Today marks the UK release of our last graphic novel for Spring 2026: the most unruly Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest. This title has been much anticipated since its shortlisting for the 2023 First Graphic Novel Award, so without any further ado, here's our Q&A with author and illustrator Myfanwy Tristram!
Myfanwy Tristram is a graphic novelist based in Brighton, UK, whose work focuses on activism and social history. Her comics have been shortlisted for several awards. In 2017, Myf co-ordinated and published Draw the Line, depicting more than 100 simple actions to help change the world. Noisy Valley was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious First Graphic Novel Award.
SelfMadeHero: Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest is a bundle of extraordinary stories, with more than one story behind it. Its opening pages, set in 2022, mention a collection of protest drawings that ultimately foreshadowed the book itself. For those not lucky enough to already have a copy, what inspired those original works?
Myfanwy Tristram: OK, so you’re talking about a set of drawings I made in October 2021 – pictures of people marching with placards, each showing a slogan that I found interesting, or thought-provoking, or funny, or impactful. It was an ‘Inktober’ exercise I’d set myself (for anyone who doesn’t know, Inktober is a challenge where you draw a picture every day through October).
You might remember that, at the time, fresh out of lockdown, we’d seen some huge protests around Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Sarah Everard. I think these had shaken politicians – XR and Just Stop Oil in particular were employing methods of non-violent direct action that shut down major infrastructure like motorways and airstrips; and the Sarah Everard protests were questioning the very legitimacy of policing in the UK.
The result was a new set of legislation cracking down on the right to protest – the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was just going through Parliament about that time. And so… I drew. Not the most earth-shattering way to confront a societal problem, but at least one that was within my reach.
Looking back, I am so glad I did that Inktober exercise because, like falling dominos, it kickstarted a series of events that I could never have foreseen. I travelled to new places, met new people, had my first solo exhibition… and now here we are with the publication of Noisy Valley. All because of a small, self-directed Instagram project!
SMH: In those same pages you reference a somewhat radical upbringing during tempestuous times. What likenesses do you find between the social causes of past and present? Do you feel any kinship with the youth of our current noisy world?
Myfanwy: Yeah, I grew up in the 80s and my mum was very active on the community level. She was membership secretary of the local branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, so the house was always full of mimeographed newsletters, badges and stamps. She took me to visit Greenham Common at a formative age – only for a day, but it made a mark.
Thatcher was in power, and my teen years coincided with Red Wedge – the political popstar tour where Billy Bragg, The Communards, Paul Weller and others would play gigs all around the country, but you had to sit through a political debate beforehand! It was genius in a way: get the kids in to see the music and then radicalise them.
I now have a 21 year old daughter, and yes, I do see some parallels. Back then we were all living under the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation - anyone who’s seen Threads or read When the Wind Blows will understand why we all thought it was an inevitability. It was also the time of the excerable Section 28, prohibiting teachers from ‘promoting’ homosexuality as a valid way of life. So the overlaps with today’s anti-trans movement and the climate emergency are pretty evident. Billy Bragg’s still doing his best to spread the good word, I notice, but perhaps we could do with some younger spokespeople!
SMH: The incredible stories that comprise this book are from a range of years, and come from people of a variety of ages. Did any of their testimonies give you new insight into protests you remember watching from afar, such as during your childhood or adolescence?
Myfanwy: Yeah, definitely. This project has strengthened my belief that the human stories behind any big event will always give you a deeper understanding than the history books do. Like, you’ll read about the miners’ strike, and it’ll tell you about the debates in Parliament and the socio-economic effect of closing down an entire industry; but in talking to people who were there, I got a whole new insight that I’d literally never thought about before.
Tracey, one of the people whose story is in Noisy Valley, told me what it was like to be a young child in a family where your dad, a miner, was on strike, and no wages had been coming into the house for months on end. And because she was just a child, she’d never known anything different. She saw the community come together, making food for each other and giving the kids little presents when they could.
I honestly believe that first-person stories are how we best understand history. It’s why I’m such a huge admirer of work by Olivier Kugler, Julia Rothman or Kate Evans – tell the stories, show the humans at the heart of them, and you can change hearts and minds. And comics are definitely the best medium for that!
SMH: As many of our readers will remember, perhaps even from an earlier newsletter, Noisy Valley was submitted to and shortlisted for the 2023 First Graphic Novel Award. What led to you taking that step with this book?
Myfanwy: The First Graphic Novel Award is such a massively important opportunity for anyone making longform comics. Sadly, in the UK, there are so few routes for comics-makers: despite this vast, flourishing community of creatives putting out such brilliant and innovative work, only a small number of publishers are willing to get behind graphic novels. I mean, shout out to SelfMadeHero obviously, and others like Avery Hill and Cape for showing how it can be done, but there’s still so much more to do.
Entering the award was a no-brainer, really. I’d started making Noisy Valley because I wanted to, not with any particular ambition to get it published, but because I wanted it to exist in the world. I’d thought I’d probably self-publish, as with many of my previous comics. But once you have the pages, why not put them in for an award, just to see what happens? It’s great for validation and getting your work in front of some more eyes — and as it turned out, finding an agent and then a publisher!
Looking at my fellow authors’ books that have attained publication thanks to the FGNA — Bone Broth by Alex Taylor and Florrie by Anna Trench — just in these two titles we can see the variety of both the stories that graphic novels can handle and of the approaches that the award welcomes. It’s brilliant to be part of that.
SMH: As we’ve already discussed, Noisy Valley is a work that connects social causes and protest movements of the past and present. What readers may not know is that the book has arrived at such an appropriate time that you had to create new pages addressing more recent developments concerning our right to protest. How much have you had to build upon or alter this book in response to world events?
Myfanwy: Noisy Valley came out of my visit to the Workers Galleryin the Rhondda Valley – they’d seen those pictures of protesters and invited me to exhibit them. The book’s evolution into the final form reflects the way in which it grew from an initially less ambitious project.
Basically, I’d thought that while I was down in the Rhondda, I’d invite local people to tell me their memories of protest and draw them up in a really quick little comic. I actually remember thinking that I’d make it pretty scribbly and zine-like, so it wouldn’t take long and I could get back to my then-main project (which, I have to say, is still on ice!).
I had envisioned it as a bit of a diary comic, which is why it retains the first-person story of my visiting the gallery and discovering the Rhondda, and meeting Gayle and Chris who run the gallery. That, obviously, leads into the main part of the book: hearing the stories of local people.
It was my agent and editor Corinne Pearlman who suggested that putting in some pages depicting the global perspective might make it more relatable to readers around the world. These aren’t just stories from a small community in the south of Wales that you might never have heard of. The point is that you’ll find people standing up for what they believe in, marching, singing, and holding up banners anywhere in the world. And it’s really important that they do.
As it goes, I didn’t have to change anything — global events just kept making the book more and more relevant. What was first just an anti-protest bill laid before Parliament then became cemented in our legislation. When government cracks down like that, you’ll always see an equal and opposite response from the people. We did see it with the Kill the Bill protests, and of course all the brave protesters willing to go to jail for holding up signs to say they support a certain activist group.
Globally, it hardly needs saying that the Trump regime also doesn’t like protesters (oh, except when they’re storming the Capitol, perhaps!) and right wing ‘strong men’ leaders are cracking down on people’s right to assemble in much the same way across South America, Russia of course, Eastern Europe, you name it.
So for once, and completely by accident, I do seem to have hit the zeitgeist. Obviously I’d rather the world were a more agreeable place, you know, but also, I’m glad that my book is saying something at the right time to be heard.
And so the Spring 2026 season draws to a close! Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest is out now in the UK, and out in North America on June 9th! Thank you, as always, for reading along with us, and for reading this newsletter. For exciting news on our Autumn list, watch this space!
As of April 7th, Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory (translated by Helge R. Dascher, edited by Charlotte Schallié and Alexander Korb) is available in the UK and in North America! The telling of a life story like that of Emmie Arbel's is a story in itself, so we got together with artist and author Barbara Yelin for this exclusive Q&A.
Barbara Yelin was born in 1977 in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She became known as a comic book artist in France for Le Visiteur (The Visitor, 2004) and Le Retard (Delay, 2006). Her first publication in Germany was Gift (2010, written by Peer Meter), the story of a historical crime that brought her work to the attention of a wider audience. Her subsequent career has included her popular comic strip Riekes Notizen (Rieke’s Notes), first printed in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in 2011, and The Summer of Her Life (with Thomas von Steinaecker, SelfMadeHero, 2020). Her graphic novel Irmina (SelfMadeHero, 2016) received an Eisner nomination. She lives and works in Munich.
SelfMadeHero: While few things are as extraordinary as Emmie Arbel’s own life, the way you came together to create this book is nonetheless remarkable. Without spoilers, what key memories stand out to you from the formation of that relationship?
Barbara Yelin: I naturally remember our first meeting. It was at the Ravensbrück Memorial, the former concentration camp, in summer of 2019. Emmie had one hour of time for me, and I found her sitting outside surrounded by many young international adults with whom she’d been sharing her memories of being a child in the camps. We found a quiet place to talk and she lit a cigarette and said to me: “OK, shoot.“ We spoke for an hour, her daughter also joined us, and then she left. Two weeks later she sent me a message saying that she would like to work and speak with me, despite her doubts as to whether the graphic novel was a fitting medium for her story, and invited me to her home. I remember how Emmie picked me up from the station in Haifa for the first time in 2020: a small lady, 88 years old today, waiting in her car.
This was followed by many, many conversations between 2019 and 2023, meeting in Germany, Israel, The Netherlands and many times online during the pandemic. We’ve been to many places, including Amsterdam where we found her mother’s name at the National Holocaust Names Memorial. We finished the book in September 2023, but we still meet when possible, and we often talk.
SMH: Your artwork in Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memoryis both vivid and gritty, drawing readers into those dark moments from Arbel’s life. When the two of you discussed how to visually convey her story, were stylistic and aesthetic elements a large part of that conversation? How did you decide upon the exact ‘colour’ of memory?
Barbara: Emmie was very clear that she wanted the narration of her memories to be as accurate as possible, historically and personally – and this was exactly my approach too. Artistically, visually, stylistically, she absolutely gave me artistic license. She trusted me in the transformation of her story, I would say. This was always based on a mutual interest in being in dialogue with each other. I showed her my first sketches as well as the final drawings, and she shared her feedback and feelings about each piece. The question about the colour of memory – which is black for her – came up when I showed her new sketches, and I understood how she connected certain colours strongly with each part of her life.
There was only one thing she was quite strict about with me: how I portrayed her present-day self in my illustrations. I tried my best and she ultimately approved of them. Emmie is an honest person with a dry sense of humour, a wonderful friend.
SMH: SelfMadeHero readers may remember that this isn’t your first graphic novel concerned with the human cost of Hitler’s rise to power. Your graphic novel Irmina, itself biographical, earned multiple awards and nominations upon its release. How do you look back on that book now that you have also told Emmie Arbel’s story?
Barbara: Irmina was an important work for me, in many ways. It was the first project where I worked with historical sources and conducted independent research using parts of documents and letters while also collaborating with historians and archives. It was also focused on how a single person, a woman, is shaped by history while simultaneously shaping history herself. These interests stayed with me while working on many following books, and also led to the book about Emmie Arbel. For The Colour of Memory I was supported by a team of international scientists, historians, archives and experts, and the mutual exchange with all of them was fundamentally important.
Irmina focused on the perspective of a woman alongside supporters and perpetrators of the Nazi regime, which itself reflects a part of my own family history. My goal was to show how the deliberate choice of so many Germans to turn a blind eye from the atrocities committed against Jews and others enabled the rise of National Socialism and finally the Holocaust.
Today, in times of dangerous ruptures of political developments, of wars, new fascism and genocide, of racism and antisemitism, I am specifically horrified by how timeless these topics are.
SMH: From March 2016 to February 2026 – that’s just shy of an exact decade between the UK releases of Irmina and Emmie Arbel. It almost goes without saying that stories about people like Emmie Arbel may be needed even more now than a decade ago. How do you feel about this book reaching English-language readers at this exact time?
Barbara: Emmie’s story is an unbearable sequence of violence, death, loss, illness, and abuse, not only during the Holocaust but also in the decades which followed. It is the story of a woman reflecting on her traumatic memories, speaking about pain, grief, rootlessness, loneliness, but then also about life, therapy, family, resilience, friendship, and hope. It delves deep into a single person, but also explores many moments from history. The book was finished already in late summer 2023, and came out that autumn in Germany.
Emmie Arbel’s story is, as I see it, a universal and deeply human story about a woman who, after decades of having no words for her painful memories, does not keep silent any more. Instead, she speaks up for herself, and she refuses to be caught in isolation and hatred. More than anything else in the world she wants peace. Emmie reaches out to the world and says, “Accept people who are different. And spread good in the world, not bad.”
I think that we will really need these words.
SMH: This book was originally developed as part of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project. How did that come about? What was it like to participate in that effort?
Barbara: SCVN was – and is – absolutely relevant for everything that is connected to this book. Charlotte Schallié, head of the project, approached me in 2018 and suggested that I be part of it and that I meet Emmie Arbel. She and her team of international historians, experts, archives, artists and survivors built a network focused on the question of how to depict the perspectives of those who’ve survived genocide. That includes projects about different genocides which can be seen on visualnarratives.org. There was a first publication in 2022 called But I Live, before Emmie and I decided to lengthen her story and rework it into a new, longer book which was also edited and supported by Alexander Korb and Charlotte Schallié.
The exchange between everyone involved is most fundamental – it is a collective work that combines aspects of the academic, the artistic, and the ethical.
SMH: How did the presence/involvement of Emmie Arbel’s family influence this book’s development? Did their memories and perceptions of Emmie inform how you ultimately depicted her and her story?
Barbara: I am very thankful that Emmie’s daughters agreed to frequently be part of our conversations. They offered their own memories and perspectives, and daughters and mother alike showed me how it is to speak as a family with such a deep history.
SMH: Many Holocaust survivors go through long periods of being unable to share their stories with even their own families; one of Emmie’s children recounts that she hadn’t heard her mother’s story until she was already 29 years old in 1994. What do you hope English-language readers will take away from Emmie’s story now that you’ve laid it out on the page at last?
Barbara: Let’s just never stop learning, about the past and present and the complexity of it, and about what it means to be human.
Thank you all for reading! Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory is out now in the UK and North America.
Brigid: saint and goddess. In this memoir, the fight for abortion rights in her homeland of Ireland inspires the author to reconnect with Saint Brigid, and to connect the dots between traditional folklore and modern social justice.
Last night in Waterstones Piccadilly, right where the 2025 First Graphic Novel Award was launched almost exactly a year ago, 2023 award recipient Alex Taylor and Cartoon Museum director Beth Bryan got on stage with ceremony host Alex Fitch to announce this year's winner.
Out of an incredible 220 entrants, a longest of 30, and a shortlist of 6, the graphic novelist only 1 title could go on to win a £500 cash prize sponsored by The bks Agency and a publishing deal with us at SelfMadeHero. That graphic novelist is Hannah McCann, creator of St Brigid & Me!
The following is taken from a series of Q&As with the shortlisted creators, originally published via our newsletter throughout December 2025.
SelfMadeHero:How did you learn about the First Graphic Novel Award? Did you follow the award in 2023, or in its earlier incarnations under Myriad Editions?
Hannah McCann: I’m not sure if it would have been from past Thought Bubble visits, or through the LDComics network, but it’s been something lurking in my consciousness for years as a competition I might, perhaps, maybe, one day apply to – so to be shortlisted is completely stunning!
SMH: What’s a key experience with the comics medium that led you to where you are now?
Hannah: Three distinct moments (sorry if it’s cheeky to pick three!) of encouragement and support from other artists/makers helped me bring this project to life: On the online course, Drawing Graphic Narratives led by Sarah Lightman, we were given space to work on a project throughout the course. Without this structure and dedicated space, I wouldn’t have started it at all.When I worked at Footprint Worker’s Co-operative, we decided to try out holding a ‘crit club’ as all of us were visual artists of one kind or another. Although we only ran one or two sessions, my colleagues Clare and Hils responded with so much encouragement at the first couple of pages of my comic, I felt motivated to keep working on it.My friend Jack Fallows invited me to be part of Leeds Comics Collective, a new group they were setting up with a nice crowd of other comics makers in the Leeds area. I have been persistently supported and challenged by these comics friends to keep drawing and making, even when I lose confidence in myself.
SMH:Has entering this competition helped you learn anything about the comics world that you didn’t know before? Could be something about the scene, the behind-the-scenes, or even your own creative process.
Hannah: It has confirmed something I’ve found through chatting with other artists at fairs over the years (as I used to table for Footprint at zine, book, and print fairs): that the scene is full of really, really lovely sound people, who usually primarily want to encourage more creativity. In terms of my creative process: it was a surprise to me that I was able to pull something together in time to submit to the award! From this confidence boost, I was actually able to push myself to self-publish it as St Brigid & Me Part 1, and print it as a two-colour riso zine. So I need to seek out externally controlled deadlines and boundaries that I can work towards on this and future projects, because I cannot manage my projects alone.
SMH:Submitting for the First Graphic Novel Award requires choosing an extract from a larger, full-length work or to start on a full-length work for the very first time. Have longer-form graphic novels always been your ideal medium? How did you go about choosing the ideal extract?
Hannah: My submission started as a two-page sketched out comic made in response to a brief in the Drawing Graphic Narratives course. I hadn’t done anything long-form before. All advice says: DON’T DO A LONG-FORM COMIC FIRST! My aim was to make it at the very least longer than two pages, and so I submitted about 18 to the competition, and managed to make it 28 for Part 1, with an aim to make it 42-48 pages, but it seems to keep growing! I’m embarrassed to answer the questions about how I chose the extract, but here you go: the extract is basically all that I had done by then. So that was the decision made.
SMH:The First Graphic Novel Award, naturally, welcomes all kinds of newcomers. Whether this is your first full-length graphic novel or not, an early hurdle in any project is knowing how or where to start. What part of this graphic novel did you put to page first? Did you simply start at the beginning, or somewhere else entirely?
Hannah: I think my previous answer answers this too. I started without knowing how long this could be. The opening panels still feel like the natural beginning of this one, no matter what length of a story it rambles off into in the end.
SMH: In a nutshell, what aspect of your work are you most excited for people to experience? This could be anything – visual, narrative, thematic, etc.
Hannah: My hope is that readers will experience a spark of enthusiasm and feelings of connection. It’s what’s at the core of my story: care and connection. And I will be so happy if they like my pencil work too.
SMH:The comics scene is always evolving, but are there any current changes or developments that you find interesting or encouraging? If so, what are they, and what do they mean to you?
Hannah: The Comics Cultural Impact Collective is very interesting to me – I feel like their work does a lot to de-mystify the industry side of comics. I’m always really grateful for the LDComics online meets – being able to connect nationally and internationally without having to pay for travel makes a huge difference. I think there are a lot more opportunities to engage remotely, which can be excellent for all kinds of access needs. I’m also very interested in the Graphic Medicine community and always keen to see what ways comics are being used in this area.
SMH: When it came to the announcement of the longlist and the shortlist, did anything stick out to you about the titles that were selected alongside your own? What impression has that left on you?
Hannah: I’m really happy to see a breadth of different styles of comics, the strong voices of the authors coming through, and beautiful skills in both image making and writing. I love how animal-rich the shortlist is this year! There are personal stories I can’t wait to read in full, and fiction stories that look like they will stay with me for a long time afterward. I really am honoured to be included in this list. I hope it will help me to believe that my work is worth making too.
SMH:Winner or not, where would you like your experience with the First Graphic Novel Award to take you in the future?
Hannah: Deeper and deeper into the world of comics!
Twelve months and another eight new titles on from our last Christmas roundup, the most wonderful time of the year is here again! It almost goes without saying: thank you all for being here with us to celebrate another year of exciting, independent graphic novels. As it turns out, a year with SelfMadeHero often involves a good deal of travelling through time…
2025 started with a look to the future: in January submissions opened for the 2025 First Graphic Novel Award with a special launch event at Waterstones Piccadilly, helmed by James Spackman of The Bks Agency, giving budding graphic novelists a chance to meet our illustrious judges: Shazleen Khan, Oscar Zarate, Jannette Parris, Karrie Fransman, and Emma Hayley.
Going from up-and-comers to a legend of the visual arts, our first graphic novel of the new year was Kusama: Polka Dot Queen by Simon Elliott. This dreamlike biography of the “creator of infinity” got its own celebration at The Cartoon Museum in London.
Echoing our return to the Eisner-winning Ruinsin 2024, in May Peter Kuper brought us Monarch’s Journey (released exclusively in North America). Through the interactive means of a colouring book, Monarch’s Journey immerses its readers (and colourists!) in the plight of the monarch butterfly as it traverses our ever-changing world.
It’s quite a jump from the 70s to the 17th century, but that’s where Gareth Brookes took us next. The Compleat Angler revives a literary classic in similar mixed media spectacle to The Dancing Plague, visually combining and contrasting the poetic and the practical elements of Izaak Walton’s work. The Compleat Angler went on to be named as one of the best graphic novels of 2025 in The Guardian!
Summer brought a brief interlude with some graphic novel award judging going on behind the scenes… Then it was back to the 20th century for the return of another oft-forgotten classic: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery, resurrected by the Rickard Sisters. Bringing this trailblazing Marxist-feminist epic back to life also demanded a fitting to-do: TROUBLE AT MILL, held at the Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Burnley.
The rest of our 2025 list brought us mostly back to the present – but not always as we know it. My Dad Fights Demons!, an original middle-grade graphic novel by UK Comics Laureate Bobby Joseph and breakout talent Abbigayle Bircham. A launch party at Gosh! Comics was shortly followed by the Lakes International Comic Art Festival where…
The FGNA 2025 longlist was announced! Our judges had managed to whittle over 200 entries (compared to 170 in 2023) down to just 30. No mean feat, and with the shortlist still to come!
Fitting that our next graphic novel to hit bookshop shelves was Bone Broth by Alex Taylor, the winner of the 2023 First Graphic Novel Award. Just right for Halloween with its back-and-forth between a more whimsical past and a more gruesome present, Bone Broth also got a hearty reception at Gosh! Comics.
Reaching November meant it was time for Thought Bubble Festival, and to reveal the First Graphic Novel Award Shortlist! At the Quick Strips panel helmed by Hannah Berry, Emma Hayley, Karrie Fransman, Zara Slattery and James Spackman announced the shortlist to a lively crowd of TB Festival attendees: Falling in Love on the Family Computer by Lois de Silva, Kittish Banter by Neo N.M., Forget-Me-Not by Lizz Lunney, A Sleigh No-One Knows by Yu-Ching Chiu, The Frozens by Lauren O’Farrell, and St Brigid and Me by Hannah McCann.
With the winner set to be announced at Waterstones Piccadilly on January 19th 2026, that left us with our very last book of the year: The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club by Francisco de la Mora and Bill Tuckey. This all-ages graphic novel, created by two parents of neurodivergent children, spotlights the experiences of those children to present an inspiring story about creativity and community. The heaving launch event at the Arcola theatre in Dalston included a humorous and heartfelt talk by the authors about the making of the book.
Meanwhile, the legendary graphic novelist and artist Andrzej Klimowski (whose many works include SelfMadeHero titles such as Behind the Curtain, The Master and Margarita, and last year’s Edifice) received the very special honour that he’d foreshadowed himself in an earlier newsletter. As part of the 14th Polish Culture Festival at China’s G Art Museum, Between Consciousness and Dream: A Retrospective of Andrzej Klimowski brings the artist’s 76-year artistic odyssey to life. The exhibition, which runs until March 9th 2026, even brings the cover of Edifice to life in a stunning 3D installation.
And that brings our year to a close! As always, thank you to everyone for sticking with us through another exciting year, and here’s to the next one!
Today marks the UK release of The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club! To celebrate the special and inspiring story of a trio of uniquely capable kids, we decided to ask Bill Tuckey (the author) and Francisco de la Mora (the illustrator) all about how this book came to be.
Bill Tuckey is a veteran reggae DJ, a beloved broadcaster for Kiss FM, and a prolific writer and editor whose journalistic credits include The Voice, Time Out, and the Independent. He also owns a successful graphic art business. Bill is the father of two sons with ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder].
Francisco de la Mora has been working as a scriptwriter and illustrator since 2008. With SelfMadeHero he has published acclaimed graphic novels about the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and has been illustrating for The Hackney Citizen since January 2018. Francisco is also the founder of Symbola Comics, a creative editorial space that aims to develop communication solutions for academics and institutions through graphic medicine-focused comics. He is the father of a son with PVL [Periventricular leukomalacia].
SelfMadeHero: It’s not every day that you see a book like this one, handling this topic in this kind of way. Our readers might already know that you are both parents of disabled/neurodivergent children, but considering your very different career paths, how did you come to work together on this graphic novel?
Francisco de la Mora: Bill became a good friend of me and my family a long time ago. My partner, Daniela, knew that Bill had a lot of things to say about many different topics, and she wanted him to write a story for me to illustrate. She came up with a brilliant idea I won’t discuss here because I hope one day Bill will be willing to go for it. Bill came back to me sometime later with a totally different concept: The Most Amazing was in his head. And we started working.
Bill Tuckey: I really wanted to work with Fran because A) I like him and B) because I thought it would be fun to tell a story in a medium I hadn’t worked in before. It felt important that we would be able to collaborate on every aspect of the book and so our shared parental experiences felt like a good starting point. When Fran told me that he and his son Martin were spending weekends in the local park picking up rubbish, my imagination got going…
SMH: Drawing from your own parental experiences, your children’s experiences – what was it like to undertake that emotional journey?
Francisco: For me, it has been one of the most pleasant experiences in my career as an illustrator. Drawing Uma, the character who is based on my son, was wonderful. I was able to see him through Bill’s eyes, and confirm that his world — the world of my son, and therefore the world of Uma the character — is wonderful.
Bill: To depict someone I love very much as a hero, and to identify their neurodiversity as a strength rather than a disability felt rewarding. And relating some of the common difficulties faced by parents of children with additional needs felt empowering too.
SMH: The rights and public perception of disabled and neurodivergent people are both very pressing topics in many countries, including the UK. Did public discussions of disability play any part in influencing the course of this graphic novel’s development?
Francisco: For me, this book is not political (I don’t believe everything is political). For 8 years, I’ve used my platform in The Hackney Citizen to talk about political issues, not only disability rights, but all sorts of things but this book is not about that. It’s a book that tries to go away from hospitals, therapy rooms, political and social discussions about disability rights, etc. All these spheres of public life shape the lives of the characters, but, just like the disabilities themselves, they don’t define them.
Bill: What we really wanted was just to tell a great story to be enjoyed by people of all ages and life experiences. But obviously there are elements of the book in which society’s disability in accommodating and respecting people with additional needs are highlighted. It’s the backdrop rather than the focus though, because the characters are bigger and better than that.
SMH: In particular, this graphic novel touches on an interesting aspect of conversations around accessibility: that accessibility issues are the concern of whole communities, and that improving accessibility for disabled people is also beneficial to the broader public. Is that something you hope for more people to understand?
Francisco: Maria Montessori used to say: “as fast as the slowest.” She was talking about a classroom, of course, but it can be applied to public life. If you work hard for the community, and for the needs of the most, the whole system benefits. That is very easy to spot in the UK as an immigrant, no matter how hard we all are trying to break the many good things we have for everyone, like education and health. Here, you know that you won’t be left behind if you cannot pay for school or doctors’ bills, and that is worth something. But if you want a much simpler example, look at the wheelchair ramps in the streets. Those things haven’t always been around. Now they are used by people with kids in buggies, kids and adults on bikes, scooters, and any wheeled device, workers carrying heavy things with a dolly, and they even make walking easier for everyone, but especially for little children and older people.
Bill: As the Jamaican proverb goes, “Each one teach one” – all of us on this planet are equally valuable, important and capable of contributing to each other’s growth and fulfillment as humans.
SMH: Representations of disabled and neurodivergent people in fiction have been, at best, a mixed bag. Do you have any personal favourite examples of representation done right?
Francisco: I am not for judgment, so I won’t go deep into the discussion of whether they are well or badly represented, but I will say that I like when the character is the lead. Examples for me: Sheldon Cooper, Dory, Sam Gardner. Also, I like to see or read about caregiver characters, family members, or people whose lives are shaken by having to care for someone with a disability — for example, George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men.
SMH: Did the process of creating and producing this book change how you think about neurodiversity and disability? Was there anything you found yourselves learning from it?
Francisco: Yes, I am very moved by how the community (for now, our close friends and families) are receiving the book and the process of creating the story. Not only the ones who are affected by a disability close by, but also people who are learning and taking something from the book. The thing I learned most clearly from the process is that we should give ourselves and others time to accept and adapt to differences.
Bill: Writing the book has helped clarify my understanding of the false distinctions that society draws between ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ – everyone is special and has something to contribute. But I think the learning journey is only just beginning now we have introduced it into the world. I’m really looking forward to where it takes us.
SMH: This is a book that balances some serious topics concerning some of society’s most vulnerable people and an inspiring adventure for the entire family. That said, if you could put a copy of The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club directly into the hands of one person – or one kind of person – who would it be?
Francisco: This is a very good question. If the book can help shape the political discussion and, in the end, change — for the better — some laws on how to best support people with disabilities, I would like to put it in the hands of politicians. Especially right-wing politicians, who are often the ones who think we don’t need to work for the community and who believe in individualism. In the book, there is one character who represents this very well: Connor, the carer. He is there to help, to accompany, sometimes to be Finn’s legs, Uma’s voice, Arthur’s compass — and with that little bit of help, the three children can live a fantastic adventure they wouldn’t have been able to achieve alone. I believe that anyone — neurodivergent or neurotypical — who has accomplished something meaningful in life has one or more Connors behind them.
Bill: If this book makes one person with additional needs feel a little bit more valued and understood, I think it will have been worth it.
Thank you for reading! The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club is out now in the UK, and out in North America on December 2nd!
