For his final degree show Watson produced thesmall press comicSamurai Jam along with T-shirts and bubble-gum cards. The comic was rooted inskateboarding andpunk rock culture and artistically influenced by JapaneseManga, specificallyAkira, and the Americanalternative comicLove and Rockets. Three issues were produced by 1993, photocopied with covers spray-painted with a stencil, which generated some interest within theBritish small press comics scene.
Watson approached various American publishers and was taken on byDan Vado ofSlave Labor Graphics in 1993 who published four issues ofSamurai Jam. These were not a success, due in part to the wildly different art styles Watson employed with each issue, but Vado kept the door open and Watson returned in 1995 withSkeleton Key, a monthly 16-page comic that ran for 30 issues and cemented his reputation.
AfterSkeleton Key Watson moved toOni Press withGeisha, a graphic novel about a robot girl artist. Rather than approach the issue of her being a robot Watson used the story to examine the ideas of fake and real. The book was an artistic bridge for Watson between the manga-inspiredSkeleton Key and his current, more European, style.
TheGeishaone-shot comic marked a dramatic shift in Watson's style, bringing in stylistic influences from European creators such as François Avril andDupuy and Berberian, but retaining the slow pacing of long-formManga. This came to fruition withBreakfast After Noon, a "slice of life" story set in the industrial city ofStoke-on-Trent inBritain. This was followed by the novellaDumped, a love story produced in association with the BIG festival inTurin.
Watson returned toSlave Labor in 2002 withSlow News Day, a graphic novel set around a small town British newspaper which dealt with English attitudes to Americans and the theme of big versus small audience.
He followed that with a one-shot featuring the fox spirit Kitsune from his earlier seriesSkeleton Key, this time in a tale set in medieval Japan, scripted byWoodrow Phoenix.
He then created twelve issues of a romantic comedy seriesLove Fights published byOni and followed that withParis, alimited series forSlave Labor scripted by Watson with art bySimon Gane.
Recent solo work by Watson has been all-ages stories targeted at children/young adults.Glister[1] is about the adventures of Glister Butterworth – girl-magnet for the weird and unusual who lives at Chilblain Hall.InPrincess at Midnight, Holly Crescent leads a sheltered life as a home-schooled girl by day. By night she's Princess of Castle Waxing where she wages a perilous turf war with the Horrible Horde.Both series were published byImage Comics. Both series have since been republished.Glister was published in the UK in an altered, expanded form as a four-book series by Walker Books.Princess at Midnight is currently being serialised online.
Gum Girl, Watson's current work, features stories about a girl called Grace Gibson, who is a young superhero fighting strange villains in the town of Catastrophe. The four books in this series are published by Walker Books.
