Small Press comics creator since 1982
All-new comic book published April 2025. This is a collection of all-new stories set in the imaginary Astorial Hotel, arriving some years after the first “Compendium” (2021) which featured Tamblyn The Secret Architect on the cover. That earlier book was a revisit of stories first authored in the 1990s, which allowed me the chance to…
Available now, a new full-colour version of this 1986 mini comic. If asked, I might sometimes tell you that the five Astorial Stories amount to some form of Christian allegory, an update on The Pilgrim’s Progress, or a retelling of Old Testament myths in a very oblique fashion. If that’s true, then The Roof Runner…
The fourth Astorial Story from 1986 now recoloured. Published in October 2024. I personally like this one for the story-within-a-story structure, where there’s about two or maybe three interlocked tales folding into each other. However, Italo Calvino I ain’t, that’s for sure! I can’t remember exactly when I read Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night…
This Colossive Cartography, my third submission for the imprint, is an imaginary fold-out instruction manual for the new digital showers in the Astorial Hotel. By way of background – I came up with a story called ‘The Cold Shower’ which I drew in summer 2024. It’s going to end up, I expect, published in a…
The third comic from the original Astorial Stories series of 1986, now with added colours. The Building Trade features the character of Tom the Builder, at work on the exterior of the Hotel, apparently carrying out repairs and works all by himself, apart from the interventions of a well-meaning but ineffectual foreman. And of course…
Continuing my plan to add colour to some of my stories, here are the first two Astorial Stories books now with added colours. The third story, The Building Trade, is also coloured – just not sent to the printer yet. I’m planning to complete all five mini-comics from the original series, plus The Floating Dan…
This just arrived. Drawn earlier this month, after a discussion with publisher Tom Murphy in November last year. That’s more like it – I mean the speed of delivery which is something I like about the small press (in the 1980s, Fast Fiction really was aiming to be fast). Colossive Press has this unique range…
Astorial Compendium Volume II This volume reprints and collects pretty much all the Astorial Stories I could find for the period 1987-2009, set in the imaginary Astorial Hotel. Some of them first appeared in Fast Fiction magazine and other small press publications. Where Volume I explores space and depth inside impossibly large rooms, the stories…
I’m quite pleased with the cover drawing to this recent Astorial Compendium book. It depicts Tamblyn The Secret Architect dashing through the corridors of the imaginary Astorial Hotel. But the scale, the proportions, and the perspective, are all wrong – no building like this could possibly exist, and no human being could possibly be running…
Astorial Compendium published December 2021 A collection of all-new Astorial Stories, set in the imaginary Astorial Hotel. This collection revisits a number of stories I wrote in 1992 for other artists to draw. Since that project didn’t turn out as planned, I recently revisited the scripts and drew them up myself, thus resulting in five…
