Richard Cowdry
Cartoonist, comic artist, graphic novelist.
Richard Cowdry is a British cartoonist and illustrator currently residing in Germany. His comics career began in the early 2000s after studying illustration at Brighton University, UK
In 2002 he won a new talent award at the Swiss Comic-Festival Sierre. He later taught comics to students at The University For The Arts in Maidstone, UK, and self-published the comics anthologies "Kartoon Cuts" (2004) and "The Bedsit Journal" issues 1 - 3 (2004 - 2008).
He was the creator and editor of The Comix Reader, a newsprint anthology which became an important platform for London's alternative comics scene.
Richard has contributed to various publications including Kuti, Vice, Oxford American, Stripburger, Black Eye, and Forbidden Planet. He drew a regular comic, "DownTown", for the Stool Pigeon music magazine.
He won first prize in the ComicInvasionBerlin awards of 2020.
He is interested in and influenced by every era of comics, going back to the early 1800s.
Das Geheimnis der Knochen is his first graphic novel.
Below is a PechaKucha talk I gave at StattLab, Berlin, on 22 June 2023.
This is my first comic from 2004. Kartoon Cuts. It was a collection of all the short strips I’d done up to that point. A friend saw it recently in a library in Seattle. I don’t know how it ended up there.
I’m Richard Cowdry, a cartoonist from England now living in Berlin. This is an advert I made recently for an issue of Kuti magazine, a comics magazine from Finland.
After Kartoon Cuts I did 3 issues of The Bedsit Journal. It was another anthology, this time with guest artists who fitted the vibe. It was mainly autobiographical and humour comics.
Then I organised and edited 6 issues of a comics newspaper called The Comix Reader. There were hardly any comics publishers in the UK in those days so this was a way of getting our work out. Everyone paid towards the printing and we shared out the comics, with everyone getting a few hundred copies to distribute as they liked.
I was also working for another newspaper at this time - a music paper in London called the Stool Pigeon. I was doing strips for them like these here.
Then I moved to Albania for 4 years. These are typical Albanian scenes. Stray dogs, half constructed yet abandoned buildings, telephone wires. I felt kind of in limbo as far as my comics career went so.....
… to stay in touch with friends on the comics scene I started doing illustrated newsletters and emailing them out. It was mainly diary comics.
While doing these newsletters, as a kind of bonus strip I started adding short stories about the history of palaeontology and fossil hunting - this one is about how people thought fossils of sharks teeth and shells had magical properties.
This one is about how these two German scholars searched for dragon bones in the caves of Transylvania.
This is the first complete Ichthyosaur skull ever recorded. Joseph Anning was 15 years old when he found it in 1811.
As I worked on these history strips I got more into it, and started seeing the potential for a longer work. A kind of scientific mystery story about how people went from using the bible to explain everything to realising the Earth was older than previously thought and that there were these earlier lost worlds buried in the distant past.
I also got interested in the characters involved, like Mary Anning here. She discovered the first complete Plesiosaur and made many other amazing discoveries. She was a self-taught expert.
She was out every day looking for new fossils. Everyone wanted her fossils and advice and opinions, but 200 years ago women weren’t supposed to be scientists and so she was excluded from academic life. She must have been incredibly tough to survive in that world.
Another outsider was Gideon Mantell. He was excluded from the geological scene because he wasn’t university educated, had to work for a living, and wasn’t a member of the Church of England. But he was one of a very small handful of people who discovered the existence of dinosaurs.
Another one of this small group was this guy, William Conybeare. Here he’s waiting for Mary Anning’s fossil Plesiosaur skeleton to arrive in London. He’s worried that it might be stolen by a rival scientist.
This is a page from a comics adaption of a science lecture given in 1824 by William Buckland, which was the first attempt to describe a dinosaur (although that word hadn’t been invented yet).
Here I’m illustrating what people might imagine this elephant-sized cross between a monitor lizard and a crocodile would look like. Btw these pages are work in progress the colouring is unfinished.
While working on this book I always had other projects on the go. This was for the Comics Invasion Berlin competition in 2020 which won first prize (it’s the first of two pages).
These are pages from a nonfiction story for Blab! issue 2, an American comics anthology coming out in 2024.
Finally this is something I’m working on right now… rough pages for a story about Native American cave paintings and creation myths. I’m doing this while finishing the fossil book.
Update October 2025
Since June 2023 when I gave this talk… my paleontology graphic novel was picked up by Avant Verlag (in the summer of 2024). It’s coming out in a German edition next month (Novemember 2025).
The two stories that I drew for the BLAB! anthology have long been completed, however, despite the success of issue one, and with issue 2 waiting to go the printer, Blab! parted ways with its publisher. Following this the main North American comics distributor went bankrupt, causing chaos and insecurity in the business. Blab!’s editor is considering his next steps, and my stories are left floating in comics limbo. The pages to the left (or above if you’re on a phone) are for Blab! issue 3…
Two pages from my paleontology graphic novel ended up in the witchcraft-themed issue of KUTI, the comics magazine from Finland.
I’ve started doing a weekly science fiction story, and I’m writing a new period story set around 1700.
From next month I’ll be out and about promoting my paleontology book. So see you around if you’re in Germany.