Supported by The Space and Unlimited as part of Coventry City of Culture, this online project includes new, hand-drawn artwork with interactive digital elements, plus behind-the-scenes insights about how the project was created. While some of the content is challenging for some readers and viewers, the unique and very personal perspective ensures a gripping pace throughout, surfacing many issues often overlooked in other treatments of this difficult subject matter. It is a lifelong project exploring body image and the sometimes harrowing experiences of disability hate crime, though it also contains humour and is ultimately optimistic.

Muscle Memory: A Survivor’s Story is the second volume of Davison’s autobiography and a follow-up to the acclaimed first volume, The Spiral Cage, telling the artist’s very personal story. He is currently working on the second instalment.Muscle Memory in Motion is a new hard-hitting project recording the life of Coventry-based graphic novelist and artist, Al Davison. His best-known work is a graphic novel called the Spiral Cage, an autobiographical account of growing up with the spinal condition that has left him dependent on a wheelchair. “I want to show people what I’m capable of as someone who’s disabled and to just celebrate it.” I always say it’s something I was born to do – I didn’t chose to be an artist. Being born with a disability is not a bad thing – without it I wouldn’t be the person I am today. He said: “The illness is not something given to you to punish you in any way but it’s to make you stronger. His remarkable passion to draw began at the tender age of two after being given crayons and he started drawing comic strips before he could even speak.Īt 18, he did some illustrating for a martial arts magazine and over the past 30 years has worked on titles for DC Comics, creators of Superman.Īl owns book shop Astral Gypsy, in the Canal Basin, with his wife, Maggie, aged 58, where he has been teaching kids the art of comic strips for the past five years. He had 21 operations by the time he was eight.

The self-taught artist, of Humber Avenue, Stoke, Coventry, spent two years in an isolation unit shortly after he was born to avoid the risk of infection. The 48-year-old was approached by writer and friend Tony Lee at an arts show who offered him the job to work on the next 12 issues, but has been sworn to secrecy about what the future books will entail.īut it hasn’t been easy for him. GRAPHIC artist Al Davison who was told he wouldn’t survive a severe illness has been chosen to illustrate a new series of Doctor Who comic books.Īl, who was born with spina bifida, has already illustrated and co-wrote a two-part comic called Silver Scream which will be published in America.

The Spiral Cage by Al Davison