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30th of August, 2026

My brother and I are both creatives. I am primarily a writer, and he is primarily a comic artist. Comics are something he takes incredibly seriously. He knows the names and the styles of all the medium’s most important artists, and he understands the process of making comics inside and out. He is particularly knowledgeable about the printing process, and how layers of dots at different hues and angles and densities can be used to create the most vibrant colours. All of this is unfathomable wizardry to me. In return, there are probably aspects of writing as a craft that he finds just as mysterious.

We are both known to dabble in each other’s mediums. This is often to one another’s frustration. After all, who would appreciate some randomer turning up at your circus and bossing around your monkeys? For me, comics are a low-stakes sandbox, where I draw stupid little drawings and tell stupid little stories. It’s not that I think comics aren’t art: on the contrary, there are comics I find both enjoyable and deeply artistically meaningful. I think my comics aren’t art. My brother will say something like “no! You can’t just arrange the panels any old way! There needs to be a clear sequence!” and I will smile back at him with the same ignorant joy as a child scrawling with crayons.

I even drew a comic about this frequent point of conflict between us. One-page wonder Comix R Seriouse features me as the rather stout figure in blue, professing my ability to draw frivolous comics, while my brother in yellow argues for sincerity while thinking of his hero, comics legend Alan Moore. I emerge victorious, holding aloft my copy of “Quof Da Ravin (sic),” while my brother and his imaginary Alan weep. My brother found this comic so funny that he coloured it in with his special retro comic colouring process, which is why it looks so striking here on the page.

But what was the “Quof Da Ravin (sic)” I was referencing here? Well, Quoth the Raven (to give it its proper title) was a Tapas comic strip that I created and ran between the September and December of 2022. It is about The Raven (whose name is not “Quoth”), a failing writer and university student who was basically myself from around that time in a 1ft tall corvid body.

It existed not only to tell silly little jokes, but express minor student grievances of the sort I was experiencing as a third year undergraduate. Examples include #14 – Nothing Beats Classic Storytelling, about my frustration with some of the classic doorstopper-length books I was reading for my history of the novel class, and #12 – It’s All In That Final Mark, about how the one mark of difference between a high 2:1 (69) and a low First (70) assignment grade can be make-or-break for one's confidence. The comic ended in December 2022 with a parody of Karel Čapek’s classic play Rossum’s Universal Robots, as I had simply become too busy to waste any more time drawing silly little pictures.

The comic almost returned following my undergraduate graduation with a narrative sequel series called Graduation Blues. It would’ve followed The Raven, newly graduated from their own undergraduate degree, struggling to find work in a bleak graduate job market and sinking into depression. I drew about eight pages of this before I realised it went against my ethos of ‘comics as fun,’ and it was ultimately relegated to the scrapheap. I have presented the pages here in a little gallery for you.

Also in my post-undergrad ‘grungy and gross-looking’ phase was Rabbit and Hamster, a very stupid comic about a pair of verbose and passive-aggressive anthropomorphic animals. For some reason the name “Mark Phillip Hamster” makes me burst out laughing every time I think about it, and I actually quite like the stupid little character designs, so perhaps I will do something more with these characters in future.

And that leads me on nicely to my most recent foray into comics. Triangle and Circle started unceremoniously one day in April, after a hard day of studying, where on total random impulse I opened FireAlpaca and just… started drawing.

The entire first issue of the comic was made totally spontaneously, without really thinking about what would happen next or how it might fit in to a larger story. I expected it to be a little throwaway joke comic, just something I needed to do once to burn off some restless energy, but then I made another one. And then another. Soon, I was thinking about character motivations, and a wider story I could tell. Somehow, I found myself stumbling upwards into… Perhaps not art, but something.

As of writing this blog post I have drawn twenty issues, thirteen of which have been released thus far (they go out weekly, on Saturdays, and I like sitting on a significant backlog). There is a lore page on this very website, which gets updated whenever I feel like I have something to add to it, and I *think* I have at least a general idea of where the story is going. It may be a silly, frivolous little comic about talking shapes, but it’s the happiest I’ve felt about an ongoing creative project in a long time.

Before I leave you, I just have one more little curiosity to add. Below is a one page comic I made about my cat Dillon that actually predates Dillon’s Very Own Blog. It’s interesting to see how many Dillon-isms are already present!