DRYLAND Book One Chapter One
Collects pages 1-20 of Dryland Book One and a short story from Tales of the Smiths
Self-published.
May 2012. 28 pages.

Set in pre-WWII rural Greece, Dryland Book One is the tale of the coming of age of Nidas, a young man who finds himself engulfed in the region’s illegal tobacco trade. Whilst smuggling tobacco leaves with his in-laws over the barren mountains of Dryland, a region spanning the coast of Western Acarnania, Greece, they are pursued by the authorities. And that’s when the trouble begins.
Dryland is a series of dramatised biographical graphic novels based on the untimely violent deaths of Con Chrisoulis’ ancestors in Interwar Greece.

Dryland Book One Chapter One featured the first chapter of Dryland‘s first book. The first chapter was a finalist at Myriad Editions’ First Fiction Graphic Novel competition in 2011, the judges including celebrated author Ian Rankin, Comica curator Paul Gravett, cartoonist Steve Bell, and graphic novelists Bryan Talbot and Hannah Berry.
The self-publication of Chapter One was sold exclusively online and at various UK comic cons, like London’s Kapow Comic Convention (19-20 May 2012). The publication also included a short Tales of The Smiths story and served as an introduction to the graphic biography of Morrissey, Johnny Marr and the Smiths that I was researching and creating at the time.
From 2014 to 2015, the remaining chapters of Dryland Book One were serialised weekly as a webcomic on SoComic.gr and in 2016 Markosia Enterprises published a trade paperback collection of all the chapters as Dryland Book One: Strato.