When we heard that Nick Abadzis was coming out with a new graphic novel, we at Autobiographix jumped at the chance to hear more about the work. Abadzis’ graphic novel Laika, about the first being (a dog!) in space, made Nora cry back in 2007 when it came out, and is a foundational text for many graphic novel fans. Abadzis’ newest comic, a collaboration with his wife Angela Watson, looks to be just as affecting. My Beloved Other, just released on August 11, 2026 (order it now!), explores what it is like to be in an interracial relationship in today’s too often racist world. Told from both Nick and Angela’s perspective, readers get an honest look at their lives. Although it details difficult and ugly moments, it ultimately “challenges readers to do what can sometimes feel impossible: keep hope alive for a future where difference is embraced as a source of unity, not division.”
Nick and Angela have generously shared their process, as well as a treasure trove of materials related to the book: be sure to check out their book trailer, a deeper explanation of the book’s origins, and their Instagram page.
Read on for more from Nick and Angela on their collaborative graphic memoir:
Describe your comics journey—how did you get into making comics?
Angela:
This is my first comic. It’s my first book, too. I always read comics growing up and then I married a cartoonist, who is also a sort of human walking museum of comics and cartooning, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually be drawn into his creative process. It’s just his language—how he expresses himself to the world— and I don’t really know how he does it. Sensory input goes in through his eyes and ears, he gets an idea and then puts it down on a page. He puts in a lot of time and effort. I get to watch TV while he draws stuff.
Nick:
I’ve been making comics for as long as I can remember. My mother kept many of my childhood efforts, and after she died I found them, all sorted into a folder. I have examples from when I was six, seven years old, maybe younger.
I got into comics professionally when I began working in comics retail in London when I was nineteen, and eventually this led to me hearing about a job through a friend as a color separator at Marvel Comics UK (back when Marvel had a British office, which dates me. This was 1987.). Marvel UK was a kind of university of comics where they taught you the House of M way of making comics.
The following year, I left to go freelance and also to pursue a dream I had of making my own comics. I was very lucky in that I encountered Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins as they launched a new monthly comics and music magazine called Deadline, and they gave me a regular slot. They liked a stickman character I had in my portfolio, Hugo Tate, probably the character I’m best known for in the UK. Deadline was this wild, experimental kind of magazine that had an outsized cultural impact in the UK, and Steve in particular encouraged me to follow my muse.
Hugo evolved quite rapidly from a stickman to something more fully-fleshed out, and became very popular. I really think he’s due another adventure quite soon.
How did you develop your voice?
Nick:
I’m British, but my background is multinational. Growing up, I had access not only to UK comics, but European and American comics too. I grew up mostly in London, but for a time, I also lived in mainland Europe, where I went to an American school, and my friends had stacks of US comics, not just superheroes but all sorts of pulpy stuff. Because of this my influences were pretty broad. My aunt lived in Paris and one year she gifted me a subscription to a really good French bande dessinée monthly, so I’d get this package of French and Belgian comics arriving every few weeks, plus in the UK, Euro characters like Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke were widely available. Later, comics artists like Moebius, Druillet and all those Metal Hurlant pioneers came along. My mother was a huge comics fan and reader of magazines and newspapers, so I had a lot of exposure early on to strips like Peanuts and B.C., both of which she loved, plus UK cartoonists like Posy Simmonds, Mel Calman, Ronald Searle, Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman, people like that. Sometimes she’d buy Punch or Private Eye and leave copies lying around. I credit her with my widescreen, ambient education in all forms of storytelling, and an awareness that you could make a living in the visual arts. All these influences went into the mix, along with British comics like The Beano, 2000 AD, Warrior, Escape and so on.
I arrived at Marvel UK, with all this stuff in my background, in the creative cauldron in my head, bubbling away. Later, Deadline allowed me to really experiment, as did a brief year-long stint as a newspaper cartoonist.
Can you tell us a little bit about My Beloved Other?
Angela:
It’s a memoir. We met in Britain, emigrated to the United States, and lived there for nearly fifteen years. That’s the story at the heart of the book: an interracial marriage, two family histories, and the racism we’ve encountered, both overt and subtle, in Britain and in America.
In situations like that, you find out what it means to be outsiders. You find out what it costs to keep belonging to each other anyway.
It might seem like we ask a lot of questions of the reader, but this is what we do for and to ourselves, too. Integration isn’t a policy. It’s a practice, a way of life, one that we’ve been living for all the time we’ve been together. My Beloved Other is that story, as told from the inside.
For My Beloved Other, you two have collaborated—how did that process work?
Angela:
Our collaborative “writing” method might be a little offbeat. I don’t really “write” in the traditional sense.
Nick:
Maybe not, but you’re a really good raconteur.
Angela:
Essentially, we recorded ourselves. We’d open a bottle of wine and just start talking. We’d talk about current events, geopolitical affairs, personal incidents that had happened recently, or we’d tell each other stories, tales from our past and our individual family mythologies.
Nick:
That’s how all Angela’s sections of the book were written—those are her words, her stories, transcribed by me, all carefully recorded and written down. I’d then thumbnail these and show them to Ang for her input. Together we’d add or delete bits, edit for clarity, tune it all to make it work better as dialog, sometimes slightly re-order text and sequences for the sake of story flow. It was all a process of judicious self-editing.
Angela:
There were a lot of very different earlier drafts of this book. Nick worked really hard to shape it all into a cohesive overall narrative. The original version of the book was called Skin Trouble, and it was loosely based on our father’s lives as immigrants to the UK.
Nick:
Yeah, that’s the version of the book I couldn’t make work, so we went back to the original idea, which was just to do an anecdotal book about what it’s like to be in a biracial marriage in today’s world.
Angela:
It wasn’t deliberate at all, but that turned out to be very timely. We did keep elements of our family history, when it felt relevant, as it helped to tell the overall story. You have to figure out what parts to give weight to, what elements to lose.
Nick:
Right. The narrative shape of the book was changing all the time, from draft to draft, partly so that we could include reflections upon current events.
What might seem relevant in an earlier draft seems less so when you review it, say, a year later. Halfway through drawing some of the final art, Covid happened, George Floyd was murdered, and we really felt that we needed to address these and other events, and so the shape of the end section changed again.
Angela:
We’d already radically changed the front end of the book after some feedback to an earlier draft that Nick shared with some trusted publishing friends, so it was a case of trying to highlight the best possible series of events to fully illustrate our “worm’s-eye” point-of-view of the world.
Nick:
Through the overall process, we dispensed with the wider stories of our father’s lives as the book became less about human migration per se and more about racism, or, in our case, anti-racism. There’s still a little of that in it, as those are our backgrounds, but it became less about them and more about us.
Angela:
We really wanted to do something about the history of sugar, colonialism, and slavery, plus explore some ideas about conditioning via culture, via advertising and branding; how this kind of stuff plays into our personal lives, without it all getting too academic or polemical in nature. It had to be about how that kind of social machinery affected us, in a personal sense. In that sense, through that process of refining and defining, it became ever more autobiographical.
Nick:
Plus, believe it or not, we wanted to keep a sense of humor about it. You have to keep all things balanced, and we wanted to keep it accessible.
What are some of the joys and challenges of making nonfiction comics?
Nick:
For me, I like to research. Laika, one of my earlier books, was heavily researched, although I’m always careful to call it historical fiction, as there were elements in there that I had to dramatize and speculate upon simply to make it work as a tapestry, all these different events coming together. I find dramatising real history both creatively challenging and very satisfying. Joining the dots of specific historical events via dramatization, which in turn leaves room for depth of characterisation.
This project was very different though. I’m a storyteller by nature and inclination, but I’ve never done autobio. A lot of people thought Hugo Tate was autobiographical, but he is a character; it’s fiction through which I channeled a lot of personal emotions, hence, I s’pose, the sense of truth about it, which is what a lot of readers responded to. Same for Laika. Anyway, they say you should take yourself out of your comfort zone, and in the creation of this book, I certainly did that. I think that was part of the reason it took so long. There were a lot of false starts, a lot of narrative problems to solve. Comics as a language is infinitely flexible though, so via experimentation I found ways of expressing things that, in another medium, might need an entirely different approach.
Angela:
I got to drink some nice wine and talk to my husband. I wrote, yeah, I thought about what we wanted to say and how to say it, I edited, we talked at length about how to achieve it all. But he did the heavy lifting, the construction work. He figured out how to make the concepts, writing and iconography all hang together and how to deal with some of the more abstract topics in a visual way.
Nick:
You had a lot of input there. I’d try certain ideas out on you, certain juxtapositions or combinations of text and illustration, and if you felt they didn’t work, you’d say so. I can think of a couple of occasions where you were like, “We need to clarify that,” or underscore something and I’d try doing it a different way.
Angela:
Sure, there was a certain amount of trial and error, but you also are utterly fearless when it comes to comes to clarity of messaging.
Nick:
I worked to make everything accessible to even a casual reader. You don’t have to be “comics literate” to read this book. Angela is a really good barometer for how a reader might come at this.
Angela:
I think it helps that we make each other laugh a lot.
Nick:
It does. Long may it continue.
Angela Watson is a psychotherapist and skilled leader of coaching, mentoring and training strategies in both social work and education. She has over twenty years of therapeutic work experience as a mental health and child development specialist, although she believes a highlight of her career so far was coaching staff and inmates at Riker’s Island Jail in New York City and is passionate about helping young people build their life skills in an ever-changing world. As both a Black Brit and (officially) an African American, she has a unique perspective on racism in the UK and USA.
Nick Abadzis is a British writer, artist, editor, visual facilitator and speaker who has been creating books, magazines, comics, animations and stories for both adults and children for more than thirty-five years, with work published all over the world. He’s been honored with various international storytelling awards, including an Eisner in 2008 for his graphic novel Laika. He recently completed work on My Beloved Other, a graphic memoir co-authored with his wife Angela Watson, to be published in August 2026 by Macmillan’s 23rd Street Books imprint. Find him on Bluesky and Substack. And, you can read more about his work at his website, https://www.nickabadzis.com.
Whoa I can’t wait to read this book!
Thank you for the lovely intro, Nora and Amaris (and sorry for making you cry, Nora, way back when. I get that a lot). Really appreciate the interview and the great work you do.