Chico the Scnauzer, my picture book illustration debut will be in store in January 2024 and published by Puffin Books! Because it’s not out yet, I will avoid revealing too much about it, but I will say I am extremely proud of this book. Honestly, I think I may be the luckiest person in the world to be the illustrator on this project. So many things had to align and somehow they all did and working with Taryn Brumfitt was such a dream.
A few years ago I promised myself that every year on Hobbit Day (September 22nd) I would publish a new instalment in remaking the hobbit. I DON’T UNDERSTAND exactly what I think if funny about the idea but I really enjoy revisiting it each year and seeing where the story goes. I think the longer-form style of writing I have been doing is seeping its way into this ugly little project. There was a part 2 to this that I roughed out that will likely turn into the comic for 2024. But for now, here is 2023’s entry.
This year I wanted to sharpen my skills as a writer so I vowed to make something totally original, creepy, silly and MUCH longer than my usual comics. I also wanted to use the project to develop a better working system so I could complete projects like this faster (which paid off in SPADES when the ‘Chico The Schnauzer‘ project, my illustrated picture book debut, rolled into production.)
Ghosts Live in Outer Space was the 28-page result! It’s a comic about conspiracy thinking, confirmation bias, arrogance, the Dunning Kruger effect… Or just a comic that explains why ghosts return on the same date in folklore and urban legends. I had it printed and sold copies of the complete piece at 2023’s Papercuts Comic Festival, (an event I have been a big fan of for years) and basically had the best weekend of the whole year as a result. You can enjoy the first 10 pages here, and if you want to know the FULL THEORY you’ll have to hit me up for a printed copy of the book.
I am a HUGE lover of Academic Film Theory, particularly when it comes to horror films. In fact, a dream of mine I have never revealed is that I want to do a comic book adaptation of Carol Clover’s wonderful book Men, Women and Chainsaws. I loved reading the book but a visual learner like me would have appreciated some charts and pictures (okay universe, make this happen for me). The Faculty of Horror is a podcast where a sociologist and a horror magazine editor/writer pick a horror film and do a ton of academic research around them and do a kind of lecture on the topics. It’s bought me so much joy and knowledge since I started listening (probably a decade ago?!).
I also finished Sarah Firth’s (FREE!) Graphic recording course last year and was eager to try out what I had learned, so I started looking for a FOH: Glossary of Gore episode suitable for a graphic recording. There are so many great episodes about things like The Male Gaze, Cultural Cringe, Postmodernism etc! But one episode had been released from behind the paywall so to be respectful to the content creators I choose their episode on Cultural Hegemony, which turns out is insanely interesting (but not as directly linked to horror films as I hoped). Marxism pops up quite a lot in film theory (and in everything these days). This is really an educational resource but the few opinions that pop up in this video are not my own.
It is EXTREMELY difficult to design graphics that accompany complicated ideas like this and even more challenging to draw quickly enough to keep up with the audio. But it’s a fun challenge. In a lot of ways it’s a combination of a few skills of mine:
I am looking forward to trying this out again sometime soon. If you are a film academic (or Carol Clover’s representation) hit me up!
I’ve been really enjoying playing around with Risograph style printing this year and writing comics so it was only a matter of time before I combined the two! I made this comic to try my hand at Zine making and try and find a way to make comics fast (I’m working on a long one that is taking FOREVER!)
In the end, the Riso effect I was after didn’t quite work but I am going to try it out again in the future. I also don’t usually like doing autobiographical work but it is easy to re-interoperate the stories you tell your friends into comic form.
Levi George Illustration 