LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR 2025! Catriona Q. Andrew has been a freelance illustrator for three decades, as well as a speech and language therapist, art educator, and has also created a course of studies for helping people with aphasia through art, as well. (Full bio on her site) Her newest comic, Silver River, is available exclusively at the LDComics Online Comics Fair throughout the month of July, and in print sometime thereafter.
Silver River is ostensibly a family memoir, however it is delivered in so dense and intense a manner as too add up to much more. The book starts with a twenty (!) panel capsule history of the city of Dundee and the jute industry, followed up on the second page with a map which is a clever way of anchoring the three main characters geographically to get things started. They are Cat Andrew and her father Colin, who moved to Camden Town, and her father’s Aunt Agnes in North London, who so much of the book revolves around
Andrew is not going for a straightforward chronological recounting of her family album in Silver River. The third page flashes back to Glasgow in 1894 to the earliest generation covered in the book, as Aunt Agnes’s mother and uncle (Annie and Tommy, respectively) are placed in the poorhouse. Annie stays in Glasgow while her brother Tommy is relegated to the aforementioned Dundee. Just two panels sets the scene for a comic spanning over 130 years!
Aunt Agnes gets the spotlight starting on the fourth page, as her eccentric life in the 1970s as witnessed by the author and her sister is recounted. We are introduced to Andrew’s father and his parents, Agnes’s sister Jessie and her husband John, in a brilliant full-page image of all of them rattling off stories of the aforementioned mother Annie.
Finally, not content with focusing on the author’s memories of Aunt Agnes alone, Andrew’s finds Agnes’s memoir of her life from birth focusing a lot on Annie’s and her life in Dundee. Continuing to skip back and forth through her Aunt’s lifetime, a complex and tragic character study is developed.
We haven’t even mentioned the drop dead gorgeous fully-painted watercolour art that Andrew so masterfully employs throughout Silver River. This is on a level more from the children’s book world, than your usual comic book fare. Just to make this quite complex story easier to follow, Andrew gives each time period a different colour scheme: 1894 in shades of violet; Aunt Agnes’s memoir of life in Dundee in sepia tone; and, the author’s memories of Aunt Agnes in full colour. A superior effort by Andrew that really must be seen to be appreciated.
It’s a strength of these online fairs to give ambitious creators with high quality projects that may not be graphic novel-length or necessarily commercially viable, direct distribution to a more receptive audience. Catriona Q. Andrew’s Silver River stands tall amongst the all-around talented creators featured in the LDComics Online Comics Fair, hopefully there will be more to come from Andrew and family.
Catriona Q. Andrew (W/A) • LDComics Online Comics Fair, £5.00
Review by Gary Usher
The LDComics Online Comics Fair runs across the month of July. Read all our coverage of the comics on offer here at BF.
