ABC for Adults is a hilarious and sinister parody of 1970s children’s learning books

"I’ve always been amused by children’s books from the past, and the hysterical saccharine world they portray," says Leigh. "A few years ago I found a children's ABC book from the 1970s in an antique shop in Wiltshire. I’d had the very same book as a child, and It was fascinating for me to revisit this innocent illustrated world as a cynical adult."

His response was to create his own version, painted in the same style, but with the seemingly innocent words – Apple, Dog, Queen, and so on – twisted into sinister adult themes. "The obvious way to do such a book would be to just draw adult things: D is for Drugs, P is for Porn etc. But this felt like a crude approach and it seemed far more terrifying to use actual words you’d find in a kids book, but let the way the words were interpreted through the illustrations create the narrative," says Leigh."I wanted the book to be more than a simple throwaway gag."

While the majority of the pages are very much humour-oriented, others highlight serious themes, such as terrorism, animal cruelty and the treatment of disabled ex servicemen and women. Leigh created the images using the iPad Procreate and an iPencil with a great drawing programme for the iPad called Procreate. I also used Photoshop.

The book has already been published in French by Ici Meme, and it’s soon to be published in the US, but Leigh has struggled to find a publisher in UK: "Two quite well known publishers said they would publish the book if I changed some of the images," he explains, "most notably the Queen image and the one showing a disabled and homeless Iraq war veteran. I was’t interested in creating a watered down version of the book, so I decided to crowd fund it myself via Unbound."