David Barclay

My name is David Barclay, and my creative journey has taken a few unexpected turns over the years. I started out writing when I was sixteen making a small dent in the Scottish hip hop scene, performing across Scotland and pouring everything I had into music. After that chapter, life pulled me into retail management, where I spent years building teams, supporting communities, and learning how to navigate people at their best and worst.

Everything shifted again when I became a full-time carer. That experience grounded me in ways I never expected, it gave me a new perspective on resilience, empathy, and the quiet battles people fight every day.

Through all of that, storytelling was the constant. I’ve been writing in some form for most of my life, music, short stories, worldbuilding, little bits of fantasy and folklore scribbled down whenever I had a spare moment. Over the last year, those scraps finally came together into something bigger.

That became SAORSA, a supernatural-noir graphic novel set in a post-collapse Scotland, influenced by Scottish folklore, Gaelic mythology, and the kind of emotional honesty you only find in real life. I’m now building the project from scratch, working with an artist, preparing a Kickstarter for Issue #1, and documenting the whole messy journey as I go.

I’m not a traditional comic creator by background, I’m just someone who never stopped making things, even when the medium changed. I’d love to talk about the journey from rapper, to retail manager, to carer, to comic book writer, and everything I’ve learned about creativity, resilience, and starting something completely new later in life.