The Higginbottoms

The Higginbottoms is a darkly comic story set in the very normal, very unremarkable town of Cleckmondwike — where nothing much ever happens… until it does.

At its centre is Onslow Higginbottom, an ordinary man living an ordinary life with his wife Maude and their dog Pablo. But beneath that ordinary surface sits something else entirely — a quiet, absurd collision between everyday life and something far bigger, stranger, and completely out of place.
The project blends Yorkshire humour, character-driven storytelling, and a touch of the surreal. It’s influenced by the kind of worlds where the mundane and the ridiculous exist side by side — where people carry on making tea and going to the shop, even as reality itself starts to behave slightly… wrong.

At its core, The Higginbottoms is about how people respond when the world stops making sense. Not with heroics or grand gestures, but with routine, denial, humour, and the stubborn need to just get on with it.

The idea grew from my interest in finding meaning in the ordinary — the same instinct that drives my artwork. I’m drawn to the overlooked: places, people, and moments that seem small on the surface but hold something deeper underneath. This story takes that idea and pushes it further — asking what happens when something extraordinary lands right in the middle of it.

The project is being developed as a long-form story, alongside character design, sculpture, and visual worldbuilding. Each character exists not just on the page, but physically — shaped in clay, explored through form, and brought to life as part of a wider creative universe.

Ultimately, The Higginbottoms is about contrast — the ordinary and the absurd, humour and unease, the familiar and the unknowable — and finding something human right in the middle of it all.