I’ve always wanted to be an author, ever since I was in primary school. I knew it was what I wanted to do, having grown up obsessed with writing stories and reading books way beyond my age group. I was always great at essays at school (I promise, ask my teachers!), so I knew I had a knack for writing, whether that took the form of fiction or not. Having leaned more towards reading comics over the last 2-3 years, now was the time to combine my lifelong passion for reading & writing with a slightly newer interest.

There’s no time like the present, and with the funds to make it happen, why not give it a shot? In August of 2025, I pitched the idea to Zain, our co-founder. As a comics lover himself, I hoped it would go down well. If you’re reading this now, you can probably tell that it did (thankfully!). You’ve heard plenty of real-life tales where a few friends take a chance on a business idea, hoping to make it happen for good. Well, this is ours. Thus, Top Shelf Comics was born!

So, who are we? We are an independent comic book publisher based in the UK, founded by a couple of mates who have had a passion for all things fiction & storytelling for as long as they can remember, and wanted to make writing stories their careers. As you can probably tell already, co-founder Zain isn’t much different to me!

We specialize in superhero and fantasy comics, and have tried to create characters and stories that are as original as possible. In a world where there seems to be iteration after iteration of the same sort of idea, whether this be in comics, film or games, writing original concepts was actually harder than you’d imagine! Ultimately, we just want to share these characters with the world & write stories that you can relate to and see yourself in. Most of all, we hope you’ll enjoy following along with them as much as we did writing them; that would be the ultimate measure of success for us.

When it comes to the writers & artists we’re hiring, we want to support as many upcoming & talented people as possible, which is why we’ve got creators from all over the world on our team. As an example, we’ve got artists from the USA, Russia & Argentina! (Crazy, right?). In the world of independent artists - most of which rely on social media to get their art out there - we know how important it is to support other aspiring creators, and so we hope to provide them with an opportunity to make their dreams of working in the world of comics come true just like us! We’d also love to be able to eventually showcase our work in comic cons across the world, starting with MCM Comic Con in London this year!

If you’ve known me since I was young, you’d know how much it means to me to finally be writing stories in some sort of professional capacity. I hope you’ll join me on this journey – there are hundreds of ideas I’m just itching to start turning into stories.

- James :)