My 2021 Inktober project – where I drew a different protester ever day of the month – hit the zeitgeist, what with the government clamping down on our right to protest, at the same time as giving us all more to protest about.
It also caught the attention of the Workers Gallery in the Rhondda Valleys, South Wales, who emailed to ask if I would exhibit my protester pictures. I was delighted to say yes.
I suggested that, alongside the exhibition, I made a comic.
I invited local residents to share their memories and photos of protests, marches, boycotts, strikes and activism.
I was slightly worried that I wouldn’t get any.
This was the wrong thing to worry about.
In fact it soon became apparent that my main issue was going to be politely declining the slightly less interesting stories (which I would have been quite happy drawing) in favour of the very, very many extremely interesting ones.
From the local mayor who ran a pirate radio station and drove a lorry with a smoke-breathing dragon on the back of it; to the Maerdy miner who can never look another Fray Bentos pie in the face; to the septuagenarian willing to chain herself to a gate and be arrested in the name of preserving an ancient meadow; to the camp set up at the road to a toxic landfill site that succeeded in getting it closed down… it is clear that the people of the Rhondda protest just as they live and breathe.
When I discovered on Wikipedia that one theory for the meaning of Rhondda is ‘noisy’, I had my book title:
As of March 2025, The Noisy Valley is now complete, and safely with my agents Pearlman and Lacey.
Myfanwy Tristram 