Avery Hill Publishing has announced plans to release Acid Box, a darkly comic adventure through club culture, spanning space and time. It looks incredible!
Written by Sara Kenney, with art by James Devlin, Ria Grix, and Emma Vieceli, coloured by Sofie Dodgson, and lettered by Hassan Otsman-Elhaou, guided by editors Kirsten Murray and Katie West, Avery Hill will be seeking support for the 200 page graphic novel with a Kickstarter campaign soon.
Joe Stone also provided design work and “a little bit of drawing”.
Comic writer Kieron Gillen describes Acid Box as: “Dancefloor history meets family history via psychic reality-skipping quest. Take your brain to another dimension. Pay close attention.”
DJ, Broadcaster, Artist Justin Robertson says the upcoming book is “A welcome depiction of the transcendental nature of electronic music culture, where transformation is always possible and hope is carried by the poetry of sound.”
In Acid Box, Jade Nyo just wants to listen to some music and to get wasted. Then, while out clubbing with her brother, she meets a trio of women who control portals through space and time, and give her an Acid Box, which controls geological features on earth. Now it’s all up to her to travel through time and avert global disaster.
But the box is broken, and Jade travels through the past, present, and future in a quest to fix it, finding along the way friends who can help through music. And as she tries and tries to change things for the better, she finds that the work and pressure of changing history might be too much for just one person to fix…
Telling a story that combines music, time travel, and adventure, Acid Box is a powerful work about the state of climate change around the globe, and a commentary on personal responsibility.
The Acid Box Kickstarter offers several tiers to suit your budget from a digital copy of the comic, to signed sketches.
• Back the Acid Box here on Kickstarter
Expanding the Project: More Than Just A Comic
Like most of the projects run by writer Sara Kenney, who runs Wowbagger Productions, there is a participatory arts element. The team worked with 20 young adults from the UK, India, Kenya and South Africa to explore the history, science themes and art within the story.
Wowbagger advertised the project on socials and via their contacts with youth groups. The young adults were paid to attend the workshops and got an additional fee for their creative works that appear in Acid Box. They also attended workshops on careers with information ranging from portfolios to pensions.
This aspect of the work is important to Sara, who has been mentoring young people around the globe since 2012 and continues to work with many of them as they advance through their careers. Because of her background (mixed heritage, dinner ticket kid with a neurospicy brain) and how difficult she found it to navigate the science and creative industries, Sara recognises the value of having a participatory art component whenever she embarks on a new project. She also believes it’s vital that artists and scientists collaborate and wants to help others who would like to embrace this as part of their practice.
The young people who took part in the Acid Box workshops spoke to Karen Berger (comic editor), Dr Tana Joseph (Astronomer, Time Travel), Professor David Nutt (neuropsychopharmacologist ), Gemmy (musician), Professor Divya Jindal-Snape (education/ life transition researcher), Karrie Fransman (artist), Joe Muggs (music journalist), Irvine Welsh (writer), Dr Suzi Gage (psychologist), Shelly Bond (editor), Rhiannon Griffiths MBE (Comics Youth), Lucy Sullivan (artist), Prof Stephen Husbands (Medicinal Chemistry), Katy Porter (The Loop), Toya Delazy (inventor of ‘Afrorave’), Jeremy Deller (artist), and many more.
“Those discussions inspired the young people to create the comics and articles, included at the back of the book,” Avery Hill note. “From sober raving, time travel, chemistry and climate change to the use of MDMA for therapeutics, their work showcases a range of stunning creative responses to our conversations.”
• Back the Acid Box here on Kickstarter
The Core Team
Sara Kenney is a writer, producer and director in TV, games and comics. She wrote the comic Surgeon X (Image) set in a futuristic antibiotic crisis; Co-wrote Planet Divoc-91 (Webtoons) an allegorical alien invasion story about the pandemic and wrote She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game (STEAM). She’s also written for several graphic medicine projects. Sara runs Wowbagger Productions and currently works as Innovation and Engagement Manager at the UK’s Environment Agency.
James Devlin is a Glasgow-based artist. He is the co-creator of Planet Divoc-91. His colour work includes the award-winning graphic novels Surgeon X, LaGuardia, and Tomorrow.
Emma Vieceli loves telling stories and has worked as an artist, writer, performer and composer across multiple publishers, genres, and formats. She is a winner of the writers’ Scribe award for best graphic novel with her Life is Strange series, and also the recipient of the Stiles+Drewe song prize award 2024 for the song “It Starts Small”, from her musical – UNFOLDING. She created the BREAKS trilogy, with co-writer, Malin Ryden, and has been an artist/writer on multiple titles across comics, television and video games.
Ria Grix is the illustrator of The Anomalous Adventures of Viola Holm and Kotiin books. Broken Frontier describes them as “UK comics’ best kept cartooning secret.”
Sofie Dodgson is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and maker, working across a variety of areas. Her work can be found in Eisner award-winning comic books, marketing campaigns for large brands such as Benefit cosmetics and Nintendo, music promos from small indie bands through to Lady Gaga, at festivals and events such as Glastonbury and Wilderness, and on your telly for series on Channel 4 and Comedy Central.
She also runs theatre and events company Tootles+Nibs which tours festivals all summer long in the UK, hosts workshops for brands, creates bespoke international treasure hunts and throws wicked parties.
Multi-award winning comic letterer, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, has worked for DC, Dark Horse, Image, and Dynamite, and is also the 2x Eisner-winning editor of the digital comic magazine PanelxPanel, the voice behind the seminal YouTube channel, Strip Panel Naked, and wrote The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber.
Acid Box Editor & Project Management is by Katie West and Kirsten Murray, with Joe Stone on board as Designer and on Diary Pages, plus Alison Sampson providing Cover Art for the Young Adult Pages.
• Back the Acid Box here on Kickstarter
Avery Hill Publishing
Avery Hill Publishing is an independent publishing company based in London that helps aspiring creators reach their potential and is a home to the geniuses that the mainstream has yet to recognise. Their canon includes psychogeographical mappings, eco-anarchist wizards, boat-shaped coffins, a bad canine named Greasy, and much more.
The company was founded by Ricky Miller and Dave White, who’d known each other since the age of 11. They started out self-publishing zines and quickly moved on to publishing anthologies and then books by creators whose work they admired. In 2015 Katriona Chapman joined the team, and that year Avery Hill also published their first book by Tillie Walden, who would go on to take the world of comics by storm.
Avery Hill books have won Eisner and Ignatz awards, and Avery Hill themselves have been nominated as best publisher in the Broken Frontier Awards for seven years running (winning three times, and last year winning the Hall of Fame Award) Over the last couple of years they’ve had books on Best-of-Year lists by The Guardian, The Telegraph and NPR.
“We hope you’ll back us in this campaign,” they say, “and help them continue to bring interesting and unusual books into the world and support the work of the creators we believe in.”
• Back the Acid Box here on Kickstarter
• Check out the Avery Hill Publishing catalogue at averyhillpublishing.com
This item was updated on Saturday 10th May to add background on the project and more about the creative team
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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.
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