SelfMadeHero New Season Spring 2025

How has January found you? Cold and reluctant? Understandable. But now it’s time for the reassurance you surely need most: the Spring 2025 list from SelfMadeHero! Here’s what’s coming up…

Following on from his previous works on David Hockney and Vincent Van Gogh, we are very happy to welcome Simon Elliott to our Art Masters series with Kusama: Polka Dot Queen.

From her days in 1960s New York as a proponent of free love and peace to her current position as internationally recognised Queen of Polka Dots and creator of infinity, Yayoi Kusama’s life is an extraordinary story of triumph over struggle through art.

Elliott’s new graphic novel vividly portrays Kusama’s unusual youth and family troubles, her discovery of a new style of painting, her struggles with mental illness, and her rise to international art stardom. For those seeking an introduction to this incredible artist or searching for a fresh take on her story – this is Yayoi Kusama’s life as you’ve never seen it before.

Of Vincent: A Graphic Biography (Frances Lincoln, 2024), Frost Magazine wrote: “I learned a great deal about the family Van Gogh, about painting, about the torments of genius, about the graphic novel. I think I’m in love…”

OUT IN UK: 10th April! 🇬🇧

After his Eisner-winning eco drama Ruins successfully returned in paperback last year, Peter Kuper is back with Monarch’s Journey: a colour-in story about this beloved but endangered butterfly and the environmental challenges it faces on its yearly flights.

Now Read This! on Ruins: “Clever, charming, chilling and compulsively engrossing, this delicious exercise in interconnectivity is a brilliant example of how smart and powerful comics can and should be.”

OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 29th APRIL! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲

Having explored the stardust years in STARMAN, the legendary Reinhard Kleist concludes his Bowie duology with Low, detailing the former Thin White Duke’s legendary time in Berlin as he searches for inspiration and records his 1977 album LOW.

In 1976, David Bowie escaped the frantic madness and substance abuse of his life in Los Angeles for the Wall of the divided city of Berlin. With his friend Iggy Pop in tow, Bowie quit drugs and created LOW, the first album of his “Berlin Trilogy”. But even here, during some of the happiest days of his life, Ziggy Stardust would not let him go…

Paper Phoenix Ink called STARMAN “a masterful synthesizing of all those changes and forces that assisted in the first birth of the artist that we know as David Bowie.”

OUT IN UK: 22nd May! 🇬🇧

In 2021 Gareth Brookes gave the world The Dancing Plague – no, not the plague itself, but a graphic novel the New York Times called “visually stunning … With fire and needle, Brookes crafts a book the likes of which we’ve never seen before.” This year Brookes returns with another mixed-media masterpiece: his graphic adaptation of Izaak Walton’s Civil War-era classic The Compleat Angler.

A foundational environmentalist text centuries ahead of its time, The Compleat Angler is one of the most reprinted books in the English language. From the ruins of the English Civil War to today, this adaptation is lovingly rendered in both linocut engraving and hand-drawn pen-and-ink to contrast the meditative and the instructional in Walton’s writing. As a guidebook on how to fish, this 350-year-old manual makes the perfect gift for any angling enthusiast, and its reflective writing connects with post-pandemic desires for calm, mindful pursuits and a return to nature.

OUT IN UK: 19th June! 🇬🇧

Thank you again for joining us this year! We hope you are as excited as we are!

The SelfMadeHero team