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The comic book heroes who've made my ambition come true
When I was younger I always wanted to be a character in a book; I used to get Famous Five stories out of the library and imagine that they had actually become The Sizzling Six and that Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the Dog had been joined by Ian, the studious curly-haired lad from Darfield.
As I grew older and more distant from the Famous Five in every possible way, it seemed that my ambition would never be realised, and that, although I'd written books myself, I'd never find myself having even a bit part in someone else's creation.
Until now, that is. If you turn to pages 36 and 172 of Fool's Gold, a brand new graphic novel, there I am in all my bespectacled glory, grinning like a fool and talking in a speech bubble. It may not be much to anybody else but I can tell you it made my day. I'm not only in a book, but I'm in a graphic novel, the dynamic half-drawn, half-written form that may represent the future of fiction.
The wonderful thing about Fool's Gold is that it's not just any graphic novel, it's a symbol of a kind of cultural regeneration that's taking a neglected area and shaking it by the scruff of the neck. It's been published by Dearne High School, a Specialist Humanities College in Goldthorpe, in the middle of the former South Yorkshire Coalfield, and mainly written and drawn by pupils there.
As we all know, this part of the Yorkshire is a place on the cusp of change: the old certainties are long gone, and the area needs new ways of thinking, a new entrepreneurial dynamism that acknowledges the past and learns from it but steadfastly looks to the future. Dearne High is, like many other schools in the region, a shining example of 21st-century thinking. Creativity is being used to foster a feeling of great self-esteem and self-worth in the student body, an essential step
in the making of a complete human being.
Last year the school published Out of the Shadows, an anthology of fantasy stories that I found genuinely chilling when I read them sitting in the house on my own on a gloomy night. Not only that and perhaps more importantly, the book was very professionally produced and sold on Amazon and in bookshops around the region. The young writers saw themselves as proper authors, worthy to take their place alongside the other scribes on the shelves. The school could have felt that the job was done, but the next step was even more ambitious, even more professional, even more groundbreaking.
Fool's Gold is a complex and satisfying collaboration, building in a literary way on the Dearne Valley's long history of collectivism and self-help. The four feeder primaries to Dearne High were involved, as were a number of local businesses who put their hands in their pockets, and places like the National Coal Mining Museum over in Wakefield and
the museum in Whitby, gave time and space.
Perhaps most impressively though, the irrepressibly optimistic teacher in charge of the project, Peter Shaw, persuaded a number of well-known writers to contribute words and images to the book, which give it a real sense of a genuine meeting of younger and more experienced minds, of authors who are just starting out on the writing road, and writers who have worn out a least half a dozen laptop keyboards.
So the story unfolds via vividly imagined ghosts in the school, real Dearne pupils and teachers seamlessly presented in photo stories and comic strips, newspaper reports and online discussions.
Professional writers involved include the multi-award winning childrens' authors Malorie Blackman and GP Taylor (who is also a character in the book), the creator of Sharpe, Bernard Cornwell, (his photograph appears towards the end) Alan McKenzie, the former editor of the great comic 2000AD, up and coming British Asian novelist Bali Rai and many more.
What makes Fool's Gold unique, though, is the bold idea that somehow adults and children can co-exist in the same book, can be co-creators of a work of art; that journalism and poetry can co-exist with cartoon and photographs and songs and that somehow they can all be as important as each other. Many educators pay lip service to the idea of writing in different forms and styles and language registers and they reduce this to multiple choice questions and SATS-satisfying exercises.
In Fool's Gold the excitement of writing is what makes the book tick, and what makes the book a constantly unfolding treasure box of styles and approaches.
And of course in the end it's more than a book: as the head writes in his introduction: "Fool's Gold has and will continue to act as a catalyst to increase students' interest and enjoyment of reading and
writing alongside the development of vital personal learning and thinking skills... vital to individual and collective success in our increasingly competitive global market."
Or, to put it less elegantly: this is Pure Gold, not Fool's Gold.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
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