Myfanwy Tristram on Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest

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!