'Endswell' the Graphic Novel
Updated: 4 hours ago
Showcasing a comic I have released chapter-by-chapter on the UK small press scene since 2018.
Hello! It's been a while since I've blogged, and a lot of my focus up to now has been on the commercially successful and super dynamic Live Illustration side of my practice. Now I want to showcase and reflect on the authorial work I produce: Comics! I write, design, draw, print and market them. I sell them at comics fairs, at small press friendly shops (like Gosh Comics in London and Zine Freak in Lancaster), and online in my webshop. Today I want to show off Endswell, my main creative focus from 2018-2023.
Endswell is a piece of auto-fiction and memoir-reportage made with and for my family during a larger-than-life crisis situation that continued for a number of years. It tracks my grandmother's health and well-being taking a nose-dive in her 90s, her exploitation and abuse by an opportunistic hoarder, and the collapse of her lifelong horse-and-hound farm project from and alongside which my mum, my uncles, myself, my dad and my 2 sisters lived. It is a means to process the situation, and also a creative way for me to tell the story visually, with a focus on what I consider to be a really really Big Story that might resonate.
It touches on so many aspects of life and I believe has a resonance beyond the specifics of the situation, and so appeals to a wider audience. Having finished it as a series and given it a solid 500-copy run on the UK small press scene, I would now like a publisher to consider it for a final edition with wider release as a complete 237-page graphic novel (A5 trim).
Themes include: Family dynamics, memories and mythologies, a slice of England's post-industrial legacy, hoarding, dementia, elder exploitation and grooming, end-of-life care and responsibility, and animal welfare.
At first I describe a crisis situation from my point of view (chapter 1); then flip perspectives to consider how the dogs live through it (chapter 2); then move into family mythology, memory and history via a psycho-geographically framed tale (chapter 3); then explore how these memories and mythologies link to the main crisis and its eventual resolution and fallout (chapter 4); and finally, depict both the survivorship of Josh the bichon frisé, and of my own family (chapter 5).
Here is a light 'overview' showcase of the project with standout pages, chapter/episode covers and character-focused panels:
If you are a publisher and would like to read a more substantial sample, please message me via illustration@petermorey.com and I will send you the password to this downloadable pdf.
Finally, here is the original small press version of Endswell as a series, collected in a 5-episode box set, available to buy from my shop:
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