Rickard Sisters

Rickard Sisters

About

About us

We are Scarlett & Sophie Rickard, sisters who work together to make graphic novels.

Sophie does the words and Scarlett draws the pictures. Scarlett has been drawing since before Sophie was born, and Sophie has been telling her what to draw since she learned to talk. We were brought up in the Ribble Valley, Lancashire in the shadow of Pendle Hill, and this landscape can be found in much of our work. We squabbled non-stop as children, and went in our own directions as young adults.
Scarlett has worked as a commercial artist, illustrator, signwriter and portrait painter. Sophie has worked as a civil servant, pub landlady, cabin crew and child counsellor. In our thirties we both got mysteriously ill, and after a lot of confusion it transpired that we both have a hereditary disability that affects our joints, our nervous systems and our energy levels. We made our first graphic novel Mann’s Best Friend (2017) as a kind of occupational therapy – Scarlett went back to saying “tell me what to draw” and we found collaborating on graphic storytelling was a good fit for our newly defined lives.
 
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was published in Autumn 2020 by SelfMadeHero. This graphic adaptation of Robert Tressell’s long and heavy-going socialist classic had taken around four years to put together and was a total labour of love. It was released in the US and Canada in December 2021 and will soon be available in translation in France. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was nominated in the category Best Adaptation in the 2022 Eisner Awards. The book changed our lives, in the sense that making books is our main job now.

In Autumn 2022 we brought out No Surrender, also with SelfMadeHero. This book is a graphic adaptation of Constance Maud’s suffrage classic, and is like a sister for The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Written in the same era (the 1910s), the book is another piece of authentic fiction written by a marginalised person about their experiences. Where The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is about being poor in a system designed by and for the rich, No Surrender is all about being female in a world designed by and for men.

We work closely together at every stage of the process, despite living 200 miles apart. We each live with a long-suffering husband and collie dogs, and spend most of our time talking to each other online. Working together is an absolute joy and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

About our shop
 
We always recommend people buy our books in their nearest real-life independent bookshop. We feel strongly that professional, knowledgeable booksellers who pay their taxes and respect their employees are precious assets on our high streets. We also live with disability and recognise that there are loads of reasons why people might not be able to get to a real shop, and how people sometimes like to buy things directly from the creators.
 
You can buy our books (and other things) in our website shop, and we’ll post them out to UK addresses by Royal Mail. We do so according to these principles:
  • we’ll never discount or undercut bookshop prices
  • we use Royal Mail because they are a relatively low CO2 option (and we support the CWU)
  • our packaging materials are always re-used or recycled, so parcels sometimes look a bit wonky. If you can use them again before they go in the bin that makes us really happy