Whales project

In early 2020, I decided that my next comic was going to be about whales.

Fast forward nearly six years later, and I’ve developed releationships with researchers around the world. Telling important, beautiful stories about our ocean’s inhabitants.

Releases

Making Space (October 2025) – co-authored with Erich Hoyt
Karasu (November 2023)

Currently working on

Making Space translations – Portuguese, French, and more.
A new comic about whale vocalisations, coming Spring 2026
A co-authored project looking to explain scientific research of Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort bowhead whales

How it all started

After the first two years of researching, I became completely lost in a spiral of academia and writing. Surrounded by books, research, sketchbooks and heaps of notes, I realised this story was going to be bigger than I initially imagined.

So by May 2022, one of the many articles I absorbed stuck with me – a piece about Sato’s beaked whales, written by Devon Bidal for the fantastic Hakai magazine (now Biographic). And, it got me thinking: Isn’t it nuts that we’re still discovering new species of whales? How did they even do this? I started writing and researching specifically around this discovery – using the scientific journal article announcing the discovery, and anything else I could find. This also led me to get in contact with one of the researchers, Erich Hoyt.

All the work that went into Karasu cemented my original sentiment even more. Whales today are the largest creatures ever to exist on this planet. And they live to us, on this star-orbiting rock we call home. Yet we know, and see, so little of them.

Karasu led to my ongoing work at the Natural History Museum’s Cetacea collection, and beyond.

Do you have an area of whale research you think deserves to be told? Let me know.

Key areas of research

Human connections with whales, dolphins and porpoises
Indigenous and historic spiritual connections with whales
Cultural attitudes and relationships with whales (e.g. from whaling to save the whales)
The variety of whale species, their taxonomy, and where their names came from
The culture of whales: how they interact as groups, how they live, feed and view the world
The role of whales in history, both as living beings and beyond
How we can better protect whales’ futures