Zara Slattery is an illustrator, comic artist and tutor based in Brighton.
During her years as a student Slattery developed a love of performance, theatre and circus, drawing inspiration from David Hughes, Ralph Steadman and David Hockney. These influences shaped her work both on stage and in print, focussing on character design, story development and live action to create experimental performance and inventive narrative forms.
When Slattery joined a writing group with a view to write illustrated YA fiction, she was introduced to graphic novels, notably American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and the work of Audrey Niffenegger. Astonished by their power to tell profound and complex stories in an accessible way, Slattery then revisited her own stories, reworking them to create her first comic.
Slattery’s ongoing work in progress – Coma Comic– is a graphic memoir that tracks her mental and physical journey through an induced coma following a serious illness in 2013. She also produced a rhyming comic entitled Don’t Call Me A Tomboy (2018) in collaboration with writer Kirsten Wild, which looks at and challenges old fashioned ideas about gender specific behaviour and ability.