More Advance Looks From Avery Hill: ‘Sennen’ by Shanti Rai

The first graphic novel from Shanti Rai, a hugely talented London-based comics maker, out from Avery Hill Publishing in October – mark your diaries, tell your retailer!

Shanti Raj is a London-based comics maker whose last comic, KO, was an impressive and beautiful thing, infused with a style that has a seeming simplicity that belies the detail and symbolism in her carefully crafted pages that simply burst with colour.

KO was a short tale all about family and adventure, as KO risks all to save her family from those who abducted them, in a story that mixes her delightful artwork with the supernatural and mythological.

Her next book, Sennen, her first longer work at 100 pages, promises to be every bit as good as KO was, with the length allowing this talented comic maker the room to really stretch herself.

Here’s the Avery Hill PR for Sennen:

“Sennen’s life is mostly perfect – spending her days tending the fields in her idyllic village and her evenings with her beloved family, all tucked into the crook of a green and beautiful valley. And if it wasn’t for the masked figures descending from the hills with increasing regularity to take their harvested food to deliver to their Gods, she’d have no worries at all.

But when the demands for tribute strike closer to home, Sennen is forced to flee the paradise of her valley and venture into the home of the Gods to save her family and their way of life – only to discover that those we worship are not always what they seem, and the lives we lead are not always so simplistic after all.”

From that, it sounds as though the background here in Sennen is similar to KO, the same universal ideas of family, a simple, idyllic life suddenly upset by change and conflict, and with the lead character forced to go beyond her current life to save her family. But, with more space and more pages to tell her tale of adventure and moving from childhood into the uncertainty of the adult world, I’m expecting rather wonderful things from Sennen.

Sennen by Shanti Rai, released by Avery Hill Publishing on 20th October 2022 (UK) & 27th October 2022 (North America)