Guest Blog: Ned Hartley
Author of Create Your Own Comics
Why Comics Are So Popular and How To Make Great 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!
Create Your Own Comics: Everything You Need to Know is available now from Amazon or Bookshop.
Thank you to Ned for visiting the BooksForTopics blog this week to discuss the power of comics. As we journey through the National Year of Reading 2026, Ned’s insights remind us of the pure power of comics and graphic novels when it comes to reading and writing for pleasure.
Readers may also be interested in the following booklists:
- Recommended Reads for Year 3
- Funny Books for Children
- Graphic Novels for Primary
- Graphic Novels for KS1
- Books for Fans of Bunny vs Monkey
- Books for Fans of Dog Man
- Best Books This Month
Browse our curriculum topic booklists for more.
Where next?
> Visit our Reading for Pleasure Hub
> Browse our Topic Booklists
> View our printable year group booklists.
> See our Books of the Month.