© Tony Husband & Paul Husband
Not the sort of headline you’d usually expect to read on a Blog primarily concerned with cartooning and illustration.
However this is a true story, told through the medium he knows best, by Private Eye cartoonist Tony Husband in collaboration with his photographer son, Paul Husband.
‘From a Dark Place: How a Family Coped with Drug Addiction’ relates how Tony and his family coped with their son Paul’s drug addiction. This isn’t his first foray into this sort of territory: in 2014 he published a slim graphic novel, Take Care, Son: The Story of My Dad and His Dementia, about his elderly father’s battle with the condition.
That book was extremely well received and proved to be so helpful that doctors recommended it to the families of dementia patients. This spurred Tony to address another painful issue: his son’s spiralling addiction, the distress that caused, and his eventual recovery.
He hopes this book will prove equally successful at helping others. “I wanted to keep it simple because people respond to simplicity, I think,” Tony says. “There was a lot of misery in our lives, but I didn’t want to go overboard. I just wanted it to resonate.”
You can read more about it here in Nick Duerden’s Independent article.
© Tony Husband & Paul Husband
Tony will be talking about ‘From a Dark Place‘ at the upcoming Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival on Friday 21st April. Further details available on the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival website.
‘From a Dark Place: How a Family Coped with Drug Addiction’, by Tony Husband and Paul Husband, is published by Robinson, priced £8.99
Thanks to Glenn Marshall for drawing the Blog’s attention to this story.