Emily Downings has inherited her mother’s strength and her father’s speed along with their deafness. The family lives at a cooperage on the border of Deptford and Brockley.

Female coopers meet with disapproval from some, Deaf coopers from many, but a deaf woman with peculiar strength will surely draw attention from unwelcome quarters and it is only a matter of time before The Order of Merit come calling and Mrs. Downings will have to raise her hammer to defend her home.

The Cooperage is the second short story from The Peckham House for Invalids.

Available now.

Recommended for teens and over.

The Cooperage © 2012 Howard Hardiman and Sarah Gordon
Cover image by Julia Scheele

With this in mind, today we thought we would share Howard and Sarah’s interpretations of a couple of Julia’s very lovely character designs.

Above, we see Howard’s take on Ms York (owner of the Peckham House for Invalids) and silver-tongued linguist Kitty having a slight stand-off (our guess is that Ms York is once again being called on her terrible habit of calling Kitty ‘Katherine’, something Miss Munroe abhors).

This miserable character on the other hand is a remix of one of the older characters in the series, Myrtle Morrison. Myrtle, during the story, is a middle-aged socialite with a talent for all things clairvoyant. Sarah has taken her back to a point in her youth when she was still just beginning to understand her talents. Unfortunately Myrtle, even during her salad days, seems to have been a spiteful so-and-so. We would all dearly love to meet her milliner though!

If you’d like to take a look at each artist’s personal work, then their blogs are as follows:

Julia Scheele (our main artist): Here

Howard Hardiman (our main writer): Here

Sarah Gordon (our main colourist): Here

Long time no update, but we’re back with some exciting news!

A couple of weeks ago, The Peckham Invalids team had a visit from Auntie Beeb’s flagship Deaf culture program, See Hear. Turns out they quite fancied running a feature on us! You can see the results of the interview on BBC2 at 1pm, Wednesday 7th March 2012. If you can’t tune in for that it will also be available on iPlayer for about a week afterwards. For the extra curious, there’s a preview of the interview here on the See Hear website.

The piece mostly follows Howard around whilst he talks about Peckham Invalids, sign language and comics in general, but there are also appearances from Julia and Sarah (one of whom had lost her voice whilst the other really hates being on camera … bonus points to anyone who can work out which one is which) who talk you through the process behind creating some of the artwork for the comic, and show how the portrait of Emily featured below was created. All very interesting stuff I am sure you’ll agree.

Rest assured,all this media attention has not gone to our heads. We are busy working on issue two of The Peckham Invalids, and more details about that will be released soon enough. Can’t wait to talk to you all about it.

Last month, our good friend at Resonance FM Alex Fitch interviewed Howard about his thinking behind the The Peckham Invalids. Find the podcast over at the show’s website: Panel Borders

Please click on the cover to view.

Beatrix Choudry
The newest addition to Ms. York’s household. Saved from the Thames in the most dramatic of circumstances, the concept of pain is apparently alien to her (an idiosyncrasy that appears to have saved her life). We hope she uses her time with us in Peckham constructively.

Ms York
Finding herself the owner of a comfortably-sized house facing Peckham Rye after the loss of her parents, Ms York uses her modest inheritance and a modest stipend from Mr. Whyte to take in girls of a peculiar nature so that they may benefit from a solid education. Finding a vocation that brings her some pride is a source of great joy for Ms York, and when she feels joy, everything around her seems to thrive.

Doctor Foxleigh is the World’s premier psychoanalyst. Patients come to him as worrisome shades. They leave as if the troublesome shadows that haunted their minds never even existed at all.

One would be most surprised to learn of someone who had not encountered Mr. Stephen Whyte in some manner. Bon viveur (with, frankly, a touch of the fop about him), he ricochets through life leaving mild chaos in his wake and many a confused personage wondering what just happened. Somehow, despite this shamefully reckless disregard for forward planning, Mr. Whyte always comes out on top.  If nothing else, we thank him for making our lives more interesting by the mere accident of his existence.

Mrs. Phyllis Harding. Wife of Mr. John Harding. Graceful and athletic are but two of the words we could use to describe Phyllis. Beautiful and intelligent are another two.  She is the pinnacle of feminine perfection and an example to us all. Although she has only been a part of London society for a short while, we expect great things from this most extraordinary of ladies.