Mensch Publishing announces first graphic memoir – a preview

By John Freeman on January 5, 2026 • ( 0 )

Mensch Publishing is to publish a new graphic memoir with environmental themes and personal tragedy, All Things Connect, by architect and award-winning visual artist Andrew Squire later this month – a luminous graphic memoir about love, resilience, and the search for meaning in turbulent times.

The book’s publication is a first for the publisher, whose catalogue ranges books include Fighter Boy by John Willis, a biography Geoffrey Page, one of the most remarkable fighter pilots of World War Two, Tales of the Art World by Philip Hook to the The Trauma Chronicles by Stephen Westaby.

Spanning two decades, All Things Connect follows Andrew and Ise from their early days in Glasgow – bonded by a shared passion for nature – to their life in a carbon‑neutral home in the Scottish Highlands, and their frontline activism with Extinction Rebellion.

As global crises mount and personal losses deepen, their story shifts from collective struggle to intimate reckoning: the pandemic, the passing of their parents, and Ise’s devastating diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease. Told with striking simplicity and honesty, the memoir reveals how they learned to let go of despair, embrace the fleeting beauty of existence, and find agency in small, deliberate acts of care.

At once a meditation on mortality and a celebration of life, All Things Connect reminds us that while we cannot control the storms around us, we can choose how we dance within them.

Here are some preview pages: please be aware, some language may offend

Andrew Squire is an architect, award-winning visual artist and cartoonist, living in the West Highlands. His art has been a journey towards minimalism, seeking to say a lot with a little, and allowing space and silence to define the form.

“Like many artists, my painting is concerned with creating an alternative reality through which to explore the shoreline between our everyday, known world, and the uncharted territory which lies beyond it,” he wrote in 2016. “Ecological thinking has done much to shift that shoreline over recent decades, giving us the opportunity for a much wider view of our place in the world.

“At a personal level, relocating to a studio on the edge of the elemental and diverse Northwest Highlands of Scotland has also brought another powerful reminder of forces much bigger than ourselves. I’m continuing to work with familiar iconic images and with more ambiguous, abstracted pieces drawn from the textures & forms of the Highland landscape, to continue that process of exploration & mapping.

“Art is inevitably a reflection both of the society in which it was produced and of the personal journey of the individual artist, and it seems to me that the tensions between those societal and personal dynamics are the source of some of the most interesting art.”

“Publishing a graphic memoir is something of a departure for Mensch, as it is not a genre we had previously explored,” says Richard Charkin, Founder of Mensch Publishing. “But when we saw Andrew Squire’s moving and beautifully illustrated manuscript we simply had to publish it.

It finds profundity in simplicity, and humour in sadness. We are also delighted to launch it on the 26th January 2026, which is UN International Day of Clean Energy, as this seems in keeping with the environmental themes of the book.”

Mensch Publishing has no mission statement and no stated editorial strategy. Its aim is simply to help authors reach readers with minimal intervention and maximum impact and to reward them proportionately.

“I don’t have a grand strategy for Mensch publishing – success will be driven entirely by the books we publish not the statements I make,” says Richard, author author of My Back Pages: An Undeniably Personal History of the Publishing Industry. “But I trust Mensch will live up to its name.”

He founded the company after 47 years largely dedicated to managing others to publish successfully.

“In the middle of 2018 I stepped down from the Board of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc and thus put an end to a full-time career in corporate publishing of books and journals. But I was too young to stop altogether and I loved the industry too much simply to disappear. I determined to continue as energetically as possible.”

• All Things Connect by Andrew Squire is available to order from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | Waterstones.com

• Mensch Publishing is online at menschpublishing.com

• Andrew Squire is online at andrewsquire.com

About the Author
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John Freeman

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.