Levi J. Richards
In St Anthony’s Chapel ruins, a sentient force that reunites people with lost things is thrown when it begins to develop feelings for a woman struggling with a more complicated kind of loss than it can comprehend.
Drawing on the little that is historically known about St Anthony’s Chapel, Lost Pets Found is a story about loneliness, unrequited love, and the tragedy of immortality. It’s also about perseverance, and finding hope in strange places. It follows two characters who struggle to connect with the people around them for different reasons, who find unexpected comfort in each other for a time, but ultimately realise that moving forward means moving beyond one another.
How does your exploration of the trans experience intersect with your explorations of memory?
For me, the main thing that defines the central relationship in this comic (between Naomi and the chapel) is a shared experience of loneliness, and I think both memory and trans experiences tie into it. For the chapel, its immortality and unchanging nature makes it this vessel for memory and what has passed before it, that disconnects it from the people around it who are always changing (and then leaving) in a way it can’t match. For Naomi, she’s experiencing this long period of crisis, and the people around her are starting to burn out on supporting her. I knew I wanted to keep the cause of this crisis ambiguous, because I think people have more of a framework for supporting people with something concrete like a breakup compared to something that’s just ambient. I think that ambient kind of distress is quite characteristic of being trans at the moment, where all these minor and major incidents of hostility stack on top of each other to create this kind of fog. I didn’t want to speak directly as Naomi about being trans because I can’t really speak to her specific experience as a woman, but I do think it fits into wider things I wanted to look at around why someone might end up feeling very isolated in the way she does.
You mention that St Anthony’s Chapel has little documented history – how did this factor into your storytelling? What was your research process, and how did you balance speculation with history, fiction and reality?
To be completely honest with you, research is my least favourite part of the comic process, because I always just want to get started with the image of the story I have in my head. Because of that, I enjoyed the fact that a lot of the research into the chapel I did do came up as ambiguous, as it made me feel a lot freer to go where I wanted with it. A lot of the concept comes from my anecdotal experience of being at the ruins, how other people have told me they feel, how it feels to spend time there: how many people identify it as a place that feels special or safe. If/when I make the full comic, my friend Elle (who runs historic-folkloric research project Son Oural, amongst other things) has promised to do a more full deep dive on theories around the chapel for me.
How did you start making comics?
I started making comics in primary school about me and my friends being superheroes, which I drew with pencil on printer paper after reading a lot of Doctor Who and Simpsons comic annuals. That said, it was reading Through the Woods by EM Carroll as a teen that really put me onto it. I started properly making (and, crucially, finishing) comics during lockdown while working on Door Ajar Comics with august (in the wake of) dawn, who gave me a lot of knowledge about the process, some great accountability, and also some really class scripts. Now I write, draw, and also occasionally finish comics.
How do you approach storytelling in comic form?
Most of the comics I make start as a sort of freeform poem, that then acts as the narration that I build the comic up around. However, I always have to have a stage where I try to strip back all the narration to its bare minimum, and focus on storytelling through just the visuals and dialogue, to try and push myself to lead with that part of it. Challenging when your protagonist is a sentient ruin who can’t move or speak, but worth a try.
Tell us a bit about your process (ideas, sketching, drafts, the medium, analogue/digital)
I tried so many different processes across digital and traditional trying to make this comic, but came back to the same one I always use. It involves doing super rough thumbnails and then making the final panels through a reduction carving process, where I erase shapes out of block colours. It’s kind of like linocut, but a lot more forgiving because it's digital, and you can add fun textures after. It’s a pain if you need to change things, but it keeps me focused on shapes and composition rather than lineart, and you can get a better sense of what the final finished piece will look like from the off.
What comic artists/illustrators are you inspired by?
A lot of them are people I follow on Instagram or personally have met at markets: Lo Cleary’s illustration work was super on my moodboard for this, as well as Beth Fuller and Lu Walstad. I actually had a lot of different tattoo artists saved who use black work and architecture to use as inspiration: anyone who draws class rocks basically. I also love the texture of Mhairi Braden’s riso work and wanted to catch that. Tillie Walden, Posy Simmonds and EM Carroll are always inspirations for trying to draw people who look as much like some guy you’d see on the bus as possible. This isn’t a comic artist or illustrator, but I was also inspired by KittyHorrorshow’s game Exclusion Zone while writing this. The way she communicates a really humanising tragedy through alternative archaeological traces in a ruin was what made me want to have the chapel fall in love with Naomi.
What do you listen to when you are working?
Like every other slightly edgy trans guy in town, I love the Mountain Goats, and dreamed of using a line from ‘Love, Love, Love’ to open this comic. I listened to a mad amount of Lucy Dacus and Boygenius last year while sitting in Holyrood Park drawing and gazing up at my new best friend, the chapel, in the sun. Ruti is another favourite to work to (especially ‘If I Could Choose It Would Be You’), and an honourable mention to Dimension 20’s Starstruck Odyssey series which I get so into I forget I’ve been drawing for three hours.
What are you working on now?
I’ve just finished a comic for an upcoming issue of HOOSE Party zine! It’s sex and relationships themed so my comic is about a spontaneous hook-up between a long-established drag king and a newbie show regular. It’s a lot less sexy than that makes it sound; it’s mostly about power dynamics and how weird it is to be in a stranger’s house. I’ve also got my first ever (?) non-comic writing piece published in The Skinny next month for their Gut Feelings art column! Other than that, I am mainly working on trying to get my body back used to drinking caffeine after top surgery. With mixed results....
About Levi
Levi J. Richards is an Edinburgh-based transmasc artist who works across illustration, comics, print, zine-making and poetry, and in the overlaps between these wherever possible. His work usually features at least one of the following: emotionally significant household objects; kitchens; the terrifying but reassuring transience of memory; free motion embroidery; a drag king; a butch lesbian; a love story where no one really gets the thing they wanted.
Between 2021–2024, Levi co-ran small press Door Ajar Comics, self-publishing poetry and comics with a focus on trans and neurodivergent narratives. Their debut graphic novel, Crossing the Threshold: Stories of the Weird, the Queer, and the Uncanny, was self-published in 2022. Levi was an Out of the Blueprint Artist-in-Residence in 2023, creating the trans personal archive dress exhibition Bloke in a Dress inspired by his time (now over six years) performing as drag king Guy Liner in Edinburgh’s local scene. He was also the only comics artist selected for Moniack Mhor’s debut Time to Write programme for trans writers in 2024, and a Creative Edinburgh Student Award finalist in 2022. Levi’s illustration work has been published by Marginal Publishing House, Somewhere: For Us, Discord Comics, G*NDERSHIT, and more.
See more of Levi’s work here.