Bobby Joseph's My Dad Fights Demons
Bobby Joseph’s My Dad Fights Demons! feels like an encore and a street party at the same time. The book is loud and giddy and also tender and attentive. The pages move with the snap of stand up, domestic muddle giving way to portal mayhem, a quick flare of feeling, then another laugh that lands exactly where it should. The energy is familiar to readers who remember the long conversation at 3:AM about Joseph’s work. The punk brash bite, the class sting, the race realism, and the fierce love of ordinary speech remain vivid. The difference is the breadth of the invitation. Teenagers in classrooms can take it in with ease and adults on the night bus can enjoy the same beats with their own aftershocks. The edge stays sharp while the grin gets wider.
Rye is the book’s centre of gravity. Rye is sharp and sardonic and capable. Rye is also carrying more than any young person should carry. The grown ups in the house are failing to keep boundaries tidy and the world beyond the front door feels raw. In walks the estranged father, the Magical Mr Mantrikz, who travels between dimensions and treats demon fighting and parenting as a single weekend plan. He swaggers, he improvises, he embarrasses, he tries, and he makes a mess. The gag engine starts from the opening pages. A conversation in the loo turns into a life reveal, there is a cutaway to a cosmic punch up, the reunion takes place on a street that very quickly fills with goblins, and a cloud chauffeur called Gobby drifts in and steals a scene. The tempo is brisk, the storytelling is clean, the jokes are plentiful, and the tone is generosity on stilts. The fireworks are the demons on the page but the real monsters are familiar to many readers. Racism haunts domestic space as habit and background and as shock. The right has found fresh ways to be noisy. Sexism lingers in old scripts that never quite go away. The book’s response is the one many of us admired in Joseph’s earlier work. Laugh first. See clearly. Refuse the sermon and keep the truth close to the surface.
The tradition under the story is a vivid wind up. The timing has the snap that readers of Skank remember. There is an anti respectability note in the way a scene punctures politeness and reveals power in a single panel. Punching down never feels like an option. The corner shop mischief of The Beano and The Dandy is audible in the page turns. Pompous figures topple. Elastic smackdowns arrive on the beat. Punchlines bloom as you flip the page. British children’s comics developed a sense that the smartest joke is the one everyone recognises in their bones. Joseph keeps that inheritance alive. He preserves the anarchy and opens the door wider. Gatekeeping falls away. The room gets bigger. That spirit is exactly what 3:AM championed when it cheered the unruly and the inclusive together.
Abbigayle Bircham’s art completes the spell. Her line is elastic and readable and confident. Faces act with a theatre school range that delights in embarrassment and bravado and the quiet look that follows a loud scene. Bodies sell the gag before a balloon arrives. Action is kinetic and clearly mapped so a reader always knows who hit what and where a blow landed. Colour pops and never clutters. Panel geometry does real mood work. Domestic scenes keep a straight and steady grid. The magic arrives and the angles tilt and fracture. Lettering becomes a chorus. Sound effects work like percussion. Captions heckle from the wings with the right degree of cheek. A first pass through the story gives pace and delight. A slower pass reveals how carefully the rhythm is built. The book looks after new readers while rewarding anyone who cares about how visual storytelling works.
Joseph’s biography gives the book an expansive ground. He is a South London writer and editor who built platforms when none were offered. He created Skank in the nineties and gave Black and Asian voices a place to swagger and a place to joke and a place to refuse tidy frames. He carried the energy into Scotland Yardie. He wrote columns for broadsheets and the style press. He taught in classrooms where comics became engines for literacy and confidence. He now serves as UK Comics Laureate for 2023 to 2025 and is the first person of colour to hold that role. A national brief to support libraries and young readers flows into the book’s shape and into its tone. If the new novel feels like a culture wide invitation that is because Joseph has been building a guest list since the days of photocopied zines and small press stalls.
My Dad Fights Demons is that rare young adult book that behaves like a riot and also like a clinic. Short arcs land with precision and make sense for a lesson plan or a book club meeting. Beats are crisp. Layouts are clean. A reader who claims not to read can find momentum in a single sitting and keep turning. Adults experience their own run of aftershocks because the punchlines keep a second rhythm that speaks to care and absence and the fatigue of doing too much too young. Librarians can shelve the book without hesitation. Parents recognise the ache under the gag and continue laughing and find room for a conversation. The laughter clears space for boundaries and care and found family and everyday survival with dignity. The book reads as art and as literature and as a brilliant time.There is something else in play that enriches the experience. The book is powered by a long conversation inside British radical humour and within radical comic literature and art. It sits beside old champions of mischief in children’s weeklies and keeps their generosity alive. It also speaks to older satirical muscles that run through the islands. A reader can hear a trace of Swift’s cool fury that prefers a sharp image to a loud lecture. Sterne’s playful voice that refuses heavy moralising is present in the way captions tease and reframe. Fielding’s social itch appears in the relish for town and street and the awkward dance of class. The pictures carry longer echoes. Hogarth’s crowded frames and elastic bodies taught British culture to see vice as ridiculous and power as silly. Gillray sharpened the caricature into an instrument that could wound and amuse in a single drawing. Cruikshank extended that language across generations. Joseph and Bircham update that shared toolbox for a multi racial modern Britain. They keep it friendly to a classroom, and they keep the old sting.
The book belongs inside the broad and lively line of radical left art and comic literature that refuses to flatter authority. It shares the DIY nerve of zines and small press, where scarcity and ingenuity produce new voices and new formats. It remembers the energy of outfits like Attack! Books and the appetite for difficult jokes that come from the ground up. It has the class grit that Pat Mills and the 2000 AD crew gave to future shock stories that stood in for present rage. It can sit on a shelf near the moments when Alan Moore pushed spectacle into the service of critique and insisted that dramatic power works best when you stay close to social truth. Joseph’s Skank era stands inside that line as a point where Black British voices took centre stage and used comedy as a tool for truth telling and community building. My Dad Fights Demons continues the project with a broader audience and the same purpose. The book treats comics as a literacy engine and as a social commons. It does the work with charm and without scolding.
Anti racism in the book is not an ideology. It is a practice. Rye is never presented as a token and never presented as a problem to be solved. Rye is a person with agency and bite and tenderness. The cast around Rye is mixed and specific and never reduced to easy shorthand. Racism appears as weather. Sometimes it is loud. Often it hums in the background and shapes choices. The response on the page is to widen the room and keep the jokes coming and keep the care visible. Sexism loses its power through exposure. Blustering masculinity looks foolish. Care and competence belong to whoever shows up and does the work, so a father who can throw a punch in another realm still needs to learn how to listen in the kitchen. Stereotypes are tempted onto the stage edge and then laughed off it. Respectability politics finds no podium. The story feels brave because it is relaxed about its politics. It normalises rather than lectures, and that is why readers across ages can recognise themselves without flinching.
Bircham’s pages make that politics live in the body of the reader. Faces carry emotion across comedy and sadness. The choreography of a fight reads in an instant. A panel that squares up for a conversation gives the eye a place to rest, and a panel that bursts its borders during a spell gives the eye a jolt that works in harmony with the balloon. Colour keeps the action legible and gives scenes distinct climates. The lettering is clear and easy to follow. The sound effects are placed where your eye naturally goes, so the action reads smoothly and the jokes land on time.
Captions work as guideposts. They add context, mark time shifts, and steer tone so scene changes are easy to follow. Younger readers can track the plot from dialogue and action alone, while experienced readers will notice how caption placement, panel breaks, and inset frames set the pacing and emphasis. The team keeps faith with both.
Joseph’s language continues to be a pleasure. He stacks quick exchanges that bounce like ping pong, he lets different registers collide and spark, and he uses bleeped swearing as a gag rather than a wagging finger. A throwaway vegan riff in the middle of a monster punch-up feels like the sort of line you overhear on a real street where danger and humour mix without asking permission. The comedy never talks down. It also never ignores what hurts. When Rye finds that adult responsibility is unavoidable, when money is tight, when tension fills a room that used to be safe, the jokes do not erase those realities. They create room to see them and to breathe. That balance is difficult to teach and difficult to maintain across a whole book. Joseph and Bircham make it look easy through craft and patience.
The bigger context clarifies why the work feels timely. British humour at its healthiest is anti reverential. It needles hierarchy and punctures bluster and invites the crowd to sing along. Eighteenth century pamphlets made a culture of common readers and common jokes. Music hall created a civic space where the clever line could travel through a city overnight. Punch cartoons trained a wide public to look for pictures that expose pomposity. Television absurdism kept a national taste for silly intelligence alive. Underground comix and the photocopied zines of the nineties held the door open for people outside the official channels. The thread running through these forms is a commitment to keep the laugh public and to keep the target above the crowd. My Dad Fights Demons stands inside that civic tradition with confidence. The present moment is full of toxic nationalism and glib culture war. Racism mutates and sexism persists. The book answers with jouissance that presents the damning evidence. It trusts readers with truth and hands them form and colour and momentum.
Readers who want a wider map of recent work in a kindred mood can look across the shelves of the past few years and find good company. Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson’s Justice Warriors turns dystopia into raucous anti authoritarian comedy that skewers policing and inequality while delivering set pieces that chase each other across the page. The Nib’s anthology Be Gay, Do Comics gathers memoir and history and satire into an exuberant proof that laughter can carry complex politics with grace and speed. Tom Gauld’s Revenge of the Librarians uses wry one page cartoons to tilt at the seriousness of literary life while quietly taking the side of readers and workers. Scarlett and Sophie Rickard’s adaptations of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and No Surrender bring socialist and suffragette histories to the present with clarity and wit and a love of crowd scenes where ideas and jokes mingle. Kate Beaton’s Ducks finds humour inside a hard labour memoir and makes room for solidarity while telling a precise personal story. Chip Zdarsky’s Public Domain takes creator rights and corporate culture and pulls laughter from contract meetings and family meals, which is a neat trick and an instructive one. These books work in many different registers, and they share a faith that left energy and comic timing can live together without fuss. Joseph’s new book belongs in that company.
Class is present in the fabric of the story and never sits apart as message. Money is not an abstract theme. Money appears as everyday limits: a cramped flat, buses that do not come when you need them, a mobile close to running out of battery or data, and small treats that trigger second thoughts because they mean going without something else later. Work shows up as shift and as hustle and as a home task that no one sees. The humour does not float above these facts. The humour happens inside them. Young readers who live in similar rooms feel recognised. Adult readers who have been there or are there now feel the same. The book makes a simple case for solidarity by refusing to flatten difference and by keeping the jokes available to everyone who steps into the scene.
Education appears in the book’s form and in its use. Teachers can lift a scene and teach panel logic. Librarians can run a lunchtime group and trace how a caption changes the tone of a page. Parents can read a chapter with a child and point to moments where characters try and fail and try again without losing face. The short arcs work for lesson length. The clean art supports readers who are still learning to track action. The story arrives with enough hooks for extension work in history, media literacy, and drama. A culture that keeps worrying about whether teenagers read receives a calm and cheerful answer from books like this. Teenagers do read when they are invited with respect, when the images are clear, and when the speech sounds like their own.
It is worth returning to the work’s attention to care. Rye learns how to receive and refuse at the same time. Mr Mantrikz learns that bravado is not the same as presence. Mum learns to name what she needs. A villain who looks certain of himself learns that certainty does not help when people refuse the script. These lessons are light on the page and they carry weight after the laugh. Care is political in a household where time is short and money is tight. Care is also ordinary. The book shows this with a generous patience that makes the last pages feel earned.
Readers who cherish language will notice the craft in small places. The title alone tells you that Joseph understands how children speak and how they imagine the adults around them. A caption that pretends to be a documentary voice then slips a joke into the corner of a balloon shows the same judgement. Jokes repeat in new keys until they turn into motifs. Sound effects combine words and pictures into a beat that matches the reader’s breath. Small cliffhangers close chapters with a rise rather than a crash. These choices add up to a reading experience that feels simple and turns out to be carefully built.
The wider political climate often treats humour as a luxury or avoidance. But the book knows humour is a method that prepares the ground for thought and for solidarity. A laugh is not a detour from seriousness. A laugh is a way of seeing. The long tradition of British satire supports that claim and the modern tradition of radical comics confirms it. My Dad Fights Demons belongs in that family. It respects its readers. It trusts them with the hard parts. It gives them pace and colour and character so they can keep moving.
It helps that the creative team is committed to a public life for the work. Joseph’s laureateship builds partnerships with schools and libraries and festivals. Bircham’s pages are a pleasure to share in a school hall because the expressions carry to the back and the page turns behave like cues. A world of young readers who meet this book in a lesson or a club can carry that experience into independent reading. Adults who come to the book because they loved Skank or Scotland Yardie can find a new place to stand alongside younger readers. That shared space is precious for a culture that wants to keep conversation across generations alive.
My Dad Fights Demons is anarchic and humane at the same time. The book sits inside a radical tradition that runs through centuries and it offers an easy hand to teenagers who have been told they do not read and cannot think seriously and to adults who have forgotten how much a comic can hold. The art and the prose fit together with rare precision. The jokes serve as an engine. The art serves as a chassis. The politics sits beside them with a grin because the vehicle knows its route and keeps its promise. Readers step off with a laugh and a thought and a sense that the room is larger than it was when they began. That is a good definition of cultural work. This book does it with style, and it does it with care. Buy it. It's brilliant.