SelfMadeHero

For the French film, see A Self-Made Hero.

SelfMadeHero

Parent company	Metro Media Ltd
Founded	2007
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Headquarters location	London
Distribution	Abrams Books (US) Canadian Manda Group (Canada) Abrams & Chronicle Books (UK) Thames & Hudson (Australia)
Key people	Emma Hayley
Fiction genres	Graphic novels
Imprints	Manga Shakespeare Eye Classics Crime Classics Graphic Biography
Official website	www.selfmadehero.com

SelfMadeHero is an independent publishing house which specialises in adapting works of literature, as well as producing ground-breaking original fiction in the graphic novel medium.

SelfMadeHero's books are distributed in the UK by Abrams & Chronicle Books and in the U.S. by Abrams Books.

History

SelfMadeHero was founded in February 2007 by Emma Hayley, and launched with two lines: Manga Shakespeare, featuring works based on the Bard but with different settings – mainly Japan in the past and future, and Eye Classics, which are adaptations of great classic works, such as those of Poe and Kafka.

In 2008 Emma Hayley was named UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year as part of the British Book Awards.

In 2009 SelfMadeHero expanded to include graphic adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, including Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet, and later several works by H.P. Lovecraft, including the anthology LOVECRAFT by I.N.J. Culbard. It also began publishing the Graphic Biography series with Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness, which has further expanded to tell the fascinating life stories of era-defining pop-culture icons such as Hunter S. Thompson and Nick Cave.

Since 2010 SelfMadeHero has been publishing original material, notably Glyn Dillon's The Nao of Brown, The Motherless Oven trilogy by Rob Davis. In 2011 the company received the Kitschies Black Tentacle award.

Graphic Anthology Programme (GAP) and Catalyst

With support from Arts Council England SelfMadeHero launched the Graphic Anthology Programme (GAP) in February 2021. The GAP was a free, public programme that eventually selected 7 applicants for “an intensive 12 weeks of comics mentoring and masterclasses.” This resulted in the anthology Catalyst being published in October 2021, which featured 11 short stories, including the works produced by the 7 chosen GAP participants. The Cartoon Museum also hosted a temporary digital exhibition promoting Catalyst in 2022, titled Catalyst – the Online Exhibition, and Arts Council England also host an online exhibition titled Comics as a catalyst for change.

As well as its central theme of "catalyst", the GAP and the published anthology have both received recognition and praise for the diversity of the creators involved.

2023 First Graphic Novel Award

In June 2023, entries opened for the 2023 First Graphic Novel Award. The award was originally founded by Myriad Editions in 2012, and is now described as :

[...]a partnership between the Cartoon Museum, the publisher SelfMadeHero, and independent graphic novel editor Corinne Pearlman, former Creative Director at Myriad Editions, with thanks to generous support from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and The bks Agency, sponsors of the £500 prize for the winning entry.

Entries are set to close in September 2023, with the winner to be announced in December. Among the judges is SelfMadeHero founder Emma Hayley. SelfMadeHero are also offering a publishing contract as one of the two prizes awarded to the winning author or team, the other being the £500 bursary donated by The bks Agency.

Bibliography

Manga Shakespeare

The adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were made by Richard Appignanesi (who previously worked on Icon Books' Introducing... series), with the art created by UK-based manga artists who came to prominence via Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga (United Kingdom & Ireland) competition, their work for Sweatdrop Studios or London manga collective Umisen Yamisen.

Of SelfMadeHero's two initial lines, it was Manga Shakespeare and its first two titles (Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, which were published simultaneously in January 2007) that contributed most to establishing the company. This foundation later allowed SelfMadeHero to branch out into other genres and lines.

Title	Artist	Released	ISBN	Ref
Hamlet	Emma Vieceli	February 2007
Romeo and Juliet	Sonia Leong
The Tempest	Paul Duffield	September 2007
Richard III	Patrick Warren
A Midsummer Night's Dream	Kate Brown	February 2008
Julius Caesar	Mustashrik	June 2008
Macbeth	Robert Deas
As You Like It	Chie Kutsuwada	January 2009
Othello	Ryuta Osada
Henry VIII	Patrick Warren	May 2009
King Lear	ILYA
Much Ado About Nothing	Emma Vieceli
The Merchant of Venice	Faye Yong	September 2009
Twelfth Night	Nana Li

Eye Classics

The creators are drawn from a British comic background (in particular Nevermore) but also include screenwriters and more traditional artists.

Title	Author	Adaptation	Artist	Released	ISBN	Ref
Nevermore (anthology)	Edgar Allan Poe	various		October 2007
The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	Andrzej Klimowski	Danusia Schejbal	May 2008
The Trial	Franz Kafka	David Zane Mairowitz	Chantal Montellier	March 2008
The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde	Ian Edginton	I. N. J. Culbard	September 2008
At the Mountains of Madness	H. P. Lovecraft	I. N. J. Culbard		October 2010
The Castle	Franz Kafka	David Zane Mairowitz,	Jaromir99	November 2013
The Shadow Out of Time	H. P. Lovecraft	I. N. J. Culbard
The Man Who Laughs	Victor Hugo	David Hine	Mark Stafford

Crime Classics

The Crime Classics line began with a set of four adaptations of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, adapted by Ian Edginton, with art by I. N. J. Culbard:

Title	Author	Artist	Released	ISBN	Ref
The Hound of the Baskervilles	Ian Edginton	I. N. J. Culbard	May 2009
A Study in Scarlet
The Sign of the Four			September 2009
The Valley of Fear

Rachel Cooke reviewed A Study in Scarlet for The Observer and concluded:

Culbard and Edginton are adept at concision, leaving out nothing that is crucial and excising much that isn't. I relished every page and thought how this book would be the perfect primer for any child whose parents feel them to be just on the cusp of potential Holmes worship.

Graphic Biography

Title	Author	Artist	Released	ISBN	Ref
Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness	Reinhard Kleist		October 2009
Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson	Will Bingley	Antony Hope-Smith	October 2010
Kiki de Montparnasse	José-Louis Bocquet	Catel Muller	February 2011
Baby's in Black: The Story of Astrid Kirchherr & Stuart Sutcliffe	Arne Bellstorf		March 2011
Castro	Reinhard Kleist		July 2011
Hellraisers	Robert Sellers	JAKe	October 2011
A Chinese Life	Li Kunwu & Philippe Ôtié	Li Kunwu	July 2012
The Boxer	Reinhard Kleist		March 2014
An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar	Reinhard Kleist		March 2016
Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie	Anne Martinetti & Guillaume Lebeau	Alexandre Franc	May 2016
The Trial of Roger Casement	Fionnuala Doran		September 2016
Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie	Néjib		February 2017
Nick Cave: Mercy on Me	Reinhard Kleist		September 2017
Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani	Jérôme Tubiana	Alexandre Franc	March 2019
Isadora	Julie Birmant	Clément Oubrerie	September 2019
Mozart in Paris	Frantz Duchazeau		September 2019
Zátopek	Jan Novák	Jaromír 99	October 2020
Buñuel: In the Labyrinth of the Turtles	Fermín Solís		April 2021
Orwell	Pierre Christin	Sébastien Verdier	May 2021
Knock Out!	Reinhard Kleist		July 2021
Alice Guy: First Lady of Film	José-Louis Bocquet	Catel Muller	July 2022

Awards and nominations

Year	Award	Category	Book	Creator(s)	Result
2011	Kitschies	The Black Tentacle	N/A	N/A	Won
2013	Angoulême International Comics Festival	Special Jury Prize	The Nao of Brown	Glyn Dillon	Won
2015	British Comic Awards	Best Book	The Motherless Oven	Rob Davis	Won
2016	Eisner Award	Best Graphic Album	Ruins	Peter Kuper	Won
2020	Angoulême International Comics Festival	SNCF Polar Prize 2020	Tumult	John Harris Dunning & Michael Kennedy	Nominated
2020	Excelsior Award	Excelsior Award Black	Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani	Jérôme Tubiana & Alexandre Franc	Won

See also

• Classical Comics, another new British company producing graphic novel adaptations of great works, including some of the same Shakespeare plays
• Classics Illustrated, a similar venture from the 1940s to 1960s
• Pendulum Press, a similar venture from the 1970s
• Marvel Classics Comics, a similar venture from 1976 to 1978
• Marvel Illustrated, Marvel Comics imprint adapting classic literature
• Graphic Classics
• The Manga Bible, an adaptation by Siku

References

• Self Made Hero at the Grand Comics Database
• Self Made Hero at the Comic Book DB (archived from the original)

External links

• Official website