Born in 1970, Mark Stafford had a pretty idyllic childhood in Bournemouth, Dorset, glutted on sunshine and comic books, sailed on through to a diploma in foundation studies, and it was only when he moved to London to pursue an HND in graphic design that the wheels came off. Assuming that graphic design was something to do with designing graphics, he discovered too late that it was actually about sacrificing newborn kittens to the Elder Gods of Mammon, and as a self-righteous prick, he was having no part of it. He dropped out. There then followed a decade or so of boozy wallowing in East Ham (“a joyless godforsaken craphole” - Oscar Wilde,) where he continued to draw and paint, got (and failed to get,) intermittent illustration jobs.

A forced move to beautiful downtown Brixton in 2005; his policy of showing work, drunkenly, at two in the morning paid off as Bryan Talbot asked him to illustrate ‘Cherubs!’, a graphic novel, published by Desperado in 2008, and he blagged the position of cartoonist-in-residence for the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury.

You can now buy affordable art prints of Mark Stafford's fantastic work here at the Dangerous Ink Gallery.