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Jon Lock is one of those lucky people whose job involves doing something he loves.

Jon, who grew up in Highnam, is a comic writer and co-founder of Gloucestershire-based Big Punch Studios which creates and publishes comics, games and podcasts.

Jon says: "I was always interested in writing and getting books out and as I started on my creative career and learned a little more about understanding how the UK comics industry worked, I connected with people who shared a similar goal, most notably my friend and colleague Nich Angell with whom I still work, his partner Ali, and my then girlfriend and now wife Lucy.

"The four of us were all creators and forming a business was a way of building a better engine for us to get our comics and then games out to the world. I would be the first to say we're terrible business people because we're too focussed on the creative stuff rather than actually running the business but it's been a really learning curve over the past decade to make interesting stories and games.

"We all have different creative disciplines to bring to the table. I'm a writer and my wife Lucy is a writer and letterer and Nich is the artist of the group while Ali is a filmmaker as well. We have this broad church of skills and we're all passionate about games."

Watch Jon talk about one of their games - a card game called Sandwich Masters - and the logistics of getting it manufactured. "It's one thing to have an idea, it's another to take it to market," he says.

"We've always done things on a budget because the margins are so thin, particularly in UK comics where we don't have the industry or market that America or Japan has. We're a micro business. We would rather control a small empire than aim for global domination."

Jon and Nich previously had day jobs and it's only in the last few years that they've gone full-time.

Jon's main comic book is the Afterlife series. "It's where I began. I self-published the first book in 2012 and since then there have been seven volumes. Last year a National Lottery Project Grant helped with Volume 7 and helped me deliver free comic making workshops to children in Gloucester."

In the past year, Jon and Nich signed a publishing deal with Macmillan Children's Books.

"Comics are a bit of a growth area for the traditional publishing industry and they are really keen to get into children's comics which are exploding. They asked Nich and I to come up with ideas for some new children's titles. We landed a four-book publishing deal. We're locked into quite an involved publishing schedule where we're producing a new 208 page novel every eight months.

"Books one or two will be hitting the shelves in America and the UK in 2026 and books three and four will be following in 2027. It's an incredible opportunity for us."

Growing up in Gloucestershire in the mid-1980s, Jon has always loved comic books.

"Like a lot of kids growing up in the UK, the Beano and Dandy were standards and then as I got older I discovered these weird American comics with the superheroes and the like. A lot of the greatest creators working on American comics were British. Although my degree was in biology I knew that comics was the thing."

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