For once, I’ve managed to create a Cartography for Colossive that actually resembles a map, and incorporates map elements too. Maps of real locations. To a large extent, the piece is based on the walks of publisher and editor Jane Gibbens Murphy. I think she exercises every day and often snaps pictures of wildlife, nature, buildings, street art, and animals, posting them on social media under the heading “Things I saw on my walk today”.
Well, one such image was an urban fox. The way the animal was standing with its mouth open struck me like an arrow. I was compelled to draw a sketch of that moment of wiry tension and decided to post it online, as a kind of friendly reply to Jane. Momentum gathered from this point, and in the summer months of 2026 more fox photos appeared, often with an invitation to sketch them. I took it as a challenge. I’d like to have been more inventive with stylising these fine beasts, but a lot of the sketches turned out fairly prosaic, even with added colours.
The locations trod by the feet of Jane started to form some chain of thought in my noggin. Isn’t there a Paul Auster story about a man walking around the streets of New York, tracing letters on a map and thus casting a secret message? (It’s part of New York Trilogy.) I made a point of going to a Brixton zine fair where I knew I would encounter the Colossive crew. “Can you send me a list of where you saw these foxes?” I asked Jane, after the idea of a new Cartography was suggested and welcomed enthusiastically.
When the list arrived, I got more than I bargained for. If it’s true that you have only to think of a red car to start seeing red cars everywhere, then perhaps foxes also have this magical ability. Most of them congregated around the cemetery and crematorium in Beckenham. My vague idea of a hidden message wasn’t going to pan out; too many of them were clustered in the same paragraph. What about a legend, which all good maps have? This led to the thought that a region divided into colour-coded smaller areas might look nice. What if the region itself was the body of a fox?
This took me back to a favourite Jorge Luis Borges story, called The Zahir. The zahir itself is a small coin that you can’t stop thinking about once it’s seen (and I used that in one of my Ramollo stories years ago), but the tale includes a digression on the image of “a tiger composed of many tigers”, surrounded by armies of still more tigers. How about a fox composed of many foxes? I didn’t want to redraw anything, so all I needed now was an outline. Without thinking, it immediately drew itself as a chalk hill figure like the Cerne Man or the White Horse of Uffington. I also reached the point of stylisation I’d wanted in the first place. A few weeks of sketching foxes had given me a bit more familiarity, especially with the size of their enormous ears.
Said outline went into the computer to be colour coded like a map. Gathered fox sketches were dropped into place one by one. Genuine map locations were added, along with map symbols for graveyards, trees, ducks, and deers, even though the locations don’t translate to real life nor is anything to scale. In sorting like with like, I grouped together the known images of certain foxes that had nicknames, and added their initials to act as further map references.
The text on the flip-side of the map elaborates on some of the above, but adds an extra conceit about counting the foxes. This is taken from the folk-lore that has grown up around the Knights’ Circle of the Rollright Stones in Dorset; it’s said to be impossible to count the stones in the circle, and you never get the same answer twice. It’s perhaps a tenuous connection, but in my mind it linked up with the chalk figure version of the Fox; this is why you get a green hillside version of him on the front. My other, more pragmatic, purpose is to guide the eye of the reader around the page, following an invisible trail; I just want you to see the foxes.
Picking up on the counting game, and the playful title Find The Fox, the Colossive editors have presented this item as a kind of interactive game in the form of a map. I would never have thought of it that way by myself, but that shows the value of collaborating with other creatives; I’m very happy to have ideas take on a life of their own, through the communion of art.
Colossive Cartographies 75 available now from Colossive Press
