Murphy's Adventures
Murphy’s Adventures is an ongoing independent graphic novel series centred on Murphy, a young girl moving through strange worlds, fractured memories, and emotional transformations in search of identity and belonging. Developed through long-form storytelling and worldbuilding, the series explores vulnerability, change, and the shaping of inner experience through narrative form.
Book 1: The Foundation
Book 1 introduces the emotional and narrative ground from which the series grows. Drawn through a more immediate and instinctive visual language, it establishes the key tensions of memory, loss, and belonging that continue to unfold across the later books.
Book 2: A turning point in the series
In Book 2, Murphy’s Adventures takes on a more distinct artistic identity. The storytelling becomes more psychologically layered, with greater visual and structural experimentation. Through fragmented memories, shifting atmospheres, and a deeper attention to character, the book opens the series into a more complex emotional and narrative space.
Book 3: Expansion in scale and atmosphere
In Book 3, Murphy’s Adventures expands into a broader visual and narrative space. Larger settings, more extended sequences, and a stronger sense of atmosphere open the series into a wider story-world. The book deepens its exploration of memory and transformation while pushing the visual language towards a more expansive form.
Book 2: Memory, fracture, and becoming
In Book 2, Murphy begins to recover a partial sense of self through memory: fragments of her past, her family, her wounds, and the things she has lost return with new force. This inward movement deepens the emotional and psychological lives of the wider cast, whose own fractured histories begin to surface alongside hers.
Visually, the book opens into a more active and experimental language: traditional drawing and hand inking remain at its core, while layouts become more dynamic, memory sequences shift into black and white, and hand-painted chapter openings expand the world through landscape and atmosphere.
Worldbuilding through hand-painted chapter openings
In Book 3, Murphy’s Adventures reconnects more directly with my filmmaking practice. The pages are constructed less as static comic compositions and more as scenes unfolding on paper, with greater attention to pacing, framing, atmosphere, and movement through space.
The opening chapters draw deliberately on the polished, screen-like aesthetics of the 1990s, while from Chapter 3 onward the language opens again through mixed media, more spacious layouts, a renewed painterly presence, and a more emotionally morphing treatment of the characters.
Book 3 thus becomes both a cinematic expansion of the series and a point of transition towards animation, augmented reality, and live performance.
Book 3: Cinematic expansion and experimental form
Book 1: The emotional origins of the series
Book 1 marks the emotional origin of Murphy’s Adventures. The story begins when Murphy falls asleep and wakes to find herself alone, setting out in search of something she has lost before gradually forgetting even what she is looking for, and eventually even her own name.
Moving through caves, strange creatures, and symbolic worlds, the book unfolds with a more immediate, instinctive, and at times grotesquely comic tone.
It is here that the series first begins to explore what it means to feel lost, and how encounters with others can wound, transform, and ultimately help us find strength.
Book 1 emerged during the lockdown period and developed through workshops and collaborative sessions with young people during the pandemic. Many of the early characters, songs, and narrative impulses grew out of those shared spaces, shaped by experiences of isolation, anxiety, and the feeling of being lost.
An expanded narrative universe
Murphy’s Adventures is an expanded narrative universe developed through graphic novels, soundtrack, and live performance. Alongside the books, the project includes a stage musical developed over several years and two collaborative albums.
Through page, song, and performance, Murphy’s world takes shape across different forms, allowing its characters, emotions, and environments to be experienced through image, music, and staged storytelling.