 Welcome everyone. Really special event. It is our penultimate event in our wonderful Festival of Women's Creativity and Enterprise. Creative women, creative business. In this session we'll learn about why comics, cartoon and humour are so important to feminists and we'll get a taste of some of the huge variety of artwork in this thriving industry. Nicola Streeton, as a co-founder of Ladies Do Comics, now LD Comics, is truly the expert to show us the way. Nicola of course is also going to show us how to make feminist comics. This will be a hands-on workshop, although I should say if you want to just watch and follow along that's fine too, but I know that Nicola will make it accessible and easy if you've never tried it and it will be fun if you if you're an expert too. Before we get our pencils and paper out though I want to very briefly introduce Nicola as herself a fabulous artist, teacher and writer. Nicola's research at the University of Sussex led to her fascinating history, UK feminist cartoons and comics, that's the title of the book, which takes us back to many of the productions of the 1970s and 80s in the women's liberation movement in the UK, including pioneering kind of graphic work in a spare rib magazine, Sea Red Women's Workshop and Cath Tate postcards, amongst many other things. She with Cath Tate went on to edit The Inking Woman, an illustrated history of women's cartooning which roams from the 18th century women's satire to Sophia Niaziz do-it-yourself zines in a collective of Muslim feminists and actually Sophia will be with us tomorrow in tomorrow's panel at 12. Nicola has also been influential in the world of graphic medicine, so called, and this is using cartoons and drawings to explore illness and loss and health and well-being and she did this in her award-winning graphic memoir, Billy, Me and You, which was about her bereavement following the death of her child. You can find details of all these books, as said, on the website connected to this festival and more about local branches also of LD Comics on Nicola's website and that's one of the things I really like, is this has become a movement with many regional branches and indeed branches around the world. I also want to just shout out to Myriad Editions, which is the publisher that published some of Nicola's work and which has a specialist list in feminist graphic cartoons and comics. So one final reminder before I hand over to Nicola that those who participate in the Zoom and turn on your cameras will be included in this live broadcast and so you'll be therefore visible in the later recording of this event because we want to put this recording on the British Library player website for a long time so other people can see this. So if you don't turn on your camera then you're not visible, but I would encourage you, if you do do something to share it at the end, there will be a chance in the last 10 minutes to share your work on camera. So now it's over to you, Nicola. Thank you. Thank you, Margarita. Thank you, Polly. Thank you for having me here today and thank you for joining us for this session, everyone. So the workshop will be in three parts. First, I'm going to lead you through some easy drawing exercises followed by a brief talk about comics informed by my practice and academic research. And then I'll return in the third part to the practical exercise of drawing. So by the end of the workshop, we'll have created our very own mini feminist zines. Let's start then with some warm up drawings and and what I ask you with what you'll need for this hour is some paper, rough paper, for example here. A for photocopy paper is fine and pen or paper, pen or pencil, something you like to draw with. The first exercise then that I'm going to ask you on your paper to draw in just 30 seconds. So this is an exercise in speed drawing. Hold on, let's get the thing going. And I'm going to ask you starting from now to draw a car. Go 10 seconds left. Stop. And now I'm going to ask you on the same piece of paper, same pencil to do the same drawing of a car. But this time I'm giving you 15 seconds starting from now and stop. And one last time to draw that car this time. Five seconds starting from now and stop. So the point of that exercise was this about distilling the shape. So I did the first one, that's my car, and you'll look at your drawing and I predict that probably the three drawings all are recognisable as a car. And this is something that the comics form does it reduce. It gets us to the essence, the carishness of a drawing. For the next exercise, I'm going to ask you to close your eyes. So on the same piece of paper or on the back, hold your pen or pencil, close your eyes. And again, I'm going to give you 15 seconds or so to draw eyes closed, a horse and stop. And that that's quite an advanced drawing brief. So just to reassure you that that looks that's mine, the horse. I'm sure yours are recognisable as a horse. Next, close your eyes again, pencil at the ready. The next one I ask you to draw is a teapot begin. OK, how did you get on? So what was the point of this? The point is, all right, more or less recognisable as a horse or a teapot. Maybe less, but certainly it doesn't take us much. It's quite easy to make something more or less recognisable. And the final exercise or my exercise is speed drawing again with sticks. So probably most of us are familiar with stick drawing just using lines. Circles and maybe rectangles, if you wish. And again, very quick drawing. First, can I ask you to draw a figure, a stick figure and stop? And the next one still using sticks, simple shapes, is to draw a house. So this might take you back to your childhood drawing. Begin now, squares, lines. OK, and finally, the final drawing. Please draw a stick tree again, just quick 15 seconds and stop. So look at your drawing of your stick, your stick drawings. And the point here is that simple lines can communicate effectively. So again, it's about this reduction. And this is really what the comic form can do. You've warmed up. Well done, everybody. I'm going to lead you now through the making of a mini-zine. Now, this is a well-loved exercise, and I'm sure some of you will be familiar with it. If not, you're going to love it. Follow my instructions carefully. So I'm going to do it with you. And I've also got some instructions on the screen. What you'll need is an A4 piece of paper, so just a regular photocopy paper. And the first stage is you need to fold it in half lengthways. And this, we call a hot dog fold, really crease it along the fold. And then I'm going to ask you to fold it in half again along the length. So it's like this, like so. Really crease those folds. And then fold it once more like this. So it's really quite small. If you have fingernails, this is where they come in handy. Obviously, my nails are bitten, so I have to use the ends of my fingers, but that's fine, too. So you should have a little this shape. Next, I'm going to ask you to open up your piece of paper like so back to A4 and fold it the other way. So this is a hamburger, we call this a hamburger fold. It's for some reason, it's quite food centric, this folding for this zine. And what I'm going to ask you to do now is to tear. You can see from the picture. So if you have the top fold at the top, just tear to the middle where the lines meet here. And you can, if you have scissors to hand, great, but give it one last, you know, crease and then fold it down, just tear it to the middle. So it should look like this, like at the bottom picture. I hope everyone's with me. And then complex, this is the complicated bit, the next bit. So fold it out and fold it in half again to a hamburger, back to our hamburger fold. Get me quite hungry. And then if you turn it on its side, you can see that it forms, just do this. So it forms a diamond shape. Everyone with me on this and you push the paper towards each other. So the diamond meets in the middle. OK, so it's a kind of and then you turn it so it becomes like a K shape. I'm jumping in because somebody, could you go back to just one step to, yeah, that tarot cup as someone who's clunkily not sure I've cut. Yeah, OK, one quickly again. Yes, thank you, Marguerita. I was wondering because everyone gets lost when we do it physically. So I really was hoping that you. So you've got, we've folded, we've got the open A4 and it's got all the folds from the bottom of the left, the stage, third stage. Then we fold it in half the other way. So it's like we call this a hamburger fold. And you can see, you can see on the paper, there's folds. There'll be folds on the paper and in the middle, maybe do a little dot. So, you know, you fold, you tear from the top bit to the middle from the top fold to the middle, but only to the middle. OK, so it should look like that. So the bottom picture, you can, if you have text scissors, that's fine. And then you open up the paper again. So you've got a four sheet of paper that looks like this with the hole in the middle and you fold it into the hamburger, the hot dog fold, so lengthways. OK, everyone with me. And if you turn it on the side, you'll see and push it slightly together. You'll see that there's a diamond shape. So that's still the fold on one side. And what you this is the really tricky bit. So I will repeat it. You push it together till it meets in the middle. And then you fold it over each other until it makes a little a little. Booklet. I'll do that last bit again. So you have the hot dog. You have the hot dog fold. You turn it on its side and so you have a diamond shape. You push the paper together until it meets and then you turn it round. So at first it has like a K shape and then you fold it over itself. Can you see? So you should be left with a booklet that looks like this. Is everyone with us still, Marguerita? Are you having any any helps in the chat? Hopefully you've kept up with us. So I now have it. I'm really excited with my booklet, which I am magically there. We don't have any things in the chat, but this is a point to say. If you do have questions, you can put them in the chat and we'll pick them up. They help us. So this is a lovely little booklet made from an A4 sheet of paper. And it's a real delight. So you have the front of your paper here. And like on the we call these narrative boxes in the comics jargon. And at the top draw a narrative box and in it write feminism. And at the bottom draw your narrative box and in it write your name. So, Nicola, my name and what I'm going to ask you to do just spend a minute or two or two is on this is the front of your booklet. So on the front, I'd like you to draw a self-portrait and it can be however you want. We're not judging art. We're just having fun here. So here's an example of mine and you might start from now drawing with your favorite pen or pencil and you might. You might think about your distinguishing features. So I can I'm lucky I can I have glasses I can draw. So just a picture of yourself. Just take a minute to do that. Just a quick drawing. OK, so I'm going to ask about why the comic and what is a comic and what's the relationship between comics and feminism. And we can very loosely define the comic form as a combination of text and image. And I've got a little example for you. I I argue it's this power of the image with the text that makes the comic form so important, so great. Imagine, if you will, that you receive a text message saying this, I hate you. Imagine now that it's alongside it's it's followed by this emoji. How do you feel? Imagine now that you receive the same text, the same text message, but this time with this emoji. How does that make you feel? And finally, imagine that you receive the text message, the same writing, but this time with this emoji and how does that make you feel? The point I'm making here is that the text has remained the same. It's the image that's changed. And when it's combined with that image, the meaning changes and this determines your emotional response. So it's this combination that I argue gives the comic such powerful potential. What do I mean by comic? And I'm speaking specifically within a Western context here, because that's what I'm most familiar with. So in my research, the UK, also American, European and Japanese. If you think of a comic, it probably calls to mind the stylized superhero. So Spider-Man, Superman with specific body shapes, hair styles, skin color and clothing, which makes it very culturally specific. And if we think of popular cartoon icons, still I'm thinking within a Western context, such as Charlie Brown, Dick Bruner's rabbit, Miffy, Hello Kitty, the Pokemon characters, Pikachu and an older example of Herge's Tintin and his dog Snowy. What they have in common is this simplicity. They're basically circles with dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, a very, a very simple drawing style. And in understanding comics, which is by Scott McLeod, he refers to research that shows that very young babies recognize a drawing of a circle with dots and a line as a human face. So the implication of this, of this recognition of the human face is that if you have a drawing that's simple, it can be recognized more likely to be recognized cross-culturally by more people so that I will see myself more likely to see myself in Miffy than in Wonder Woman. In comics, we use metaphor. This is an example from my own graphic memoir. And this use of metaphor enables us to deal with difficult and serious subject matter, such as bereavements in my own work, or subject matter that's also being addressed in comics, such as the experience of having cancer and the experience of mental health conditions. And I'm also referring in my talk to zines. So what is a zine? A zine comes from the conflation of fan and magazine. And it was a fan zine was a term coined originally in the forties by an American sci-fi enthusiast. In the seventies, it became shortened to zine and as Teal Triggs writes, it refers to photocopied, stapled, amateur, non-commercial small publications for small distribution. So it has a DIY ethos. So to summarize why the comic, it's this shorthand immediacy of communication. It can be widely recognized when we use the simple forms. It's different to illustration because illustration reinforces the text. Whereas comics, like we showed with the emoji, can say two messages with the text and one through the image. And I talked about the importance of metaphor. But what do I mean by feminist comic? And to explain this, I want to talk a little about my own journey as a practitioner and also academic because the two overlap. I first produced what became my graphic memoir, a personal story of bereavement following the death of my child in chapter forms. And I published, self-published these in Licorice, a series of seven zines that I produced with my then 12-year-old daughter, Sally Plowman, between 2009 and 2010. And my work in Licorice became to the attention of Corinne Perlman, the creative editor at Publisher Myriad Editions, and was published as a graphic memoir in 2011, Billy Mia Knew. And it was the fourth at the time in their recently introduced line of graphic novel titles, of which there are now over 30. Is Billy Mia Knew, is it a feminist work? Not overtly. I'm cis, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class woman. So any personal story I tell is going to be one from a certain position of privilege. But although I identified as a feminist when my two-year-old died in 1995, the event itself, the experience itself, was probably the most significant consciousness raising experience I've had. Because very happily, very willingly, I'd unconsciously been shaping my life in a particular way. The choices I was making in my work and my daily life, I say unconsciously, according to a patriarchal notion. And when that was taken away with with away from me, I was left without a script. My feminist lens was polished to show me something of the power and indeed, actually the laughable absurdity of social structures, which inform our behaviour. And it was then that I began to understand also the meaning of feminist humour and to understand what Ellen Siksu and Catherine Clement refer to as hellish pleasure, how the hysteric often laughs even as she howls. And by the way, for me, the best example of this, which I do recommend watching is Marlene Gorris's 1982 film, A Question of Silence. My interest in gender grew when my book was published and I realised it was the first long form graphic memoir by a British woman to have been published and yet it was 2011. My publisher is Myriad Editions and now it's become more and more relevant to me that this is a woman led publisher. It's a publisher where the provenance and social political publications emerging originally from Pluto Press and now merged with New Internationalist. The emphasis in their approach is to prioritise the relationship with authors and for me, this to reflect elements of the socialist feminist approach. In addition, another early influence on me was the form of the graphic memoir to tell personal stories by women often not heard or perhaps being told in a new and different way, not heard enough. In particular, one work that impacted me was Dragon Slippers, a graphic memoir by a Canadian artist Roslyn B Penfold published in 2006. And it's about her experience of domestic abuse. What struck me in particular was in spite of this graphic memoir's phenomenal publishing success and translation into around a dozen languages, I hadn't heard of it through the comics community that in 2009 I was becoming part of but through women's aid. So through an organisation that originated from feminist activism. Another influence on my thinking and practice was co-founding LD Comics, Originals Ladies to Comics in 2009 with artist and friend Sarah Lightman, importantly stating the friendship because that's been the undercurrent of all my work. We hosted monthly platforms for presentations of graphic novel works in London, women led but not women only and the popularity of the forum immediately introduced me to a wealth of comics, women's comics based works. We're still operating, currently hosting online events so really a global reach. The next one is next week. We're a committee now of six women creators, Charlotte Bailey, Rachel Ball, Emma Burley, Lou Crosby and Wallis Eats. So I guess at this time I was starting to ask a Linda Nocklin type question of where are the great British women comics artists. Thanks to Trina Robbins. There was a cartooning history that was existing in the USA. Unquestioningly I'd taken this history as my own but whilst there are similarities the UK context is different and it was pointed out to me that there wasn't there wasn't a taxonomy of British women cartoonists which led to my PhD research. So why feminist cartoons and comics? Why not women's cartoons and comics? When I conducted my research I found there was very little about women's comics in the mainstream archives, the archives that hold held comics and it was whilst I was reading on feminist theory and history more generally still in the mainstream archives that the main finding of my research was established which was that it was in the feminist periodicals and publications from the 1970s where I found this deluge of women's cartooning and comic that hadn't been recognised within comics and the main finding was that the platforms and opportunities for women cartoonists and comics artists in the UK have historically been established by feminist activity not from comics activity. So for example in the 70s spare rib Trouble and Strife outright feminist arts news all carried cartoons by women in the feminist publishers established in the 70s and 80s out of 11 companies set up four of them published cartoon books of works by women so Sheba Feminist Press Virago Press Pandora Press and Women's Press. In the 90s with a DIY ethos and the expansion of technology particularly photocopying feminist zines emerged not always with cartoons and often around music but sometimes some including often including the comic form and most well known ones were Fanny Comics, Sour Cream, Bad Attitude, Harpies and Queens and Girl Frenzy. And it occurred to me that through some of these works these cartoons these early cartoons I actually had been introduced to aspects of feminism again part of my early consciousness raising that I dismissed as inconsequential and ephemeral and didn't count as kind of proper heavy feminism but it did and I want to mention a little also about the humour the other strand of my academic questioning because it was obviously obvious some of the works were very funny but why weren't they being recognised as mainstream humour and what didn't square with me was the stereotype that persists really quite strongly today of the feminist as serious and humourless and it led me to think about the power of humour if society reinforces a stereotype of a feminist as humourless which you know continues then it denies the power that comes with humour and by the way you know think of our very own Prime Minister Boris Johnson whose previous work included being a comedian and the Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky also previously a comedian so in other words if we think of humour as a weapon and say feminists aren't humorous we're denying them that weapon but what my research proved was certainly in cartoon in cartoon form there's a buoyant amount of humour amongst feminists but it was a different kind of humour so needed to build a different audience and I suggest that the graphic novel work coming from women today is also different to mainstream graphic novels or comics in the style and in the subject matter but with the community building activities such as LDC we're building and strengthening the audience for this type of works. One of my case studies was Cath Tate of Cath Tate Cards and she drove the Inking Woman which was an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum London co-created by Cath Tate Anita O'Brien Kate Charlesworth and Corinne Perlman and my contribution was to the book that accompanied the exhibition Inking Woman and later theorised in my more recent book. So all this my work so far is simply the start of a history and an addition to a wider feminist and women's history in the UK there was of course much missing there was a limit to how much I could do but it's hopefully one that will be added to the importance really for me has been the ethos of the DIY the zine type activity that extends into activism and the attention to the little stuff of the everyday on subject matter and the way we work and this leads me neatly into part two of our mini zine and I'm inspired always in my teaching of comics by Linda Barry who's a very inspirational American cartoonist and also educator using the comics form so some of her ideas I've incorporated so pick up your little booklet and open the book onto the first page with your pen or pencil whatever you want to write and draw with and just at the top write numbers one and number two these are your page numbers and for each of the tasks I'm going to take you through I'm going to ask you to think about feminism and what it means to you to inform your responses but if you if you can't think of anything in relation to feminism don't worry just respond however you wish it's really for fun so on page one I'd like to I'd like you here on this page to draw a thought bubble so I've given you example there of what a thought bubble looks like a cloud with the little dots just draw a thought bubble just quickly and in that let me see in your thought bubble I invite you to write something that something oh you've overheard or something that someone has said to you someone someone said and in this context it might be these days something someone's texted to you and here's my example taken from a text I got recently so just have a couple of have a minute to think about something you've overheard or something someone said to you to write in the thought bubble one more minute okay if you're ready to move on the next thing to do is drawing and draw on page two draw something boring so here's my example to give you an idea again thinking about feminism but it can be anything draw something boring have a minute to do that half a minute more okay and on the net if you turn your booklet page to the next page and write at the top your page numbers the top three and four again thinking about feminism uh let me see what's my first let's draw a memory from your childhood on page three so here's my example it's supposed to be me holding a Barbie doll in love or or the equivalent of what was a Barbie doll then Cindy I think so a love of dolls but it can be anything you want draw a memory or a thing that you remember it might be an object a stick up object uh from childhood take a minute to do that two minutes perhaps okay and uh when you when you feel ready I'd like you to draw a speech balloon on your page four and a speech balloon is looks like this and has the tail pointing to the mouth of the person who speaks or the object if you want an object to be speaking so draw a speech bubble on page four and I'm going to ask you to write this time a saying or a motto or a slogan so my example is cheer up it may never happen so think about a saying a motto slogan if you can think one from feminism brilliant or otherwise whatever you think of yes it might be a quotation even I guess all right everyone ready to move on to turn your page so the next page um at the top right your page numbers again page five and six this time oh yeah I wanted you on page five to draw something or someone that you saw recently and to interpret my drawing I've done as an example that's someone on zoom shouting go watch cartoons I'm zooming so you're allowed to incorporate text into your drawing so something or someone that you saw recently so I was thinking um probably if you're like me most most recently seen people on a screen draw something or someone you saw recently so you might draw them saying something okay another 30 seconds and next um draw a thought bubble that goes on to page six again a thought bubble connecting if it works to your drawing in page five and in your thought bubble again thinking about feminism in your thought bubble write a question so here's my example how can we make the world a better place so write down a question have a couple of minutes to think and write your question okay well done and uh your feminist zine is almost complete we've just got the back cover of your um of your mini zine to complete and um let me stop sharing to come out of this and what's great by the way about this is you can open it up and on the back so you've got all your zine on one side and on the back you can make a poster in your own time so it's a great exercise and if you are doing it with an A3 sheet of paper you could make an A5 booklet which is double this size and is a more conventional zine type size so um that's something for you to take away thank you very much for joining in I hope you've managed all right so we're going to we've got around nine minutes left to share your works for anyone who'd like to so what we've got what I'd like to invite you if you have a spread from your zine that you just made that works particularly well you think uh or doesn't have to uh but you'd like to show it we'd love to see so um if you what we're gonna what we have a plan here uh if you put up your hand there's a raised hand icon Margareta will invite you to switch on your camera and hold up your favorite spread to the camera so we can all see and if you unmute your Margareta will invite you to unmute yourself or she'll unmute you something and uh we can introduce you with your name and you can tell us where you're joining us from today or and or if you have a question to ask again please put up your hand and Margareta will invite you to present your question great thank you hi it's nice to see the people appearing um that was very instructive Nicola as someone who is certainly no comic scholar or artist myself I've I've tried to scrabble a lot and I'm very very curious to see what other people have done um so yeah turning on your screen I can see a couple of people if you wanted to put I'm presuming it's easy to put things in the chat I mean it is for me my end but um come on ready yeah I'm just allowing people a bit of time all right we have um um could could I pick out Aysa to start with um Aysha Aysha Aysha yes hey let I would love to see and Nicola who was the expert go right up to your camera that looks amazing can you read it out for us pink is for girls and I'm eating my pink candy floss here is that your memory from childhood oh that's so great that's so lovely we were talking about pink a bit earlier weren't we Margareta yes in fact I changed my top from pink because about I you you've made that so full of movement to me that is wonderful thank you are we allowed to very quickly Nicola do you think we have time I know we we must be quick but to go quickly through the whole thing oh yes go on just very quick whiz through from beginning Aysha so lovely we were talking about pink a bit am I okay hello I just stopped my top from pink because you you've made that so full of movement to me okay I will I am a designer a graphic designer so feminism and Aysha I think I did a mistake on the folding I'm sorry about that um what for sadness and something boring was thinking it's not boring it's completely opposite and my childhood memory okay I will I'm a designer a graphic designer so we have a little feedback so I'm not sure why but if just maybe just show us and don't don't say anymore and we'll we'll move to someone else maybe it's me I don't know okay and the other one is I listened the previous broadcasts on book covers and they lost literature and what is being lost so the question is what is being lost books lost literature these are the books and screened the browser and my talk bubble is what is being lost thank you thank you could we have ellie ellie whistlock and where are you where are you say if you wouldn't mind saying okay I'm in hackney um I had um my son who is seven and crashed out of formal work and set something up myself um um I've recently had like a crazy experience and I think I want to draw about it please do could we see your could we see what you've drawn now just in the interest of time oh lovely lovely line oh it says you are not your thoughts can you read it great that is great the boring thing is the phone yes I got that that is a good course but my grandpa is used to say that and I was just like shut up read it out you can do anything you want to do that's great and we were just like sharp gramp you can't be invisible you can't no you totally can be invisible and that's the nightmare um and then my my lovely friend she's just in a state but I want to put something on the last page yes what can we do want to suggest something ellie that all of us can do or anyone else oh what do you take solace in sorry what do you take solace from what do you take solace from nice one okay I think we're gonna we're gonna stop at that point I very much want everyone to get a chance so thank you um Julia could you could you show what you've done um and thank you so much ellie that was that was wonderful Julia right um okay this is this is me um then this is uh pity she's a girl with that batting action that was somebody said that about my daughter when she was um with my son and then this is the bit I really like this is me at about six on the floor burning curtains it'll all come out in the wash one of my mom's favorite saying um this is the news breaking news you can see the newscasters and and there was something about um how do we feed the children but everybody's hair have you noticed it's going wild on the news so I quite I quite like that idea very enjoyable workshop thank you I I'm gonna rush on again with great admiration for what you've managed to do too thank you so much uh Sarah could you share your one and again where where are you hi I'm I'm in Perth in Scotland wow great um yeah um I've just to show you it there's my that's me being cheeky right um I just looked at a text because I couldn't think of anything so my last text says good job you told me about that magic way and she's talking about um PayPal it's my friend and in the other picture my friend from my community garden she's burning and older women but on the other side there's me getting mansplained too which is very boring it's the most boring thing that can happen to you and you have to decide whether you want to listen to it or not or whether you want to argue that's why it's boring so yeah at the same community garden there'd be a lot of them that kind of mansplaining going on um this is a man from the childhood I used to always fall over on my knees I'm not very well coordinated I don't think um and there's like the boys would always laugh and run away because I was always falling over um and it says do what you can with the time you've got available and that's from a teacher of mine who is absolutely brilliant every time you were behind on time she would just always say do what you can with the time available which meant you could never run out of time it would just be done when it was done um five um this is me in the supermarket yesterday um and it's a friend of mine who I don't see that often since I moved but she was saying what a brilliant time she was having because our man's away on the regs and she's just got the whole house to herself and the kids the girls are all a bit older so she was just saying how gay it was and then my question was just just whether you know we can teach um or just be the same with boys and girls so they don't build up these differences so yeah can boys and girls be treated the same from the moment they're born this is my thoughts probably just these are the things don't occur thank you thank you Nazia if you wouldn't mind coming in and again if you could say where you are thank you so much Sarah it's quite quite fun and brilliant um this is I don't know if you can see that's me um I wrote okay so this was a text message someone sent me and this is my boring moments on the sofa with my husband can you read it out um oh you naughty girl Nazia right okay that's great um this is my childhood memory so being at nursery school and being picked as the only brown kid and it but I it was to make me feel special to stand in the middle and have everyone dancing so that's a nice memory um and I think this was meant to be the fourth bubble I think so I am the brown girl in the room for the ring and this is my mum during a video chat and how to reconnect with those that I love but have lost and that's a thought oh and that's it yeah wonderful thank you we have time I think just for one more word and Lea would you mind sharing thank you thank you so much Nazia I like whatever you're sitting on too by the way it looks lovely and fluffy okay Lea can you see that I started off by brushing my teeth but the scale was wrong so how did you end up in tenor reef how can we overcome these barriers yeah great question yeah wonderful thank you I feel like I'm in company of very talented people and I really appreciate as well you're actually quite brave to share having done something so quickly but I I think they're all brilliant I'm sure Nicola you think so too really nice we have we have only two minutes left and I wanted to just mention that there is some comments in the in the chat somebody says um Jessica says this is fab I seem to have disabled my camera so I'm going to tweet mine thank you everyone and we also have a question about um Sandman by Neil Gaiman um is the series of graphics novels most read by women do you have an particular opinion about it given it's written by a man to which extent can a man be a feminist in his actions in the comics world from pre so you have you have one minute to answer that really good question and I think Neil Gaiman is quite a champion of of comics across I have to confess do you know what the drawing style just doesn't really pull me in and that's it's just a personal thing but it might be I wonder if it is gendered I'm not sure we'll we'll discuss that hopefully at some other time but um I know I agree popular as a comic but it's certainly firmly within mainstream comics I would argue Neil Gaiman's work thank you for that question okay um yeah a big question but I think hopefully we're making this festival show that all men men can contribute something to um you know we just need space for everybody as well I think yeah it's a big debate and on that note I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm not gonna allow you Nicola to I know you've got great opinions on this but just to say come back tomorrow because tomorrow we're going to have our closing panel at noon um noon till 12 and it will be where we try to pull together all these really difficult questions around inclusivity and the marketplace and ethical business and uh yeah I'm sure we'll come to the question there of men and also of all genders um and what what we can all contribute but for this moment we have come to the end of the time I want to really really thank you it was a very special meeting um really creative meeting and very hands-on and big big thank you to Nicola um so hopefully see you all tomorrow again thank you good night and goodbye