Mimi Grey, David Roberts, Ella Beech and Lauren O’Hara in conversation, Rise Raise Riso, and a comic from me in the back about Armadillo Al, Picture Book Lover of the Wild West.

Until soon!

Recurring themes were:

• Basement cinema

• Dogs

• Massive fridge filled with cans of soda and bottled water

• Public-aquarium-level fishtank

• Mum did the decorating

• Some kind of spiritual room covering many religious bases. Insane levels of wealth and success not getting you through the eye of the needle, it’s probably a safe idea to have a quiet room with some holy icons in it.

I started with Maleficent and immediately muddled her with the evil queen from Snow White.

Next up, Sauron from Lord of the Rings. I don’t like LOTR, and it probably shows through my lack of commitment to Sauron’s crib :-(

I’ve been watching Welcome to Derry on TV, a prequel to Stephen King’s IT. It’s pretty bonkers and gross, and they’ve just killed off one of my favourite characters, so it feels tonally accurate so far. I’ve started this comic, but have ideas for more of PW’s sweet sewer set-up for sure!

The end!! RIP Cribs and all the other ace MTV shows - Laguna Beach, Pimp my Ride, Newlyweds, The Hills. And I guess there’s no need to have a show about a celebrity’s house when they can show it to you themselves on Instagram. Sigh.

Thanks for reading this trail of nonsense! Until soon!

His most recent post absolutely insisted on being tried out, immediately:

Fionn's Comics Newsletter

How To "How To"

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6 months ago · 37 likes · 16 comments · Fionn McCabe

There is nothing that warms my shriveled, vitamin deprived heart more than taking stupidity seriously.

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What you need:

Paper and pen or pencil
Post-It notes (if you’ve got ‘em)
A passion for education

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What to do:

1. Think of an activity that no one needs to know about.

2. Make a comic explaining how to do that activity.

3. Don’t worry about describing your activity in a way that makes sense. In fact, you can do the opposite! Or don’t! Riff on the idea of explaining something because… you don’t owe anyone an explanation! You can do what you want!

4. I can’t remember the this bit of the instructions, but… I’m sure it will come to me. Fuck. It’s a crucial one! It’s, like, the most important bit of this... ahhhh! Fuck. FUCK! Uuugh. God, I hate when this happens! Shit. Nope! Nope… it’s totally gone.

5. You did it! Good job! Education is a crucial building block of a functioning democracy.

Hilarious. Because I drew William Steig’s Shrek in my last post, that big green ogre was still on my mind.

Wooo, total nonsense. Now I want to do more “How To” comics! Also, putting a definite article in front of “Shrek” is a Richard Herring joke - he often references “a” Shrek, and it makes me laugh.

This exercise and Fionn’s comics for it made me think again of this book I have by Shel Silverstein, Uncle Shelby’s ABZ. It really was one of my favourite books for quite a while when I was about 8-10 years old. It’s just hilarious anarchy, and as I’ve said here before, was an inspiration when I wrote How to Make Good Choices in 2022.

More pictures and thoughts on this book here!

I made this picture for the pleasure of drawing these characters - I especially loved doing Shrek. Let me know if any/all are unrecognisable, and I’ll fill you in.

I thought it’d be nice to share a selection of pages from some favourite books of mine - ones I’m especially happy to have been reunited with during the great Big Yellow Storage reckoning. I’m sure some/all of these will be familiar, but then it’s good to see familiar friends!

First up, the wonderful Janet Ahlberg in this tribute by her husband Alan Ahlberg, who sadly also died earlier this year.

This book is such a treasure trove of sketches and insight into Janet’s work.

Ahhh, the sketches! The characters! Drooool!

Cover sketches for Each Peach Pear Plum!! Surely this should be classified information - it’s too precious!!

A really wonderful book! I give it 5 Hungry Caterpillars out of 5!!

Next up… maybe my favourite recently published book… Doug Salati’s Hot Dog!!!

It is true that I am more susceptible to anything dog-related since I got Rusty, but nonetheless this book is so touching, and it’s hard not to be moved by the relationship between these two pals - and the dog’s joy at being out of the city and running along the beach.

I just love it. 5 Hungry Caterpillars out of 5!

A big favourite of mine is Dorothée de Monfried. I first found one of her books at Bologna book fair, and have been keen as (French) mustard on everything she does ever since.

They’re all in French, but that’s no barrier to enjoying her wonderful pen and ink/watercolour illustrations!

Look at that Notre Dame! She’s a great draftswoman, and also manages the tricky dance of keeping her lines always lively. I give her 5 chenille affamées out of 5!!¡¡

The Akissi books, by Marguerite Abouet and Mathieu Sapin. This is the first book, but there are more - and they actually weren’t in storage, as I don’t let them out of my sight.

Inspired by author Marguerite Abouet’s own childhood in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s, these follow hilarious, naughty Akissi and her antics. They are a wonderfully written evocation of a time, place and way of life. Abouet also wrote the wonderful Aya books, with another brilliant illustrator, Clément Oubrerie. But Mathieu Sapin is my absolute fave, and I can’t get enough of his pictures.

J’extremely adore. 5 out of 5 Hungrys!!

Well, I was hardly going to finish this round-up without being a William Steig Bore. In fact, I’m going to make myself a badge that says “Ask me about my William Steig preoccupation” - any other takers?

He rules, everyone else drools, and there’s SO MUCH to look at!

This book is of course the tip of the iceberg of my WS collection, but I came here to hearten, not to make everyone weep bitter tears of envy.

I am speechless in the face of his brilliance. I give William Steig an ASTOUNDING: 1…

million Hungry Caterpillars out of 5!!!

Wishing you all a Happy National Illustration Day, however you choose to celebrate it! ❤️

At the dramatic end of the last book, Shirley Vs The Green Menace, we saw George abducted by a giant mole, and taken into the Under-Underworld. The new book begins as Shirley follows him down…

Landing in a cave, Shirley meets the Queen-in-hiding and royalist banana skin, Peels. Together they set out to find George and vanquish the (titular!) Huge Beast!!

In this section, having walked for a while, Shirley and Peels come across some scary foes…

What will happen next?! How will they escape this scrape?? You KNOW how to find out…

Boss of the Underworld: Shirley Vs The Huge Beast publishes on January 15th, 2026. It’s a full-colour comic story aimed at readers 7+ - and what better way to brighten up the misery of a rubbishy wintery January!

Available here from friend of the Repository, Shelf Editions:

Pre-Order the book!

And all good bookshops!