The Lakes International Comic Art Festival has announced its second tranche of guests for its annual weekend of comics celebration, taking place across Bowness-on-Windermere over Friday 26th – Sunday 28th September 2025. Festival Passes are available now.
Announced this week are, in alphabetical order: Charlie Adlard, Mehdi Annassi, Serge Bloch, Philip Bond, Chris Condon, Dagsson, Jacob Phillips, Will Potter, the Rickard Sisters, Mohammad Sabaaneh, and Alison Sampson. Full biographies below!
Already announced are Shelly Bond, Simone Lia, Lorenzo Mattotti, Bill Morrison, Robbie Morrison, Mike Perkins, Sean Phillips, Chris Shepherd, Lucy Sullivan, Donya Todd and Craig Thompson. More guests will be announced in the coming weeks.
Offering an entertaining mix of panels, live draws, interviews, presentations, workshops, award announcements, a Comics Market Place and the International Rights Fair for comic creators and publishers, plus plenty of free events for children, you can expect a full weekend of comic craziness in the Lake District town!
“We were delighted with the response to news about our first guests for our 2025 Festival,” says Festival Director Julie Tait, “and we expect many fans will be pleased to have confirmation that both Philip and Shelly Bond are coming to Bowness, and Charlie Adlard, who has supported our projects in many ways, is back on the lineup.
“The weekend is a vital part of year-round commitment to promoting comics as a medium, alongside local, national and international partners. It’s going to be a very exciting event this year!”
The Lakes International Comic Art Festival returns to Bowness-on-Windermere Friday 26th – Sunday 28th September 2025 | Festival Passes are available now
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Festival Guests: Second Wave!
Charlie Adlard has been a “veteran” of the comic industry for over 25 years. He’s spent the majority of his time since 2003 working on The Walking Dead, which finished in 2019, and has received many industry awards for his work on the series culminating in winning the Sergio Aragonés International Award for Excellence in Comic Art in 2019.
In his time as a comic creator, he has worked on many other projects as far reaching as Mars Attacks, The X-Files, “Judge Dredd” and “Savage” for 2000AD, Batman, X-Men, Superman etc and creator-owned projects closer to his heart like Astronauts In Trouble, Breath Of The Wendigo, Codeflesh, Rock Bottom, Vampire State Building, and White Death.
Mehdi Annassi, aka Machima, who created this year’s Festival poster, is a self-taught multidisciplinary visual artist based in Casablanca. He started his career in the video game industry in 2008, and worked since then as a digital artist, illustrator, graphic designer and street artist. In addition to his commissioned work (murals,comics, posters, illustrations, animation), the award-winning artist (creative of the year 2015 on the Maroc Web Awards) is known for his contribution and involvement on Moroccan comic art scene, as a founding member of Skefkef, the first Moroccan independent comics magazine written in darija.
Apart from designing walls and posters for his freelance clients, Mehdi Annassi is currently working on his first graphic novel. His work has been shown in Morocco, Spain, Egypt, France, the UK and Lebanon.
Serge Bloch is the illustrator of many children’s books, including SamSam and the Max and Lili series Born in 1945, Serge Bloch studied under Claude Lapointe in the the illustration workshop of the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts. For a time, he was the Artistic Director of Bayard Youth press, and he also drew for various daily newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Suddeutshe Zeitung Magazine and Die Zeit.
He’s the illustrator of many children’s books, including the Max and Lili series, and the creator of several albums such as the SamSam series.
Bloch received the Bologna Children’s Award, in 2007 and Le Baobab, awarded at the Montreuil Fair in 2005. In 2005 and 2015 he was awarded the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.
Philip Bond started writing and drawing comics in the seminal ’80s DEADLINE magazine. He has since squandered talent on books like The Invisibles, X-Statix, Doctor Who and Eve Stranger, but is frustratingly still best known for drawing Grant Morrison’s Kill Your Boyfriend (1995). Philip is currently co-creating, with writer William Potter, the Britpop underdog epic Geezer.
Chris Condon is known for his work on That Texas Blood, The Enfield Gang Massacre, with artist Jacob Phillips. He’s also the writer of the smash hit Ultimate Wolverine from Marvel Comics and Green Arrow from DC Comics. He lives in New Jersey with his dog, Obi, who really does most of the writing.
Hugleikur Dagsson, a previous and popular guest at LICAF, is an Icelandic cartoonist and comedian known for simple drawings and dark humour. He has published many books in many countries, written a few plays, directed his own animated TV show, and taped a couple of stand up specials.
Jacob Phillips is a comic artist and colourist residing in tropical Manchester. He has been drawing his whole life, self-publishing his first comic Roboy at the age of 11 and selling it at Brighton Comic Con.
Skip forward some years and today he is the artist on That Texas Blood and The Enfield Gang Massacre with writer Chris Condon, as well as Newburn with Chip Zdarsky and graphic novel adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS, as well as being a two times Eisner-Nominated colourist on books such as Reckless, Criminal, Night Fever and more.
His recent cover work includes News from the Fallout, a new six-issue mini series from Image Comics, written by Chris Condon, drawn by Jeffrey Alan Love, and The Devient.
Will Potter is bass player in UK indie band CUD, comic-book writer, children’s genre and activity book author
From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, William Potter played bass in Top 30 indie band CUD while writing and drawing “Nommo” for seminal UK music/comics anthology Deadline. On leaving the band, Will worked as a writer, editor and artist for numerous licensed-character magazines and partworks featuring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Captain Scarlet and Spongebob Squarepants, plus the DC Comics Graphic Novel Collection and Marvel Fact Files.
In 2017, with CUD having reformed, he began collaborating with fellow Deadline alumnus Philip Bond on a comic-strip unreliable biography of the band, Rich and Strange, followed by the ongoing crowdfunded satiric Britpop book, Geezer. Will has also written 50-odd non-fiction books for kids, including The Ultimate Guide to Creating Comics, How To Create Fantasy Art and the cartoon factual series, Professor Kat’s Science Facts, launched in 2024.
Scarlett and Sophie Rickard are sisters who work together to make graphic novels. Sophie does the words and Scarlett draws the pictures. Scarlett has been drawing since before Sophie was born, and Sophie has been telling her what to draw since she learned to talk.
They were brought up in the Ribble Valley, Lancashire in the shadow of Pendle Hill, and this landscape can be found in much of their work. They say they squabbled non-stop as children, and went in their own directions as young adults, but now work together collaboratively, without arguing, despite living 200 miles apart.
Scarlett has worked as a commercial artist, illustrator, signwriter and portrait painter. Sophie has worked as a civil servant, pub landlady, cabin crew and child counsellor.
Scarlett and Sophie will be at the 2025 Lakes International Comic Art Festival launching their third graphic adaptation with SelfMadeHero, This Slavery, by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. This classic novel about women’s place in capitalism follows Constance Maud’s No Surrender (2022) and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (2020) which was Eisner nominated for Best Adaptation.
Mohammad Sabaaneh is an award-winning Palestinian cartoonist and caricaturist, and an active member in the Cartoon Movement. He has been a cartoonist since 2002, and works with the Arab American University. His work has been published in many Arabic newspapers, such as Al-Etihad, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and Al-Ghad. He has also participated in many international leaflets and books, and his comics have been translated into French, Italian, and Arabic.
Sabaaneh, who received a Master’s degree from the UK in the Illustration By Chevening Scholarship in 2020, is also a member of the International Cartoon Movement and the Middle East representative for CRNI. He’s won many graphics awards, including third place at the Arabic Caricature Contest in 2013 and the Festival award at the Estaq International Festival for Cartoons in 2017. His work has previously been exhibited worldwide, in Britain, Spain, and Washington and participated at many international exhibitions in Berlin, Norway, Holland, Genève, Qatar, and Syria.
His first book, Palestine in Black and White, was published in the US in April 2017 through Just World Books, and published by Al Saqi in the UK, and in Spanish and Catalan. He published his comic, Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine, considered the first Palestinian comic in the US, in 2021.
Sabaaneh has used the art of caricature with deaf students, to help them use more than one dialogue language to express their feelings, and with children who have been witness to the horror of war, to help them psychologically.
He organised two international exhibitions in Palestine, the first in 2014, with the participation of 99 artists in Mahmoud Darwish Museum. The second was in 2018, from the world to Jerusalem, with the participation of 155 artists, also exhibited in Belgium, Holland, and London. In 2023, he organised the first Palestinian collective comics exhibition. His mural was exhibited during the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba at UN Headquarters in New York.
Alison Sampson is an award winning, London-based artist and writer, drawing comics and illustrations in the fields of horror (Wolverine, Bloodline, Hellboy, EC Comics, Winnebago Graveyard, the 2023 Eisner-nominated Department of Truth, Werewolf By Night), fantasy (Sleeping Beauties Volumes 1 & 2), science fiction (TITLE AND PUBLISHER REDACTED) and adventure (Hit-Girl: India), and more.
Clients include Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, Tiny Onion, Oni, Dark Horse, AWA, IDW, Boom! Studios, Titan, Vault, Z2, TKO, DSTLRY, Rebellion, broadcasters, print newspapers, major art galleries, various crowdfunded projects, and more.
Recent collaborators include Stephen and Owen King, Steve Niles, Mike Mignola, Futurific, Subterranean Press and Iron Maiden. Recent writing credits (also drawing) include: Women of Marvel, the Tori Amos anthology, Little Earthquakes, which received four Eisner nominations in 2023, Iron Maiden/ Z2, and for Trina Robbins’ upcoming Won’t Back Downbenefit anthology for Planned Parenthood.
Alison is also a prolific cover artist for books and comics. She is currently working on creator-owned and work for hire projects, including REDACTED for REDACTED and REDACTED for REDACTED, and when she isn’t doing that, she works on growing comics communities and growing baby trees. And when she is not doing that, she is an Architect.
The Lakes International Comic Art Festival returns to Bowness-on-Windermere Friday 26th – Sunday 28th September 2025 | Festival Passes are available now
• The Lakes International Comic Art Festival is online at: www.comicartfestival.com | BlueSky | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Little LICAF on Facebook | Little LICAF on Instagram
- About the Author
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: downthetubes News
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