Benjamin Dix: ‘I’m the custodian of some of the darkest stories in the world’

Benjamin Dix says the hardest thing about his job is explaining to other people what he does. “At a dinner party, for example, it’s, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I make comic books.’ ‘What about?’ And suddenly I’m the one sitting at the table telling you about all the tragedies of the world. I find that quite draining. Sometimes I’d like to be saying I wrote Calvin and Hobbes,” he laughs.

The content of Dix’s comic books could not be any further removed from the lighthearted cartoon strip about a boy and his stuffed tiger: subjects tackled so far include the abuse of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, crack addicts in Guinea-Bissau, the Somali diaspora and, most recently, the experiences of a Nigerian woman, Abike (not her real name), who was trafficked into the UK.

The idea of using the comic-strip format to highlight human rights and social issues first came to Dix when he was working for the UN as a communications manager in northern Sri Lanka during the civil war. While sheltering in a bunker he read Maus by Art Spiegelman and Palestine by Joe Sacco, two acclaimed graphic novels that deal with the Holocaust and the Gaza Strip respectively.

In 2008 Dix found himself in the last UN convoy to be evacuated from Sri Lanka, an event that left him with “massive abandonment guilt issues”.

“You deal with your privileged space in this world,” he says. “It’s the white guys who get in the armoured trucks and drive out wearing bullet-proof vests. You’ve been there four years and made friends and suddenly you’re saying, ‘Good luck, guys’ and off you go. I lost 30-odd friends in a matter of months and that changes your perspective on life and your sense of who you are in this world.”

Returning to London with post-traumatic stress disorder, Dix realised the one thing he could do for the people he’d left behind was to tell their stories. His background was in photojournalism, but he believed a comic book could reach a wider audience than an article or newspaper article or documentary. He began interviewing survivors of the civil war and asked artist Lindsay Pollock, a friend of a friend, to illustrate the script. The result of this collaboration was The Vanni, a graphic novel that follows the fortunes of one fictionalised Tamil family, through war, displacement and the search for asylum.

It was meant to be a one-off, a means of exorcising his feelings of guilt, but the positive reaction to The Vanni encouraged Dix to go looking for similar stories. He has since set up a non-profit company, PositiveNegatives, and published 10 graphic novels, with six more in the pipeline. Some of the comics are commissioned by NGOs or charities looking for new ways to lobby governments or to reach new audiences. Others, such as Abike’s story, he follows up simply because be believes they need to be told.

His approach is meticulous: while researching The Vanni, Dix began working on a PhD in visual anthropology, allowing him to explore issues around representation (“removing the white British male voice from the story”) and the ethics of interviewing people with trauma and turning their testimonies into an artform. “I’m the custodian of some of the darkest stories in the world now and I want to be responsible with these testimonies,” he says.

Dix carries out all of the field research and interviews himself, spending at least a month living with the subjects in their homes, getting to know them, taking photographs, recording their stories. After a few weeks of immersion he’ll draft a script and show or read it to the individual so they can edit it. He then hands the script over to an illustrator, where possible of the same gender, ethnicity or cultural background as the subject. For his next project, which will track the journey of Syrian migrants from a refugee camp to Scandinavia, he has commissioned two Syrian artists who have recently been granted asylum in Copenhagen.

Abike’s case was unusual in that Dix never met her in person. He came across her story through a chance meeting with someone who worked for Eaves’ Poppy Project, which supports trafficked women. Abike had already given her testimony to lawyers at the charity and, reluctant to ask her to relive the trauma, they used this report as the basis for the comic, giving her the final approval.

The artist who worked on Abike’s story, Gabi Froden, has a background in illustrating children’s books, but Dix was impressed by the sensitivity with which she sketched Abike’s abuse. “We didn’t need to see Abike naked or actually depict a rape scene, and the way Gabi illustrated it leaves everything to the imagination without it becoming voyeuristic,” he says. The opening scene of Abike’s story – and of all of the comics – has a photographic background, a device Dix uses to reinforce the idea that it’s a story set in the real world and based on real events.

What was Abike’s reaction to seeing her life depicted in this way? “She liked what we’d done with it, she liked that it was anonymised, she’s glad it’s out there, but she’s still traumatised and she now just wants to be left alone,” says Dix.

The anonymity of the cartoon format is one of the main attractions for Dix and his subjects. That, and its accessibility: the visual narrative transcends age, gender, cultural differences and literacy levels.

“People just get it,” says Dix. “You can see the nuances of the story, the pain these people went through, the expressions on their faces.” It’s also a very flexible format: “So Abike’s story, for example, it can look really high-tech and we can animate it as we have done for the Guardian online, or it can be printed out in schools in Nigeria, to teach young kids about the dangers of trafficking, and they won’t need high-speed internet, or a projector.”

Some of the books are being piloted in schools and Dix would eventually like to see them being used to teach topics such as conflict, migration and sexual violence on the curriculum. “This is a very human-led way of telling a story. In this digital, Photoshopped age, there is something very organic about the fabric of the comic, the simplicity of pen on paper.”

To find out more visit positivenegatives.org and gabifroden.com. To see a film version of our graphic short story go to theguardian.com/global-development, where you will also be able to find details of a GuardianWitness project inviting budding graphic artists to send us their work. To donate to the Poppy Project: eavesforwomen.org.uk/about-eaves/our-projects/the-poppy-project