Shining a spotlight on emerging voices in comics is a huge part of what we’re about here at Broken Frontier. As is putting work that tackles socially relevant issues front and centre. Today at BF we get to do both with an opportunity to post the official trailer for the upcoming graphic novel Gigs from Top Shelf Productions. Not only is it the debut of UK creators Mark Mosedale and Si Smith it’s also a hugely relevant release in our current world of AI intrusion and the gig economy.
Check out the trailer video below. We’ve also reproduced the original press release for further information. The book will be in stores on June 16th.
Top Shelf Land Gigs, Technology-Driven Dystopian Tale from UK Creators Simon Smith and Mark Mosedale
A.I. took the work. Gigs replaced jobs. Ordinary people are left to scrape together lives in a world that’s no longer built for them. This is Gigs, a new graphic novel from Top Shelf releasing June 16, 2026. With a hard-won blend of biting satire and humanistic passion, two creators from the North of England weave together six divergent chapters into an extraordinary graphic novel. Gigs is both a powerful warning about the oppressive world to come and a defiant celebration of the humanity that will sprout up in the cracks.
“When we started working on Gigs in 2019. We hoped that doing a book about AI taking jobs and necessitating a universal basic income wouldn’t become irrelevant in the time we spent making it. It turns out that that was the wrong thing to hope for,” says co-creator Mark Mosedale. “Still, there are all the right things left to hope for and, as Woody Guthrie wrote, you’ve got to keep the hoping machine running. For me, writing Gigs has been a big part of that.”
“When we started Gigs I was reaching for that feeling that great music gives me – hearing Tinseltown in the Rain for the first time, or Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops, or Once In A Lifetime. When this stuff finds you, it’s proof that another, better world is possible, and an encouragement to look for it,” says co-creator Si Smith. “Imagining a dystopia is relatively easy, especially right now, and the world that we’ve built in Gigs is quite bleak. But whilst hope and joy and revelation are definitely much harder to create, Mark and I have had a good go at it.”
About the Book
In a frighteningly near future where Basic Income is supplemented by gig work assigned by “the app”…an octogenarian punk and a lonely young worker seek escape through music. A street artist makes art by night and paints over it by day. A has-been detective chases a case into a forgotten world. A drug runner makes a long, strange delivery. A writer marks her days on a decaying space station she can’t leave. And a refugee asks for help in the last free place.
Gigs will be available wherever books are sold, as a full-color softcover graphic novel (ISBN: 978-1-60309-593-8) as well as a digital edition, on June 16, 2026, for a list price of $24.99. For more information please visit the Top Shelf web site.
About the Creators
Author: Mark Mosedale is a writer from the North of England. He has also been a pot washer; a video game journalist; a dollar-store clerk; an unpaid writer for major national newspapers (once willingly, once without being informed, which seems careless now); a customer-service advisor for a debt management charity; and a paperboy. He once ran 100 miles without puking, but he did it quite slowly. Mosedale lives in Leeds, England, with his wife, kids, and preoccupations.
Illustrator: Si Smith is a UK-based comic artist and freelance illustrator. He has also worked: as a primary school teacher; in teams programming festival events and venues; on a zero-hours contract invigilating shows at a well-known arts institution; as an exhibition curator; in an art supplies shop; on the panel of an under-the-radar arts funding body. He loves Radiohead and The Slits, and the best gig that he ever saw was RIDE at the Manchester Albert Hall in May 2015. Smith is married with two adult sons, and he currently lives and works in Leeds in the North of England.
About the Publisher
Top Shelf Productions has published critically acclaimed and popularly beloved graphic novels since 1997. Celebrating more than a decade as an imprint of IDW Publishing, Top Shelf continues to showcase the vanguard of the comics medium, publishing works of literary sophistication, visionary artistry, and personal resonance.
