Cincinnati-based artist and writer A. Cagle, known professionally as Doc Galahan, has spent the last five years building a narrative art world that invites readers and viewers to step inside Queensgate as participants rather than distant observers. His ongoing project, Queensgate, imagines a Victorian-era metropolis that exists just beyond our recorded history, a place reconstructed through illustrated newspapers, letters, photographs, and objects that appear almost archaeological in their detail. The effect is a living archive rather than a fictional setting.

Galahan’s work is deeply tactile. In a cultural moment shaped by digital saturation, he chooses craft: broadsheet newspapers printed at full scale, wax-sealed correspondence, weathered receipts, and spectral photographic plates. Each object feels unearthed rather than fabricated, as though recovered from the ruins of a forgotten century. This approach defines his flagship project, The Queensgate Papers, a thirteen-issue illustrated newspaper series chronicling the infamous Black Card Murders.

The Queensgate Papers began as a Kickstarter campaign in January 2025. The project earned Kickstarter’s “Project We Love” distinction and reached readers in more than fifteen countries. This early success established Queensgate as a global niche for fans of gothic mystery, physical artefacts, and immersive storytelling.

Building on this foundation, Galahan is expanding the world through The Queensgate Letters, a twelve-month correspondence series that launches on Kickstarter in March 2026. Subscribers will receive a physical letter each month paired with ephemera from Queensgate. The project continues Galahan’s mission to transform narrative into something that arrives on the doorstep, turning reading into a ritual of tactile discovery.

Some of his most striking work occurs where the handmade meets the technological. Galahan’s Spectregraphs, holographic speaking boxes, present animated versions of Queensgate’s characters as if transmitting across time and reality. A Spectregraph appears to hold a trapped moment, a flickering conversation contained inside a series of odd wooden boxes with antique glass portals. These pieces bridge illusion, sculpture, and digital animation to create encounters that feel equal parts séance and art installation. They reinforce one of Queensgate’s central principles: stories can cross boundaries between worlds.

Alongside these larger works are fine art prints and Galatypes that mimic antique ambrotypes with uncanny depth, as well as a range of experimental artefacts that broaden the mythology. Each piece follows the same internal coherence. Every object, whether printed, cast, or projected, behaves like recovered evidence from a place that hints it once existed.

What sets Galahan’s work apart is the discipline of his world-building. Queensgate is not a loose collection of curiosities. It is a fully realized narrative ecosystem. Newspapers, letters, prints, and holographic boxes function as fragments of a shared history presented through different mediums. This allows audiences to enter Queensgate from many points of contact, whether as readers, collectors, or participants in an unfolding mystery.

As the project expands into subscription storytelling, new books, installations, and increasingly elaborate artefacts, Queensgate continues to grow as both a world and a body of art. Galahan’s practice sits at a rare intersection of fiction, craft, and immersive design. It suggests that stories do not need to remain confined to pages. They can be held, displayed, collected, and even spoken through light and illusion.

In Queensgate, narrative becomes physical memory, preserved, resurrected, and carried across the threshold between worlds.