Woodrow Phoenix is a writer, artist, and graphic designer based in London.

He is known for his free-wheeling experimentation with illustrative and graphic styles, with message-driven pictures offering up an incongruous mix of the cute and the sinister.


His comic books and strips include Donny Digits - a comic strip which appeared weekly in the Guardian in 2009; The Sumo Family, which appeared weekly in the Independent on Sunday and then monthly in Manga Mania magazine; The Liberty Cat, published quarterly in Japan by Kodansha in Morning magazine; SugarBuzz! (in collaboration with co-creator Ian Carney), an anthology comic that was optioned for television by Walt Disney, The Cartoon Network and other independent production companies. In 2003 he directed an animated cartoon based on characters from SugarBuzz!, for The Cartoon Network.

His children’s books include Baz the Biz (1999) and Is That Your Dog? (2001) with writer Steve May, and Count Milkula (2006) with writer Robin Price.


He is the author of Plastic Culture: How Japanese Toys Conquered the World (2006), for which he interviewed artists and designers in Japan and China and photographed hundreds of vinyl figures, mascots, dolls and collectibles for a critical appraisal of the world of art toys and designer vinyl.

Rumble Strip (2008), pushes the construction and narrative possibilities of the comic strip in an entirely new direction while exploring the complicated psychology of the relationship between people and cars; how we navigate the world and how we relate to each other with and through machines. It was reviewed in The Times as ‘One utterly original work of genius. It should be made mandatory reading for everyone, everywhere.’

In 2011, Woodrow Phoenix co-edited the collective graphic novel Nelson with Rob Davis, which won ‘Book of The Year’ at the first British Comic Awards in 2012.

He is currently on the last few pages of a giant graphic novel exploring scale and timing in narrative, called She Lives with pages that are one square metre in size. She Lives was his MA project last year for the Sequential Narrative course at The University of Brighton.

You can read more about him in the Writers’ Directory at the British Council Literature website.