Our writers reflect on what makes their hearts beat. Critical, witty, honest.
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
If Comic Book Slumber Party’s Deep Space Canine had been a 1970s Marvel comic it would have had the words “Because you demanded it!” slapped all across its cover. As…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
Graphic medicine with a most distinctive approach to its subject matter, David Biskup’s Seagram interweaves the artist Mark Rothko, and the later vandalism of his Seagram murals, with a tale…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
The Broken Frontier Breakout Talent Award is always the most fiercely contested category in BF’s annual list of accolades. As a site that actively champions new creative voices, of course, that…
Some things bear repeating even if they’ve been said many times before. Dan White’s Cindy and Biscuit is the best all-ages comic series I have reviewed in five-plus years of…
If there was one word I overused in reviews in 2016 (and there were undoubtedly more than just the one but for my fragile ego’s sake let’s restrict it to…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
Two years ago at Broken Frontier we announced our first set of ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch‘ – half a dozen self-published comics and zine artists whose craft was…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
Welcome to the fifth annual ‘Ten UK Small Press Comics You Need to Own!’ round-up here in ‘Small Pressganged’! This celebration of the self and micropublishing world has become something of a…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
I will come back to this point towards the end of this review but for all its bizarre situations, colourful characters and surreal sequences of events there’s something very human…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
As we approach 2017 it seems only fitting to look back on the UK self-publishing world in 2016 through a ‘Small Pressganged’ lens. This was the year that this column…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
It’s been around a decade since we saw the last original Fred the Clown work from the always fertile imagination of Roger Langridge – comics that were collected by Fantagraphics…
Columns · Eyecatcher · Small Pressganged
The intersection between place, time and memory has been an integral part of Tim Bird’s Grey Area series from Avery Hill Publishing over the last few years. In Grey Area:…
When a small press publication is as consistently excellent as Katriona Chapman’s very personal and individual series Katzine it’s sometimes easy to focus attention elsewhere on books that aren’t getting…
Wildly imaginative and constantly surprising, Todd Oliver’s Boxes is strangely reminiscent of the elastic visuals of some of the greats of the British weekly comics traditions of yesteryear …but ramped…
Earlier this month at Broken Frontier we ran the collected version of Broken Frontier Award-nominated artist Wallis Eates’s #30DaysComics November. A vast, sprawling visual metaphor, ‘November’ was something of a departure…
Craig Collins is a creator whose dark wit is equalled only by his propensity for experimenting with narrative construction. In the years that ‘Small Pressganged’ has been following his work…
For someone who enjoys the (admittedly often twee) sentiments of Christmas comics as much as I have over the years I’ve still ended up specialising in an area of publishing…
Christmas is coming! And with the end-of-year celebrations imminent I asked some of the small press artists we’ve featured in this column in the last year or two to share…
As the year draws to a close, and we enter the lull period between the UK Autumn festival extravaganza and the next flurry of events in the Spring, it’s time…
“I Wanted to Change the Narrative as I Believe Comic Art Deserves the Same Respect!” – Dominica Claribelle on Experimentation, Representing Southeast Asian Culture in Her Work, and Her Debut Graphic Novel ‘Finding Home’December 3, 2025
“You Laugh to Keep from Crying” — A Conversation with Pascal Girard and Cathon on Their New Comic Strip Collections ‘Pastimes’ and ‘Fruit Salad’November 19, 2025
“I Think it’s Really Important to Follow Your Dreams!” – Sarah Graley Talks Working on ‘Pizza Witch’ with Stef Purenins and the Pleasures of Rewarding Audience InteractionsNovember 13, 2025
“I Hugely Admire Comics with Dynamic Page Structure!” – Beatrijs Brouwer/Beastly Worlds on the Lure of Fantasy Storytelling and Her Creative ProcessNovember 13, 2025
“People Are Having Good Ideas All the Time and Putting Them into Practice” – Alison Sampson, Charlie Adlard, Lucy Sullivan and More on the Importance of the Thought Bubble Portfolio Reviews and Comics CommunityNovember 13, 2025
