Posted in: Comics, Indie Comics | Tagged: autobiography, Black Bastard, graphic novel, soaring penguin press

Soaring Penguin Press Publishes Autobiographical Black Bastard

Comic book publisher Soaring Penguin Press has announced that they will be publishing the controversial autobiography by Tobias Taitt, Black Bastard, as a graphic novel.  The graphic novel is the autobiography of writer Tobias Taitt, a second-generation Windrush-descendent.  For those unfamiliar, the Windrush Generation were people arriving in the UK between 1948 and 1971 from Caribbean countries and were named for the ship MV Empire Windrush that arrived in 1948 and brought workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other islands to help fill post-war UK labor shortages.

Soaring Penguin Press says the autobiography will follow Taitt through the 1980s.  In further describing the author's story, they say:

"Told simply and adroitly, Black Bastard recounts how Taitt struggled to grow up in the UK after being abandoned by his Barbadian mother, who had hoped to find a better life there—but failed to find it.  Falling into a life of (occasionally violent) crime from the age of 15, Taitt was shunted from children's homes to reform schools to prisons throughout the '80s until he was able to stay out of trouble long enough to start to put his life together."

Tiatt's story was originally published as a novel by the author, but in adapting his novel for Soaring Penguin Press as a graphic novel, he teamed with artist Anthony Smith to bring his life story to a different medium.

"We're really looking forward to seeing the reaction to this powerful and moving book when it comes out," said Soaring Penguin Press co-publisher John Anderson.  Added co-publisher Tim Pilcher, "It addresses a lot of important issues not discussed in comics enough, and is particularly relevant in our Black Lives Matter era."

The story of the Windrush Generation became quite relevant in 2018, when a scandal erupted in the UK after members of the generation were targeted by the government through hostile policies and were "wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office."

Black Bastard will be published in the UK in September by Soaring Penguin Press to coincide with October's Black History Month and will contain previously unpublished material.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!