The Lakes International Comic Art Festival has announced its fourth tranche of guests for its annual weekend of comics celebration, taking place across Bowness-on-Windermere over Friday 26th – Sunday 28th September 2025.
Newly announced guests heading to the Lakes in September are, in alphabetical order, Abbigayle Bircham, Matthew Dooley, Kate Evans, Khaled Jarada, Pertti Jarla, Comics Laureate Bobby Joseph, Michael Lark, Martin Rowson, Kev F Sutherland, Bryan Talbot, Mary Talbot and the team from the adult humour comic magazine, VIZ.
They join already announced guests such as Charlie Adlard, Mehdi Annassi, Serge Bloch, Philip Bond, Shelly Bond, Simone Lia, Lorenzo Mattotti, Bill Morrison, Sean Phillips, Alison Sampson, Lucy Sullivan, and Craig Thompson.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to reveal more guest for this year’s truly international Festival,” enthuses Festival Director Julie Tait. “It’s great to welcome returning creators, and introduce our new audiences to new faces, too.
“Complementing our new partnership with Phoenix comic, we think we’ll be delivering on of the best mixes of comic talent we’ve ever brought to Cumbria.”
• Festival Passes for the rest of LICAF 2025 are available now
This year’s Festival in the heart of the Lake District this autumn as part of an exciting new partnership, also includes, for the first time ever, Phoenix Fest – the UK’s best-loved children’s comics festival – which will join LICAF for a weekend of storytelling, creativity, and comic fun in Bowness-on-Windermere, from Friday 26th to Sunday 28th September 2025. Phoenix Fest guests include Abby Bulmer, Neill Cameron and Jamie Smart.
Tickets for Phoenix Fest events will be sold separately from LICAF’s general Festival Pass, and will go on sale at 8.00pm on Tuesday 1st July 2025.
• Tickets for the Phoenix Fest sessions will go on sale at 8.00pm on Tuesday July 1st 2025
Further details, including the full line-up and event updates will be available via www.comicartfestival.com and thephoenixcomic.co.uk/phoenix-fest
• The Lakes International Comic Art Festival is online at: comicartfestival.com | comicscanchangetheworld.com | BlueSky | Facebook | Instagram| YouTube
• For more on the Lakes International Comic Art Festival’s Comic Development Work please visit Comics Can Change the World at comicscanchangetheworld.com | Follow Comics4Change on BlueSky
Festival Guest Checklist
Abbigayle Bircham
Abbigayle Bircham is a Norwich-based comic artist with a penchant for the weird and wonderful, who is probably scribbling away in her favourite tea shop at this moment. A Lakes International Comic Art Festival Breakthrough Initiative participant, she has published work with Soaring Penguin Press and the Rat Pack Collective, dreams of having her own cartoon show one day, and first met Bobby Joseph when taking his Writing Comics short course. Now he can’t seem to get rid of her.
Matthew Dooley
Matthew Dooley won the Cape/Observer Graphic Short Story Prize and his debut FLAKE, published by Cape in 2020, went on to win the Wodehouse Bollinger Prize, the first time for a graphic novel. It was also a Guardian Book of the Year. His latest book, Aristotle’s Cuttlefish, the story of a man who’s spent a lifetime quietly cataloguing the carelessness of his fellow home town residents, was published by Jonathan Cape in June 2025.
Kate Evans
Kate Evans is a cartoonist, artist, author and quilter. Back in the 20th century, she was living in a tree on the route of the Newbury Bypass road protest, when she was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to draw cartoons from the tree tops. The subject of her pen is wide-ranging – from feminist fairy stories, through birth and breastfeeding to refugee relief and revolutionary socialism. Her graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Red Rosa, has been translated into 20 languages. Threads from the Refugee Crisis was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Orwell Prize for journalism. She does the regular strip “Thoughts from a Broad” for New Internationalist magazine. She is unafraid of tackling serious subjects through the light-hearted medium of comics. “If you can make someone laugh, you’re halfway to changing their mind.”
Evans’ latest project is another meticulously researched and beautiful historical biography, this time of Jane Austen. In Patchwork, Evans illustrates Austen’s story using the fabrics of the quilt that she made, and pieces together the narrative from Austen’s own words. Then, using the new medium of thread painting, she has embroidered a series of fabric meditations on the fabric of society in Regency England. The whole thing stitches together seamlessly to form a stunning new work that will appeal to Austen fans and comics aficionados alike.
Khaled Jarada
Born in 1996 in Gaza, Palestine, Khaled Jarada is an independent visual artist and children’s book illustrator. He has illustrated many children’s books, such as Cane Talk and School Uniform, with several publishing houses. He has worked as an animator, taught art of performance and participated in several local and international exhibitions. He did an artistic residency at the Al Qatan foundation in 2020 where he exhibited his project Metres. The same year he received second prize at the video art festival organised by the French Institute in Palestine for his project, Pandemic Diaries.
In 2021, he was selected for the artistic residency at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome. In France, he took up a residency at La Filleuse in Reims in 2022, and also participated in the residency for the Festival Ciné-Palestine in Paris in 2024. In the same year, he took part in the Musée Sahab group show at the Palais de Tokyo, and concurrently held his first solo exhibition, “Non Key Frame”, at the Fann A porter gallery in Dubai. He has been a member of the agency, Artists in Exile, since 2021.
Pertti Jarla
Pertti Jarla is mostly known for his Fingerpori syndicated strip series, launched in 2006. Its humour is largely based on Finnish puns, and has been adapted to film and theatre. He has also done all kinds of illustrations and editorial cartoons, and has self-published his own comics.
Bobby Joseph
Bobby Joseph was announced as the Comic Laureate 2023-25 during the Lakes International Comic Art Festival on 30 September 2023, in Bowness-on-Windermere.
Bobby is an acclaimed comic writer, artist, tutor and editor whose work has often challenged and inspired its readers. His early work includes the creation of Skank magazine, where his best-known strip, “Scotland Yardie”, first featured later collected by Knockabout Press in 2017. It was the first BAME graphic novel to be studied as a module on an English Literature MA course at King’s College, London.
His latest graphic novel, My Dad Fights Demons!, drawn by Abbigayle Bircham, is published by SelfMadeHero in September 2025.
Bobby has written for The Guardian newspaper, Dazed and Confused and Vice.com. His comic work was a prominent feature at the Anarchy in the UK comic exhibition at the British Library in 2015 and was seen by over 60,000 visitors. He is also a vocal advocate for diversity and BAME representation in comic books and is credited on the BBC website as instrumental in featuring some of the “first comics by black creators featuring black characters.”
Michael Lark
Michael Lark is the artist and co-creator of Lazarus and Lazarus: Risen from Image Comics. In his nearly thirty years in the comics industry, he has drawn many of the most iconic characters in the medium, including Spider-Man, Captain America, Daredevil, Batman, Superman, and many others.
Martin Rowson
Martin Rowson is a multi-award-winning political cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, author, performer and poet. His work currently appears regularly in The Guardian and Byline Times, and hitherto he’s been published by almost everyone you can think of apart from Private Eye and The Sun (they never asked him).
His books include comic book adaptations of The Waste Land, Gulliver’s Travels and The Communist Manifesto; a memoir, and Stuff, about clearing out his late parents’ house which was longlisted for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize; and eight volumes of poetry, the last of which, The *Untsiad, updates Alexander Pope’s classic satire on human idiocy and corruption, The Dunciad.
In 2017, in a full-page editorial, the Daily Mail described Martin and his work as “disgusting”, “deranged”, “sick and offensive”. He couldn’t have been happier.
Kev F Sutherland
Kev F Sutherland has written and drawn for Beano, Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel Comics, and now creates graphic novels adapted from William Shakespeare. He runs his Comic Art Masterclass across the country (learn everything he knows, so you can steal his job), and is creator of the popular Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.
Bryan Talbot
Born in 1952, multiple award-winning artist and writer Bryan Talbot has worked on underground comics, science fiction and superhero stories such as work for 2000AD and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. Bryan was awarded a Doctorate in Arts and another in Letters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His own books include The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Alice in Sunderland, and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (with Mary Talbot), the first graphic novel to win the Costa biography award; and the Grandville series, which won Le Prix Actusf De L’uchronie earlier this year.
His latest graphic novel, The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor, will be published in French in September, and in English by Jonathan Cape in November.
Mary Talbot
Mary M. Talbot is an academic turned graphic novelist. Her first graphic novel, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes(with Bryan Talbot), won the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Her books also include Armed With Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington, and Rain, both with Bryan Talbot, the latter a rallying cry to protect the planet.
Bryan and Mary are both founding patrons of The Lakes International Comic Art Festival.
VIZ
And yes, VIZ are back! (I’m not sure the Festival team can keep them away…)
Born in 1965 to simple coal mining folk, Simon Thorp attended grammar school in Pontefract, winning the Rev. JJ Christie Prize for the most outstanding boy in the first year. He went on to spend 3 years studying fine art at a world famous and prestigious university, the name of which escapes him. He sold his first cartoon to Punch in 1983, and his last cartoon to the same magazine at the same moment. He has a wife and three children, the names of whom escape him.
Born in 1962, Graham Dury studied botany at Nottingham and Leicester Universities before throwing away a glittering career in research science to draw men with space hopper-sized testicles. Had he not been sidetracked, he would almost certainly have won a Nobel prize for plant genetics, possibly two. He is now pinning his hopes on the Nobel Committee instituting a new prize for drawing men with space hoper-sized testicles. He is married with about three children.
• Festival Passes for the rest of LICAF 2025 are available now
Announced guests for 2025 in alphabetical order include in alphabetical order, Charlie Adlard, Mehdi Annassi, Abbigayle Bircham, Serge Bloch, Philip Bond, Shelly Bond, Chris Condon, Dagsson, Matthew Dooley, Kate Evans, Khaled Jarada, Pertti Jarla, Comics Laureate Bobby Joseph, Michael Lark, Simone Lia, Lorenzo Mattotti, Bill Morrison, Robbie Morrison, Mike Perkins, Jacob Phillips, Sean Phillips, Will Potter, the Rickard Sisters, Martin Rowson, Mohammad Sabaaneh, Alison Sampson, Chris Shepherd, Lucy Sullivan, Kev F Sutherland, Bryan Talbot, Mary Talbot, Donya Todd. Craig Thompson, and the team from VIZ – with more guests to come
• The Lakes International Comic Art Festival is online at: comicartfestival.com | comicscanchangetheworld.com | BlueSky | Facebook | Instagram| YouTube
• For more on the Lakes International Comic Art Festival’s Comic Development Work please visit Comics Can Change the World at comicscanchangetheworld.com | Follow Comics4Change on BlueSky
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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: British Comics, Comic Art, Comics, Creating Comics, downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, Events
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