The creators of a graphic novel starring characters with varying additional needs hope it will become a ‘touchstone’ for conversations about disability.
Illustrator Francisco de la Mora and writer Bill Tuckey had a long-standing friendship before they joined forces to publish The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club, out on 20 November.
The story follows three children, all with different disabilities, and a former engineer living in an underground bunker. Together, they form the Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club, joining forces to embark on adventures involving collecting rubbish, police mix-ups and a psychedelic carer.
The book is named after the 'rubbish club' de la Mora set up with his son. Every Saturday, the pair would go to Clissold Park in Hackney to pick up rubbish together.
Both de la Mora and Tuckey are parents to children with additional needs. But while this informed the creation of the book - and the three characters are inspired by their kids - Tuckey said the graphic novel isn’t meant to be a ‘tool.’
“Really, the inception of it was just to write a really good story,” he said. “The point of it was just to have characters that happened to be neurodiverse in leading roles, and for that to be almost incidental.
“The drive behind it was to create a good tale. That’s how we would like people with additional needs to be viewed - just part of the landscape of our society. Everyone’s got different abilities and needs. We want to embrace those differences.”
The children come across various characters who don’t understand their needs over the course of the book. De la Mora portrays these characters as whited out, and they only become colourful once they grow more accepting of the children.
De la Mora said this was not meant to be interpreted as a judgment of those who struggle to know how to broach the topic of neurodivergence. Even he has come up against difficulty raising his son.
“Sometimes I’m whited out, sometimes I’m in full colour,” he told the Citizen.
“If we are transitioning there, we have to allow the space for others to do the same. We have to allow those conversations.”
Tuckey and de la Mora said the release of the book is just the ‘first stage.’ “The next stage is to connect up with SEND groups or people who are interested in hearing more about [our work],” Tuckey said.
“We’re very open to visiting schools and to just generally use [the book] as a touchstone for wider conversations.”
The Most Amazing Saturday Morning Rubbish Club is published by SelfMadeHero, who “aim to publish ground-breaking and beautiful work by authors and artists from across the globe” in graphic novel form.
Their other releases for 2025 include Kusama: Polka Dot Queen by Simon Elliott, Low: Bowie’s Berlin Years by Reinhard Kleist, The Compleat Angler by Gareth Brookes, This Slavery by Sophie and Scarlett Rickard, My Dad Fights Demons! by Bobby Joseph and Abbigayle Bircham, and Bone Broth by Alex Taylor.
