A Date with Destiny

Book 3 Cover Reveal! PLUS: The Mega Robo Chronicles begin!

Mar 31, 2026

Hello, newsletter readers! It’s been a busy couple of weeks, travelling the country doing festivals and workshops and meeting young readers, and everywhere I go, one question keeps coming up: “When is the next Donut Squad book coming out?”. And I’ll tell you what I tell every child who asks me this: THE LAST ONE ONLY JUST CAME OUT, JEEZ, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME, BLOOD? I’M DRAWING AS FAST AS I CAN OVER HERE! ALSO: GET A JOB!

Anyway, I am excited to now have a more satisfying and less aggressive answer to this question, and it is: soon! Book 3 is going to be out SEPTEMBER 10th, 2026! And it is going to called…

DONUT SQUAD: DESTINY OF THE DONUTS

And it is going to look… a little something like… this!

For Phoenix readers: yes it’s THAT story! Insane complicated time-travel shenanigans! A surprising number of Samuel Beckett references! Other things children enjoy! True believers, THIS ONE’ S GOT IT ALL.

Available to pre-order now from Waterstones, The Phoenix, and, oh, you know. all the places!

I am very excited to put this one out into the world. It is, even by Donut Squad standards, the MADDEST THING, and I am very proud of it.

Meanwhile, in regularly-scheduled Newsletter Business…

UPCOMING EVENTS

ITEM: I am happy to announce I will be back at Hay Festival this year, doing a couple of very fun events! Firstly, I will be taking part in a big Phoenix Draw-Off Comics Spectacular type show with a couple of my brilliant fellow Phoenix creators, Laura Ellen Anderson and Thiago De Moraes. Absolute legends both, so I think this should be really fun. Details and tickets here!

And then, excitingly for me, later that day I’m being allowed out to talk to the grown-ups! I am honoured be interviewing the animator, cartoonist and graphic novelist Astrid Goldsmith about her wonderful new book The Crystal Vase, as part of Hay’s Debut Discoveries strand. Astrid is incredibly talented, her book is just brilliant, and I think we are going to have a very fun time talking about it all. Details and tickets here!

How excited am I to see all this comics stuff going on as part of one of the UK’s biggest and most prestigious literary festivals, I hear you ask? Well, allow me to tell you:

Thank you for asking!

ITEM: PhoenixFest in Oxford this April sold out in minutes, inevitably, so in case anyone didn’t manage to get tickets I wanted to draw your attention to the PhoenixFest DIGITAL tickets, which are available now! You get to watch a livestream of both Jamie’s and my events, plus a bunch of other fun digital-exclusive type STUFF. Details and tickets here!

ITEM: I had an idea for a fun new regular feature for this newsletter! Please allow me to introduce…

THE MEGA ROBO CHRONICLES

Turn your mind back to the heady days of, uh, I don’t remember exactly, a FEW YEARS AGO. I had just finished the run of Mega Robo Bros in the Phoenix that would be eventually collected together as THIS:

…and I was hard at work on the final volume, which would eventually be collected as THIS:

…and it became apparent that, well, that it was going to take me a WHILE.

Because NEMESIS had ended on quite a dramatic cliffhanger, once it became clear we were going to be leaving kids hanging for a long time - I don’t remember how long it ended up being, I feel like it was at least a year and am slightly worried it might even have ended up being two - we decided to do something to tide readers over, keep the strip ticking along and alive in the comic, and eventually allow us to build back up to its eventual return.

And I think, because I’d been doing these little ‘Freddy’s Diary’-style strips to round out the back of the books, I had discovered how much I enjoyed making 4-panel gag strips, and so we decided to try doing some of those, as a way of checking in with the strip and the characters.

Anyway I ended up LOVING doing these, and the results include some of my favourite Alex and Freddy moments from the whole series. But because of where they fell in the scheme of things, and how books and pagecounts work, they’ve never been collected. I feel like I might have shared a couple of them on here, but unless you saw those, or read them at the time in the Phoenix, they’re kind of lost to the mists of time.

I thought it might be a fun new thing to run them here, one a newsletter, and maybe talk a little bit around them. I have a sense that it might bring up some interesting stuff, because of some of the specifics of the format and the time they were made.

So here we go! If you haven’t read MRB at all, please note that these will I guess contain SPOILERS for the end of Book 7, so I apologise for that. And if you’ve read all of these before, I apologise for the repetition. But hopefully they will be new and / or enjoyable to somebody!

Anyway! Enough preamble and apologies, let’s have some COMICS.