Catalyst: graphic stories by writers of colour edited by Ayoola Solarin. Review by Barry Didcock

SelfMadeHero, £14.99

Review by Barry Didcock

Founded in London in 2007, graphic novel imprint SelfMadeHero has carved a niche for itself publishing biographies and memoirs alongside more experimental fare, and by promoting writers and artists from around the globe. Nestled in its list you can find histories of medicine and wine, biographies of George Orwell and Diego Rivera, an exploration of the friendship between Sigmund Freud and American doctor Horace Frink, and an adaptation of Robert Tressell’s seminal 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

Casting an eye along my own bookshelf for titles bearing the publisher’s logo, I find a Hitchcockian psychological thriller called Tumult, a biography of doomed dancer Isadora Duncan, and Siberian Haiku, which details the experiences of two Lithuanian children at the hands of the Soviet army in 1941. Wide-ranging doesn’t even come close to describing the SelfMadeHero oeuvre.

A new venture for the publisher is its Graphic Anthology Programme, aimed at developing, nurturing and bringing to market comic book writers of colour. Seven participants spent 12 weeks in a sort of comic book boot camp taking part in workshops and mentoring sessions. At the end of it, each of the seven plus their mentors produced an eight-page strip. The result is Catalyst, a collection of 11 stories by a range of mostly UK-based writer-artists, three of whom live in Scotland.

A page from Pris Lemons's Orbital Decay

They are Pris Lemons, originally from the Cayman Islands and a self-described queer artist focusing on gender and sexuality; Shuning Ji, who was born in China and now lives and works in the capital having completed a post-graduate illustration course at the University of Edinburgh; and Asia Alfasi, Libyan-born but raised in Glasgow after her family moved to Scotland when she was a child.

Musing on the choice of title, the anthology’s foreword notes its meaning as “a call to action, to change” but also promises that readers will find “completely different imaginings of what a catalyst might be or mean, from the magical to the macabre, the cosmic to the cathartic”.

Opening page of The Camera by Edinburgh-based Shuning Ji

Macabre certainly describes the offerings from Shuning Ji and Dominique Duong. A twisted take on technology and modern living with more than a whiff of Rear Window about it, Ji’s near dialogue-free The Camera unspools in a faceless city at sunset (or is it sunrise?) and finds a young man taking delivery of a new digital camera. He shoots some test pictures from his window but what he sees when he zooms in on one of them will have chilling repercussions over the next couple of pages.

A page from One Small Thing by Dominic Duong

In Duong’s story, One Small Thing, crisp drawings are presented in a sludgy background palette of greys – but they draw the reader’s eye to the woman in the red hat loitering at the periphery of scenes where bad things happen. An angel of death? Some kind of monster? In both mood and style, it has some of the feel of Ana Lily Amirpour’s cult Iranian skateboarding vampire flick, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.

In terms of narrative, the three most straightforward stories are the most powerful. In Sonia Leong’s Just Like Me, we follow a friendless, Manga-obsessed schoolgirl as she finds a kindred spirit in the female comic book artist who comes to give a talk at her school – while on a deadline to come up with a subject for her next comic strip. It’s a neat conceit and is presented in a style which cutely references its subject. Using the technique of stories-within-stories, meanwhile, Glasgow-based Asia Alfasi presents a layered tale about female empowerment set against the background of traditional Arab societies. Again, it finishes on a neat kicker.

Finally, Woodrow Phoenix presents Convolute, a fascinating biographical strip about Hazel Fellows, the black seamstress who led the team making the spacesuits for the Apollo 11 mission which first put a (white) man on the moon. The astronauts literally lived or died depending on how good she was at her job. Lucky for them, she was very good. “Up there, your hands are everything. Down here, they mean nothing,” runs a caption on the final page. Phoenix doesn’t need to labour the point – Fellows was an unsung hero of the space race who wouldn’t have been allowed to use the toilets at NASA.

Not everything is as straightforward or traditional. Catalyst, as its mission statement suggests, offers a range of approaches to graphic novel creation, some of them pleasingly opaque. Using what appears to be an arsenal of rainbow-coloured Sharpies, Pris Lemons plays with time, memory and perspective in her story, Orbital Decay, which opens at a party and then sort of … melts. The result is a tale which is opaque, poetic and intriguing enough to have had me going back

for repeat readings. The same is true of Egypt-born Calico NM’s weird, vibrant, sci-fi flavoured Because I’ve Got All Of You. It dispenses with a title page entirely, decorates the panel frames with floral designs and employs techniques such as the Roy Lichtenstein-favoured Ben-Day dots to give a cartoon-y feel. It’s quite a trip.

Catalyst is as instructive for aspiring creators as it is nourishing for readers. There’s hardly a graphic fiction or comic book technique that isn’t put into use somewhere here. The lettering ranges from the hand-drawn to the typeset, the art from airbrush fine to rough-hewn, the narratives run from fractured internal monologues to traditional caption-dialogue-caption layouts. Hands stretch out from panels, text fades as it runs down the page to indicate the erosion of memory and in Catherine Anyango Grünewald’s The Host, which opens the collection, the story is told through enigmatic images, facsimiles of screen grabs from the video conferencing platforms we’re all so familiar with now, and phrases such as “pin video”, “mute audio” and, tellingly, “remove”.

It's an inspiring and thought-provoking collection.