Come and Get Me, a Piece
Come and Get Me, the graphic novel
The cover. A hand-drawn cover in flat, clean-lined comic style. On a gravel carpark, a woman with dark hair in a bun, glasses, a long dark coat and a white cane stands arm in arm with an older man in a flat cap, grey beard and wax jacket. His black Labrador guide dog sits at his side in its harness, facing the café door, ready to lead them in.
Behind them a big disc is split down the middle: the left half is cool and blue with perfectly ruled motorway markings, the right half is rapeseed yellow and hand-painted. On the left a sleek grey car is drawn entirely with a ruler; on the right an ivy-covered brick café is drawn freehand, with a plain door that has no sign, a lamp-lit window, a planter of petunias, and a sign on a post turned edge-on so only its thin side shows. A dotted route line runs ruler-straight in from the left edge, then goes wobbly across the gravel and stops at her feet.
At the top, in a small black box: Blind Ant Comics. Then the title, COME AND GET ME, and beneath it: a cosy speculative accessibility story. At the bottom: Forty-one miles, flawless. Thirty metres of gravel, unsolved. Story by Charlotte Joanne · Drawn by Sloppy Jo. In the bottom corner is Sloppy Jo's signature, followed by a small cluster of dots.
The picture
The description above came first. Here is the cover it describes.
Read it
Download Come and Get Me, the graphic novel (PDF, 16 MB)
It is an ordinary PDF, and it is accessible the way any PDF can be. Open it in whatever you normally use:
- Every page has a heading, and the whole book has a title and a language, so a screen reader can move page by page.
- Every caption and every line of speech is real text, labelled with who is speaking: "Glasses: The rapeseed is in flower."
- Every one of the eighty pictures, the cover and every panel, has its own description.
- Seventeen pages and a cover, in two parts: the car park, and the robot in the boot.
The pictures, as Charlotte Joanne puts it, are reasonable adjustments for sighted readers. On one page towards the end, the dog has no legs.