Autobiographical comics

One of my main projects for Comics Youth has been adapting the life story of a young person called Key. My experience lies in illustrating fictional comics, usually of a darker nature. When I was asked to work on this project, I was a tiny bit surprised, but once I spoke to Key about his childhood, I now understood why someone used to working in a darker tone was needed.

Reading Key’s experiences was harrowing, knowing what someone like himself went through for years with little intervention whilst also knowing that the same things were happening to other young people all over the country made it apparent that Key’s story needed to be told. Originally, the plan was to rewrite Key’s story with his support but reading his accounts and the raw emotion contained in them, we felt it was important to preserve his voice and portray it word for word throughout the book.

The aim of adapting Key’s story is not only to present his experiences for people to understand but also to recognize that Key’s experiences with safeguarding are not an anomaly, young people are being abused every day in plain sight and nothing is being done to tackle this. Through allowing young people like Key to tell their stories, we’re encouraging an open discourse for which other survivors can talk about their experiences and also give victims the safety to break the silence.

The process of adapting Key’s work was extremely rewarding. I worked with Key to develop an Autobiographical text detailing his life from when he was first put in his father’s custody up until the present as well as many conversations with himself and what he wanted to get across in the work. As I said above, Key’s writing style was extremely raw and powerful, he was incredibly brave and articulate throughout the process and didn’t hold back his feelings about his abuse. Because of this it was extremely easy to take direct quotes from what he’d told me and work around them. I would be lying if I said the process wasn’t also emotional for myself, there is nothing pleasant about hearing that someone you’ve worked closely with and care about has undergone horrors in their childhood, but I know getting these experiences onto paper and helping to visualise and contextualise them will support other people in the future.

At the very beginning Key asked me to use pen and ink to illustrate his story. I think this has worked a lot better than digital inking. The pages are all inked by a dip pen and then washed over with black ink. The result is very raw illustrations, with inky textures and uneven lines, all things that I feel add to the darker tone of the story. It was challenging deciding how to illustrate some of the more traumatic aspects of the story, I didn’t want to take away from Key’s words by showing literal illustrations, nothing I could draw could even come close to accurately representing the events of the story, so at times I decided to follow a more abstract route, both trying to capture the tone of the story but also to elevate Key’s voice.

Working on Key’s story has been a pleasure for me, it’s taught me a lot about my own artistic process as well as about how the world sometimes works. I said earlier that usually my comics are fictional, there is usually an allusion or allegory representing the horrors of the real world in there, working on an actual person’s real life story was initially a challenge but once Key’s voice was established in the work it flowed quite naturally. I’ve always believed in the power of storytelling, but Key’s story taught me that power in practice, adapting his story really highlighted how sharing our truths brings power.