Pomona!

Come closer, shut softly your watery eyes!

I just received an advance copy of my book, Pomona, Stories of the Cat Witch, which is publishing with Guppy Books this October!

It’s a mix of comic and picture book, with six short stories about Pomona and her friends.

I had the idea for Pomona in 2016, which I partly remember because a. I was on holiday and b. I was also watching the first season of Stranger Things. I don’t mean the idea came to me in a mystical dream (I wish), but I mean I was drawing the character of Pomona at that time. The last story in this book was the first story I wrote about her, A Sleepless Night.

In 2016 it still felt like any kind of comic was harder to get over the line at a UK publisher, and I can’t even remember if I showed to it anyone back then. Now, happily, the landscape is completely different.

I’ve done a lot of events in schools and bookshops this year to promote Boss of the Underworld and talk about comics generally, and there’s really no doubt how much children love reading comics given the chance. This feels hopeful in a scary landscape for reading in this country where, set against more evidence of how important shared reading is for the development of babies and children, are the statistics that less children are reading for pleasure than even a few years ago.

I looked a lot at my favourite illustrator, William Steig, for the forest scenes (which there are a lot of), and I think it shows in my tree trunks especially.

I was really happy with the back cover!

My big thanks to Bella Pearson for commissioning and championing this book, to Ness Wood for super design work, and to Clem Koenig and Axel Scheffler for their support and for introducing me to Bella, and to Axel for the incredibly kind quote which we used on the front!

Pomona publishes on October 1st, and is available for pre-orders now, wherever you get your books, and of course especially from your local independent bookshop!