Issue 104 / October 2019

WRITING OUTSIDE
OF THE MARGINS
For the last four years, Comics Youth, a Liverpool City Region social enterprise, has been helping young
people write their own stories, with the next chapter focusing on the lives of the marginalised.
Our youth is defined by flux and change. They’re
dramatic. They shape the adults we become. There
is no end of stories about young people; it’s a time of
everyone’s life that has a lot of juice for storytelling.
But it’s rare that those stories are told by people currently in the
weeds of their youth. And it’s even rarer that stories about young
people come from places other than white, and straight, and
wealthy.
This rarity comes from the kind of people who are involved
in telling stories, both on the business and creative sides. The
British publishing industry, for example, is overwhelmingly white,
wealthy and southern. A comprehensive survey of the industry
from the start of this year revealed that a majority of the people
in publishing come from the South East, London or the East of
England, while just under five per cent come from the North
West. Similarly, the same survey showed that just 11.6 per cent
of the industry is BAME. Class is also a big divide: an analysis
of the 2014 Labour Force Survey showed that just 12 per cent
of people in the publishing industry come from working-class
backgrounds.
This creates a default type of person in stories – a default
that doesn’t reflect the reality of people’s lived experiences, a
default that leaves people out. Resisting that default is necessary
in the fight for liberating marginalised groups. It’s a default that
comes from who has access to resources, so fighting it means
giving resources to marginalised people to tell and mediate their
own stories.
This is where something like COMICS YOUTH comes in.
The four-year-old charity, founded in response to cuts to youth
services, works through a variety of programmes to give young
people from marginalised communities a safe space for creative
exploration and expression. Working across BAME, LGBT,
low income and disabled communities, they aim to create a
community of solidarity, openness and acceptance based around
creating and reading comics.
I went to their fourth floor space on Lord Street in the
heart of the city to chat about Comic Youth’s latest initiative,
MARGINAL, a publisher led by under 25s that pulls together
all elements of what they have been doing with, in their words,
the goal of changing “the landscape of UK culture”. Their space
is open and loving, with room for working on art, reading from
their gorgeous library of comics, zines and graphic novels, or
just playing on the Switch and hanging out. Through Marginal,
20 eight to 25 year olds will create and release their own
stories. “It’s about giving visibility to young people who don’t
have a platform,” Amy Roberts, Comics Youth’s marketing and
communications officer, tells me. “Helping young people to feel
recognised and a part of a community, when so often they’re
being pushed out and being told their opinions don’t matter, their
identities don’t matter, that whatever challenges they’ve been
through aren’t valid.”
Marginal is a very open programme, possibly taking Comics
Youth away from strictly dealing with sequential art. “We have
found that quite a few of our young people are interested in
exploring avenues of poetry or fiction or memoir that aren’t just
artwork based or word based,” Amy adds. “We’re just gonna
see where their ideas take them and support them in fulfilling
that.” The idea is that the young people involved know what their
stories are, and the best ways to tell them. Marginal, and Comics
Youth more broadly, sits just as a way to facilitate and resource
their goals.
The fluid, member-led direction of the project means that
these young people can find solidarity in shared experiences:
“They’re able to lead with those experiences, help out and give
advice,” confirms Amy. This is a key part of Comics Youth’s ethos,
across the wide eight to 25 age range. “It’s not just going to
somewhere and the people that run the space be involved with
you and support you, but also having peers that are a little bit
older and also able to take you under their wing, show you that it
gets better, and keep going.”
Teenage years can be quite
isolating, which is perhaps
exacerbated by the constant
presence of the internet in all of our
lives. We’re always being looked
at, scrutinised. Amy comments that
“everything’s become very insular,
but very global, and that can be so
overwhelming for young people,
especially if you do have mental
health issues like so many young
people do, like so many of us do.
Technology can be so overwhelming”.
But, through this communal act of
creation, young people can explore
their identities in a safe space, away
from the gaze and judgement of online spaces. In this, it becomes
vital that what they create is physical. “To take those narratives
away from digital spaces, by handing out a limited-run zine in a
community that you feel a part of, is massive,” says Amy. “That’s
the thing when you publish physical media, you don’t have to
look at comments, you don’t have to be following hashtags to see
backlash, or people having a go, it can just be enjoyed on its own
terms.”
This puts Comics Youth, and Marginal, in a punk tradition of
people on the edges doing it themselves, making their own art,
telling their own stories, outside of the mediation of institutions.
A tradition that birthed the kind of zines they still make at Comics
Youth, the kind of zines that led to these very pages.
Amy sees this as a natural socio-political cycle. “I think at the
moment we’ve gone back to a scene that you saw growing in the
late 70s and 80s, where, similar to right now, the economy and
the government was failing marginalised people and marginalised
voices. During that time, a lot of comics and zine culture started
coming into fruition, because people got sick of not being heard
and not having their stories told. We’re coming back around to
this idea.” But this is only meaningful if it remains accessible,
affordable and grassroots based. Things that may have started
as a part of a DIY culture have, over the years, shifted into more
corporate, branded entities. “It isn’t just zines, it’s [evident in] the
“We want to connect
communities and reach
out to people who
don’t see themselves
in a lot of stories”
whole DIY culture, like Thrasher. Maybe skateboarding wasn’t
the most inclusive of scenes, but it stood for something, and it
was a community where a lot of young men – who were maybe
disadvantaged – came together and created a network and
community to support one another, during a time where a lot of
men experienced mental health hardships. But then you see how
that’s become so corporate, it’s become a brand, and it’s what
girls on Instagram use to get more likes, or whatever.”
This dilution of DIY culture has meant that while the style
and signifiers of the scene have become mainstream, the actual
creation of new work has become more insular and gatekept,
mirroring the mainstream publishing culture that too often
excludes new voices. Commenting on the scene as it is in London
(“where it’s £10 for a booklet from Goldsmiths”), Amy points out
that “they’re beautiful but no one can
afford them”.
Liverpool isn’t London, though,
and our city has a history of standing
up for communities that have been
forgotten by the powerful. “I think
we have a real culture for making
our own shit, being punk rock and
rebellious,” asserts Amy. “I think it
does come from the music scenes
we have, and the arts scenes,
where everything is very DIY,
because people don’t have the same
resources; you have to make your
own scene.” It makes Liverpool a
perfect place to begin an injection
of new energy, new voices and
new authenticity into the DIY zine space. Amy adds that “the
scene definitely needs a fresh injection of voices, which is kind
of what we want Marginal to be: to encourage people to have
the confidence, as well as the skills, to feel like they deserve to
be writing, that their stories are interesting and their creativity is
wonderful”.
While Comics Youth currently gives space and resources for
young people’s expression, they’re ambitious and always on the
lookout for new directions to expand and collaborate. “We believe
that LGBT young people deserve a voice, and BAME young
people deserve a voice, that the young shouldn’t be marginalised
and should be given a platform. That’s why we’re just pushing for
bigger and better. We want to make it accessible, affordable, and
we want to connect communities and reach out to people who
haven’t been heard and don’t see themselves in a lot of stories.”
Their ambition doesn’t cloud their purpose; they are only driven
by the goal of facilitating accessible, radical expression by young
people with stories to tell but whose voices are left unheard. !
Words: Edward Haynes / @teddyhaynes
For more information on Comics Youth membership and further
involvement, visit comicsyouth.co.uk.
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