Guest Blog: Ned Hartley

Author of Create Your Own Comics

 An Exciting Time for Comics

I’ve been lucky enough to write comics professionally for over two decades, and it’s a fantastically exciting time for comics in the UK.

According to recent figures, sales of comics and graphic novels reached a peak of £20m in 2025 and are still growing. Hilarious series like Bunny vs Monkey and Dog Man top the charts, along with brilliant manga and exciting superhero books. The recent rise in sales is partly due to publishers leaning into formats that work for kids and partly due to the wonderful range of comics on sale right now.

The Power of Comics

When I visit schools to run comics workshops and clubs, I get to see the incredible emotional power of comics on young readers.

In the last few years, I’ve seen a huge boom in the new comics that children bring to school, and the range of different characters that they love and want to tell me about.

A Strong Connection

There’s something immediate and personal about comics that reaches readers in a way that isn’t like any other artform. There’s no barrier between the artist and the reader, there’s nothing to get in the way of the art and story on the page, and that’s why comics can create such a strong emotional connection with the reader.

Lowering the Barrier to Entry

Comics are inherently creative, and the barrier to entry is incredibly low. Any kid can grab a pen and paper straight away and start making their own comics.

Every time I run comics workshops, I’m blown away by the creative ideas that kids come up with, from rapping worms to ninja tomatoes (to give two recent examples).

Unlocking the Power of Storytelling

The book Create Your Own Comics: Everything You Need to Know by Alex Lopez and me is meant to help kids on their journey to making great comics, with tutorials on drawing and page layout, but also how to come up with characters and form a story.

Comics have their own visual language and grammar, and when you understand it you can really unlock the power of clear and exciting storytelling.

Comics As a Medium – Not a Genre

Comics are a medium, not a genre, so we didn’t want to push readers towards telling a particular type of story.

Instead, we wanted to give readers tools and a vocabulary to understand and create the stories that they want to tell. Comics as a medium work just as well for funny strips about talking animals as they do for earth-shatteringly epic superhero showdowns.

Helping Kids Make Comics

There’s been a huge rise recently in the amount of graphic novels on the shelves in bookshops, but there hasn’t been a corresponding rise in books that help kids make comics. While comics can be used as a tool to encourage reluctant readers, they are so much more than that. Comics are a vital form of expression for many kids, and a way to tell stories in a direct and immediate way that they can’t anywhere else.

Hopefully, readers of Create Your Own Comics: Everything You Need to Know will come away with different ways of thinking about comics, but there’s one overriding message to the book – making comics is so much fun!

Guest Blog:  James Davis

Author of Scarlet Defender of the Universe

Humour is the key to engagement

One of the most powerful remedies to the reading crisis is also one of the simplest: stories that make kids laugh.

Humour has always been a secret doorway into reading, but today it may be more essential than ever. Highly illustrated, accessible books that are packed with jokes, visual gags, and playful storytelling offer an irresistible invitation to children who might otherwise feel intimidated, bored, or defeated by reading.

There are few better moments as a parent than when your child is reading and laughing. That’s when you can feel certain you’re not getting it wrong.

Laughter motivates readers

When a child laughs, something important happens: the pressure lifts. Reading stops feeling like work and starts being fun. Humorous stories lower emotional barriers by creating positive associations with books, which is especially crucial for reluctant readers or those who have struggled with more traditional texts.

Laughter rewards effort. It motivates children to turn the page, try another chapter, or pick up another book, all without being nudged or monitored. In a climate where screen time is an ever-present competitor, the joy of a good laugh becomes an effective counterbalance.

Illustrations enrich the experience 

Illustrated books that blend text with dynamic, expressive artwork, like those by the fabulous Dotty Sutton, play a unique role in this effort. The visuals support comprehension, provide context clues, and offer resting points for the eye, making stories more accessible to children with diverse reading abilities.

But highly illustrated books do more than help struggling readers; they enrich the experience for all children. Illustrations amplify the humour, transforming a funny moment into something unforgettable. A well-timed drawing of a character mid-mishap or a scribbled margin joke can turn a simple sentence into a belly laugh. That emotional spark keeps young readers coming back for more.

Accessibility opens doors 

This accessibility is not about “dumbing down” literature. It’s about opening doors. For some readers, these books will be a stepping stone; for others, they may be a home.

I still very much enjoy re-reading the Asterix books I buy my son as presents. Almost a teenager, he is thankfully a voracious reader, but will happily switch between Lord of the Rings and Mr Gum. I would never encourage it to be any other way.

Social elements of reading

Importantly, funny books also foster the social elements of reading. Children share jokes, quote favourite lines, and pass around books that made them giggle. Laughter is contagious; so is enthusiasm.

This is especially powerful when children want to share these moments with the strongest influences in their lives: their parents.

Bridging generational gaps 

My most treasured feedback on Scarlet: Defender of the Universe, was from a family that now uses the term shploink frequently as a verb. ‘Shploink over there and get me an apple, will you?’ ‘Let’s shploink to the shops and pick up some bread.’ I couldn’t have imagined a better outcome.

It’s extremely difficult to create a book that bridges generational gaps and provides something that can genuinely be enjoyed by all. But I was lucky enough to have a great deal of help from people much smarter than I am. I did, however, provide the gags, which is perhaps enough.

Cutting through the noise

In a world of competing distractions, humorous, highly illustrated stories cut through the noise. They create emotional connections and promote comprehension. If we want to nurture lifelong readers, we must give children books that feel like a treat, not a task. Books that meet them with warmth, joy, and a well-placed punchline.

Amid the reading crisis, laughter may be our most potent tool.

Guest Blog: Simon Stephenson

Author of The Snowman Code

The Books that Remain with Me

Growing up, our local library was my home-from-home. I knew our librarians by name and also temperament: who to ask for a recommendation, who would kindly overlook an overdue book if you told them what you’d enjoyed about it, and who absolutely would not. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is famously the last person to have read everything ever written, but I suspect I am the last kid to have read the entire children’s section of Colinton Public Library.

I found something to like in just about all the stories that I read, and it was a rare Primary School book report that did not conclude with me heartily recommending a work to all my friends. Nonetheless, all these years later, only a handful have remained permanently with me, and they all have a single thing in common: they made me feel.

Mission Emotion

Charlotte’s Web. The Call of The Wild. Watership Down. I can still remember exactly where I read each of them, and precisely how they made me feel. And then there is perhaps my favourite book of all time: The Little Prince.  Even as an adult, I still cannot read it without shedding a tear. Perhaps especially as an adult.

When it came time to write my own children’s book, I therefore knew what my mission was: it must make my readers feel. And not only my young readers, but ideally my older readers too.

Deeply Felt Experiences

Emotion, though, might be the hardest thing to do as a writer, because you cannot fake it. If you, as a writer, do not feel emotion for your characters, then the reader certainly will not. It is no coincidence that The Little Prince has its origins in the four days Antoine St-Exupery spent lost in the Sahara desert after his plane crashed, or that Watership Down draws on Richard Adams’ experiences in Operation Market Garden, one of the most brutal campaigns of World War II.

I have mercifully never been in a plane crash, nor fought in a world war, but of course, that leaves a writer like me with a problem: how do you write something that makes people feel?

The answer, I think, is something I learned while working at Pixar: that deeply felt ordinary experiences can be as universal as extraordinary ones. As with The Little Prince and Watership Down – or even Luca or Toy Story –  the translation to the fictional world does not have to be literal, but the feeling beneath it needs to be real.

Rooted in Personal Emotions

And so my story, The Snowman Code, is rooted in emotions I have personally known: sadness and grief in wintertime, but also joy and happiness and the redemptive power of love.

The empathy for my protagonist draws directly from my life too: Blessing is involved in the care system, and when I was a children’s doctor, I worked with a lot of kids just like her. I always left those clinics profoundly moved by my young patients’ resilience in the face of their difficult circumstances and wanting to do whatever I could for them.

If I have done my job right, readers of all ages will leave The Snowman Code feeling the same way about Blessing, and hopefully that feeling might even stay with them.