Though William Blake lived through a golden age of cartooning that gave us pioneers such as Gillray and Rowlandson, he thought that ‘Caricature Prints…ought not to abound so much as they do.’ The comic strip per se, a pictorial sequential narrative, did not quite exist in Blake’s time. Nevertheless he has gone on to have an outsized influence on comics creators from Britain, America and further afield, both as an artist who combined visual art and the written word, and as a maverick author of subversive and visionary projects.

John Riordan is combining his lifelong love of comics and his ongoing obsession with William Blake by creating a full-length graphic novel based on Blake’s life, which, as far as he can tell, has not been done before. He will share extracts from this work-in-progress called LOS, along with the intentions and experiences that have fed into his ongoing magnum opus/epic folly. He will also give a potted history of Blake’s influence on, and appearance in, comics, and explain how he thinks his own Blakean comic fits into this long and continuing cultural history.

John Riordan is an illustrator and comics artist, and a Trustee of the Blake Society. He created the comic strip William Blake, Taxi Driver for Time Out London, and is serialising LOS, his graphic novel about Blake, at https://loshighway.substack.com/