This Autumn is shaping up to be one for the (comic) books, with a whole host of events coming up over the next two months! There's so much going on, we just had to get it all down in one place. Here's what we have in store for you...
2nd September: Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 exhibition private view and book launch with Mirko Ilić at The Coningsby Gallery.
5th September: Romo the WolfBoy Fireside Talk with ILYA at Comicazi, Somerville, MA.
12th September: ILYA signing at Small Press Expo, 12-1pm at official SPX table.
13th September: "A Walk on the Wild Side with Romo the WolfBoy” workshop with ILYA at Small Press Expo, 12.30-1.30pm, followed by signing at official SPX table.
16th September: Lo! An Amazon! launch at The Cartoon Museum.
17th September: Lo! An Amazon! talk by Mary and Bryan Talbot at Dr Johnson's House.
18th September: Mary and Bryan Talbot signing Lo! An Amazon! at Gosh! Comics.
1st October: "Panels & Perspectives: Disability and Neurodiversity in Comics" talk at City St George's, University of London.
2nd-4th October: Lakes International Comics Festival.
Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 - Exhibition and Launch
If you've been paying attention, you'll have already heard about the upcoming exhibition and launch of Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 at The Coningsby Gallery. The exhibition runs from September 1st to September 7th (closed on September 6th), and the private viewing and launch takes place on September 2nd, 6-8.30pm!
If you're quick, you can still RSVP to [email protected] to make it to the launch! We hope to see you there!
Romo the WolfBoy - Talk, Workshop, and Signings
On September 1st, Victoriana-infused paranormal adventure Romo the WolfBoywill reach North America in an all-new snappy paperback edition - and its creator ILYA has also crossed the pond!
First you can find him in Somerville, MA where he'll deliver a fireside talk at Comicazi on September 5th!
Then he'll be appearing at Small Press Expo in Maryland, first for a signing on September 12th, and then for the "A Walk on the Wild Side with Romo the WolfBoy" workshop on September 13th - followed by another signing!
First is the launch at The Cartoon Museum, on September 16th, for which free tickets can be booked here!
The next day, the Talbots will be delivering a special Authors' Hour talk on their new title at Dr Johnson's House - the home another literary icon who was one of Wollstonecraft real-life associates.
Finally, you can catch up with the Talbots at Gosh! Comics for a signing on September 18th!
The Great Marc Evers: The True Story of a Champion Against All Odds - Special Panel
On October 1st at City St George's, University of London, two creatives responsible for one recent and one upcoming title will be taking part in Panels & Perspectives: Disability and Neurodiversity in Comics. These are Francisco de la Mora, the illustrator of 2025's The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club, and Gemma Plum, the illustrator of The Great Marc Evers: The True Story of a Champion Against All Odds, which also releases on October 1st!
Tickets are now available for this special event, which also features the graphic novelist Zara Slattery and is hosted by the academic and comics journal editor Dr Ernesto Priego.
Lakes International Comics Festival - Launch, Talk, and Signing
Once again, we're excited to return to the Lakes for LICAF 2026! As usual, you can expect to find us on October 3rd and 4th hosting signings at our very own table, and these are the fantastic creators we've published who are among this year's special guests: Gemma Plum, Francisco de la Mora, Bryan and Mary Talbot, and ILYA!
On October 3rd, you'll be able to find them at these events:10.30-11.30am: ILYA on Romo the WolfBoy.
A full schedule if we ever saw one, and that's just for September and October! We look forward to seeing you at any of these exciting events, and to telling you what's next!
SelfMadeHero is delighted to announce that The Count Binface Comic Book will be published on August 6th – preorder your copy from Gosh! Comics here!
This 72-page anthology is an unauthorized celebration of the extraterrestrial politician, Count Binface. The collection features contributions from more than 30 of planet Earth’s most exciting comics creators including Krent Able, Steven Appleby, Becky Barnicoat, Hannah Berry, Babak Ganjei, Dave McKean, Martin Rowson and Bryan Talbot, with cover art by JAKe Detonator. The book will be published just a week ahead of the Clacton by‐election when Count Binface will, democratically, battle Baron Von Thunderclap, that bloke who used to be on the telly, and, oh yes, Nigel Farage.
10% of every sale will be donated to Shelter via Work for Good.
For years, Earth has staggered from one crisis to another. Politicians promised solutions. Experts offered analysis. But the planet still seemed headed into the proverbial trash.
Then Count Binface arrived from planet Sigma IX. He took on prime ministers, mayors, and snooty pundits. Along the way, he became Britain’s most beloved Recyclon, defender of common sense and tireless champion of the Lovejoy box set.
When Count Binface announced earlier this month that he would stand against Farage in the Clacton by-election, SelfMadeHero Managing Director Emma Hayley knew the time was right to celebrate this exciting new force in British politics in comic book form.
“I’ve been a fan of his ever since learning of his policy to nationalize the singer Adele,” says Hayley. “After Count Binface said he was standing, I started contacting all the great comics creators and cartoonists I’ve worked with over the years.”
Remarkably, the anthology has been put together in less than a month.
“It has been a hectic few weeks,” says Hayley. “I’d like to thank all the writers and artists who went the extra mile because they believed in this crucial work of political satire. And because they thought it was a funny idea to celebrate a guy dressed as a bin.”
The Count Binface Comic Book brings the universe of “Old Binnie” to glorious life. Expect space battles, political nonsense, cosmic bureaucracy, recycled wisdom, and more heroic rubbish than you can fit in a wheelie bin.
Full list of contributors: Nick Abadzis, Krent Able, Steven Appleby, Andrew Attwell, Rachael Ball, Becky Barnicoat, Henny Beaumont, Hannah Berry, Abbigayle Bircham & Bobby Joseph, Paul Ashley Brown, Grazia Caleo & Louis Netter, Darryl Cunningham & Jonathan Edwards, Dix, Kate Evans, Babak Ganjei, Fraser Geesin, ILYA, JAKe Detonator, Rich Johnston, Rebecca K. Jones, Jonesy, Dave McKean, Peter Morey, Rob Murray, Woodrow Phoenix,Anna Readman, Scarlett & Sophie Rickard, Martin Rowson, Mark Stafford, Bryan Talbot, Edward Taylor,Myfanwy Tristram.
The Count Binface Comic Book touches down from Sigma IX on August 6th. Preorder here, or find it wherever the most out-of-this-world comics are sold!
The Coningsby Gallery, 30 Tottenham Street, London, W1T 4RJ
In 2020, as his city and the world shut down around him, the acclaimed New York-based artist and graphic designer Mirko Ilić returned to his first love: drawing comics. With unprecedented time on his hands, he crafted a sequence of single-page stories to reflect the mood of those times – eventually naming his accumulated series in memory of 2020 AD – or rather (as a quite different sort of “AC Comic”) “A.C. 2020”.
Those initials stand for “After Covid”, because Ilić continued to create his intense visual essays even as the lockdowns slowly began to lift, channelling his inner anxieties and minute daily observations into a set of starkly surreal images that combine his unique personal imagination with the distilled inspiration of a lifetime’s influence – from Magritte to Moebius, Marshall McLuhan to Winsor McCay, Robert Crumb to Leonard Cohen.
Topped and tailed here by new appreciations from the legendary Steven Heller and Dave McKean, Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 builds into a unique picture of one man’s inner turmoil at a crumbling world. At once tender and disturbing, enthralling and liberating, its tragicomic pages stand as testament both to the stunning talent of their award-winning author and the universal circumstances he faced and overcame.
Spotlighting key pages and artworks from the book, this exhibition celebrates Ilić's long-awaited return to the comics form and invites you to explore the surreal world he created in response to the pandemic in 2020. The artworks lifted from the page and printed at large scale allow an enhanced appreciation of the book's captivating psychological landscape. Ilić's intensely personal and inventive imagery is a must-see! Several pieces will also be available to buy as high quality prints.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mirko Ilić is a Bosnian-born comics artist and graphic designer based in New York. His formative years were spent in Communist-era Yugoslavia, where he became known for his early illustrations for comic books and magazines. His comics were then published internationally in Heavy Metal, Métal Hurlant, and Marvel’s Epic Illustrated, among others. Soon after moving to the United States, he became the art director of Timemagazine’s international edition and The New York Times’s op-ed pages.
Other highlights of Ilić’s illustrious career include designing album covers for Rage Against the Machine, creating the celebrated opening title sequence to You’ve Got Mail (1998), and enjoying collaborations with such luminaries as the legendary Milton Glaser and Steven Heller – including, most recently, on Milton Glaser: POP (The Monacelli Press, 2023). His works (including some of his comics) are in the collections of MoMA (New York), SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Smithsonian (Washington DC), Die Neue Sammlung (Munich), and many other globally renowned institutions.
Mirko Ilić: Fist to Face, a sumptuous retrospective of his life and work by Dejan Kršić, was published in New York in 2012 by Print Publishing. Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 (SelfMadeHero, 2026) is at once a disturbingly beautiful reflection on surviving the COVID pandemic and an unforgettable return to the visual medium of his first love: comics.
“Ilić’s comics are vivid and sublime descriptions of that range of emotions we have all experienced, and may continue to feel for considerable time still to come.” – Steven Heller
“It was a great pleasure to see such a powerful image-maker return to comics after many years as a master poster-maker, illustrator, designer – a ‘creativo’, as the Italians would say.” – Dave McKean
It might only be June, but we're wasting no time in announcing our lineup for Autumn 2026! As always, thank you for your readership throughout our Spring season this year.
To lighten Summer's end, you can look forward to four brand-new titles, all of which draw inspiration from a range of striking life stories and unique moments in time, and two new editions of works previously issued in other formats.
September 2026 sees the long-awaited return to print of comics and graphic design legend Mirko Ilić, now invoking the surrealism of life during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020.
The Great Marc Evers is also set to make a splash in September, with Ivo van Woerden, Gemma Plum and Marloes Dekkers’ beautifully realized life-story of this champion Paralympian swimmer’s rise to greatness – with his family constantly by his side.
October will mark the welcome return of the renowned, award-winning duo Mary M.Talbot and Bryan Talbot, with Lo! An Amazon! – perhaps their most brilliant collaboration yet. This is the graphic biography of the political theorist and feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, tracing her daring travels – and enduring activism – through Revolutionary times.
Talking of daring travels, our final new title of the season, slated for November, comes from Simon Elliott, the acclaimed creator of Kusama: Polka Dot Queen, who now exchanges dots for lines in bringing us the story of Chagall: Painter of Poetry. Follow Chagall’s artistic journey, from his birth in an obscure outpost of the Russian Empire, via his constant flight from oppression and tyranny, to his global renown as an emblem of all it means to be free.
And meanwhile...“Who is this who is coming” in time for Halloween? None other but the spirit of M.R. James, perfectly embodied in Leah Moore & John Reppion’s single-volume Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: The Compendium.
And if that’s not enough, there’s even a new paperback edition of ILYA’s Victorian paranormal mystery, Romo the WolfBoy, set to arrive in North America in September and in the UK in November.
Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 by Mirko Ilić.
A collection of wordless single-page visual essays inspired by Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Winsor McCay and others to reflect the anxieties, uncertainties, and daily observations of award-winning artist and designer Mirko Ilić.
In 2020, New York-based artist and designer Mirko Ilić started drawing self-contained single-page stories created to reflect the mood of an unprecedented time. He called this collection “After Covid 2020” or “A.C. 2020”.
Ilić continued to create these visual essays even as the lockdowns slowly lifted, channelling his anxieties and observations into striking and surreal images that combine personal imagination with motifs and inspiration from music, fine art, comics, and more.
Shocking and provocative, captivating and meditative, this sequence of illustrations paints a unique picture of a man’s inner turmoil amidst a crumbling world. Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 is a testament to both a period of unprecedented upheaval and the stunning talent of its award-winning author
OUT IN UK: 3rd SEPTEMBER! 🇬🇧 OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 29th SEPTEMBER! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
The Great Marc Evers: The True Story of a Champion Against All Odds, written by Ivo van Woerden, illustrated by Gemma Plum, translated by Michele Hutchison (with colours by Marloes Dekkers).
The inspiring life story of one of the greatest Paralympic swimming champions, and his family that stopped focusing on a “no” to find a “yes”.
What if you stopped focusing on what’s impossible, and opened yourself up to what’s possible? Marc Evers is two years old and it's almost impossible for anyone to get through to him. His parents are told by a psychiatrist he has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and that he’ll never be able to talk or go to the toilet on his own. For this reason, the psychiatrist recommends institutionalization. Thankfully, Marc’s parents refuse to listen.
Eighteen years later, Marc is preparing to compete in the 100-meter backstroke at the 2012 London Paralympics. He walks, talks, and rides his bike. He’s his own person, surrounded by a busy family – and he can swim like a torpedo. With five Paralympic medals and many world records, Marc Evers is the Netherlands' greatest Paralympic swimming champion. How did he manage to beat the odds?
The Great Marc Evers is a moving, intimate, inspiring, and above all optimistic coming-of-age portrait of Marc and his family. A beautifully drawn story about perseverance, hope, and strength, about trusting your intuition and daring to believe.
OUT IN UK: 17th SEPTEMBER! 🇬🇧 OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 6th OCTOBER! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
Lo! An Amazon! The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, written by Mary M. Talbot, illustrated by Bryan Talbot.
A graphic novel from the award-winning creative duo Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot about Mary Wollstonecraft, foundational feminist philosopher and author.
“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their dignity.” In the Age of Revolutions, with many movements springing up to demand greater liberties for mankind, Mary Wollstonecraft spoke out for the other “one-half of the human race”: that of womankind.
Over twenty years before her daughter, Mary Shelly, created the science fiction genre with Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 manifesto, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, took the world by storm. Forthright and fearless, she mingled with other radical thinkers of her time and travelled widely. In the same year she published her magnum opus, she even ventured alone to Paris during the Reign of Terror.
This graphic biography of the then-controversial and now-legendary Mary Wollstonecraft comes from the creative partnership of Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, the award-winning duo behind Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, and Armed with Madness.
OUT IN UK: 1st OCTOBER! 🇬🇧 OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 3rd NOVEMBER! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
Chagall: Painter of Poetry by Simon Elliott.
“Poet, dreamer, and exotic apparition…” This is a graphic novel about the colourful life of modernist pioneer Marc Chagall.
The artist Marc Chagall (1887–1985) once described painting as “a window through which I could fly into another world” – which is just what he did. He grew up Jewish in the so-called Pale of Settlement (now Belarus) in the Russian Empire, relocating to Paris in 1910, at the height of the “Belle Époque”, and then served an uncomfortable time as an art commissar in Bolshevik Russia. He would spend his long lifetime outrunning and outliving a succession of oppressive régimes (Tsarist, Soviet, Fascist, Nazi) as numerous as the art movements he absorbed (surrealist, fauvist, symbolist, modernist) and the range of media he both liberated and illuminated. In his ceramics, stained glass, tapestry – above all, in his paintings – Chagall brought the freedom of his “colours of love” to a stark world that is too often too dark.
Acclaimed for his graphic biographies of Hockney (2023), Van Gogh (2024), and Kusama (2025), Simon Elliott returns with a triumphant portrait of perhaps the greatest colourist (and therefore optimist) of them all.
OUT IN UK: 12th NOVEMBER! 🇬🇧 OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 24th NOVEMBER! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: The Compendium, adapted byLeah Moore and John Reppion, illustrated byAneke, Kit Buss, Al Davison, Meghan Hetrick, George Kambadais, Abigail Larson, Fouad Mezher, and Alisdair Wood, and cover art byFrancesco Francavilla.
An anthology of eight spine-chilling ghost stories by M.R. James by various artists.
It’s time to draw the curtains, curl up by the fire, and enter the sinister world of that master of the English ghost story, M.R. James. Just make sure that you’ve locked the back door... As an academic medieval historian (of the sort often featured in his stories), he turned his back on Victorian schlock-horror sensationalism, in favour of a subtler form of creeping shivers and uncanny fear that has guaranteed the endurance of his supernatural tales.
In the ninety years since his death, the spirit of M.R. James has inspired countless acts of homage, not just in literature (Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Ruth Rendell), but in radio (Neil Brand, Mark Gatiss), television (Jonathan Miller, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton), and film (Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon).
Now Leah Moore & John Reppion have extended that influence into the graphic-novel form with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: The Compendium, a collection of eight powerful adaptations of his most famous and spine-chilling tales. Reimagined in a wide variety of graphic styles by Aneke, Kit Buss, Al Davison, Meghan Hetrick, George Kambadais, Abigail Larson, Fouad Mezher, and Alisdair Wood, this anthology hauntingly evokes the singular dread of what James himself simply called “the ominous thing”...
OUT IN UK: 17th SEPTEMBER! 🇬🇧 OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: TBC 2027! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
Romo the WolfBoy (Paperback Edition) by ILYA.
At Blimey O’Riley’s Travelling Circus, a stagehand and a strange, wild boy find themselves investigating a paranormal mystery.
Romo, rumoured a wolf boy taken from the wild, and a young stagehand named Francis are the two newest members of Blimey O’Riley’s Travelling Circus. Together they will become Criminologists Extraordinaire, Specialists in the Paranormal – but this is only their first adventure…
When the circus comes to town in Victorian England, repeated acts of sabotage by a mysterious, giggling culprit turn Romo and Francis from rivals to friends. Can they work together to solve this baffling case, and even become a top act in the meantime?
OUT IN UK: 26th NOVEMBER! 🇬🇧 OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 1st SEPTEMBER! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
And there you have it! Six reasons to look forward to Autumn 2026! Thanks for reading!
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!
