Today is a special day. It marks the launch of a collaboration between writer Nikesh Shukla and I on a new, very special comic book project: Issue 1 of the new series Mad Villain, Alerta.
Sometimes you’re lucky enough to meet someone and you know that something special and powerful will come out of this serendipity. Nikesh and I both met a few years ago as residents of Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. We always knew that we’d do something together, but we were not sure what. As concerned parents bringing up children in Bristol, this collaboration has felt more and more urgent over the years. As a white immigrant woman from France, I kept hearing voices from both sides of the Channel: ‘fascism is at our doors’. Concerned, kind voices - privileged ones.
Mate, fascism is here. Reform’s popularity is off the charts and it is very likely that the RN will come through the next presidential election in France in 2027. French politicians held a minute of silence last month at France’s national assembly in memory of a neo-nazi. It’s not at our door, it’s there. It’s there from the frontal attacks my Black and Brown friends and their kids are facing daily to the denial of well-meaning, left-leaning friends who whisper “but what can we do?”.
Today I’ve got a proposal for you: read a comic book. It’s called Mad Villain, and it’s a story of a middle-aged dad in Bristol who decides to join Antifa. It’s a story about parenthood. It’s a story about masculinity. It’s a story about Bristol. It’s a story about antifascism.
In his latest pamphlet, Hope Must Be Held In A Clenched Fist, Nikesh writes:
“It reminded me of why Bristol is such a dangerous city to these so-called patriots. What they don’t understand about this city is, sure it has its problems, its socioeconomic complications, its issues, what city doesn’t. But it is, for me at least, a city filled with good people wanting to do the right thing, trying to do the right thing and being unafraid of getting it wrong, because getting something wrong is just a rehearsal for getting it right. And to a lot of people, doing just that, trying, is dangerous. Bristol tries. It doesn’t always get things right. It doesn’t worry about being first. But it tries.”
When his pamphlet came out, I had just finished reading Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein. There’s a passage about vertigo that struck me:
“Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds. The known world is crumbling. That’s okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks.”
So there it is, Nikesh and I have tried something in the midst of our respective vertigos, because we believe there are better days ahead. We hope you will enjoy it. And we hope it will inspire you.
Mad Villain Issue 1 Alerta is out now, you can get it here.
Siamo Tutti Antifascisti!
