Steve Roberts

Steve is an illustrator and writer of children’s books and comics. He has also created, written and directed several children’s TV series. He grew up in a small village in Warwickshire where he spent his time reading and then making his own comics, going for long walks looking for ghosts and constantly drawing cartoons.

After school and following a HND in Visual Communication, a lot of practice and perseverance led Steve to illustrate comic strips regularly for the long running Sci-fi comic 2000ad. During this period he had the opportunity to illustrate several of 2000ad’s classic characters and also to co-create a couple of his own series. Alongside his love of comics, Steve became increasingly interested in animation and children’s book illustration and in 2007 he started work as a Creative and writer at Ragdoll Productions. At Ragdoll Steve created and wrote the 2D animated series Dipdap, which was broadcast in the UK on CBeebies as well as internationally. Dipdap went on to win a Children’s BAFTA IN 2011. Also during his time at Ragdoll he joined the writing team and drew storyboards for the series The Adventures of Abney and Teal. This was when he first met the creator of the series Joel Stewart. He would go onto collaborate with Joel again on a further 2D animated TV series B.O.T. and the Beasties. Steve also worked closely with Ragdoll’s founder and Creative Director Anne Wood to cocreate and write the stop-frame/live-action series Twirlywoos. The series went on to win the Best Children’s Programme Pre School age award at the
Royal Television Society North West in 2016 and also the RTS North West Best Animation/ puppetry award in 2017.

More recently Steve has focussed his efforts on writing and illustration. He wrote and illustrated Frankencritter, a very silly strip for the Monster Fun comic. He has also illustrated more comic strips for 2000ad and collaborated with Joel Stewart again, this time in book form. Together Joel and Steve created, wrote and illustrated a series of comics for younger readers called Tangletree Mysteries. These books were hugely enjoyable to work on and as such a massive fan of comics as a child, he was very happy to be able to produce his own comic for children.

Steve lives in Leamington Spa with his wife and daughter and a border terrier that needs a lot of exercise. Luckily for him the long walks with the dog are perfect for thinking up new stories and characters to draw.