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Welcome Home
Graphic novel about squatting, unrequited love and lost struggles, written with humor and driven by hope
A group of squatters occupy an empty flat in a condemned tower in London, aiming to unite their neighbors to resist the demolition. Weaving together confused memories, Welcome Home moves between the squat and our protagonist’s work in a care home.
The squatters aim to bring all the residents together to resist the tower’s demolition. But it’s not as easy as that. Rain is in love with her housemate Eva, who unfortunately happens to be her best friend’s girlfriend. She can’t stand Will and his try-hard activism, and is avoiding Yaz, who used to tease her at school and lives in the tower. Her life in the squat is repeatedly interrupted by her work in a care home where she has grown particularly close to Doris, a resident with dementia, who used to live in their flat. Through Doris’s stories we discover the history of the tower and another, older love triangle.
Shortlisted for the Myriad First Graphic Novel Prize, Welcome Home manages to deal with the heavy topics of urban regeneration, care homes, and dementia, while maintaining a light touch.
Bio: Welcome Home was written by sisters Clarrie and Blanche Pope, and is inspired by their experience in squatting and housing struggles, as well Blanche’s time spent working in care homes. They want to give readers insight into the class, race and gender politics involved in both through a humorous look at the way in which these issues affect the minutiae of people's lives.
A group of squatters occupy an empty flat in a condemned tower in London, aiming to unite their neighbors to resist the demolition. Weaving together confused memories, Welcome Home moves between the squat and our protagonist’s work in a care home.
The squatters aim to bring all the residents together to resist the tower’s demolition. But it’s not as easy as that. Rain is in love with her housemate Eva, who unfortunately happens to be her best friend’s girlfriend. She can’t stand Will and his try-hard activism, and is avoiding Yaz, who used to tease her at school and lives in the tower. Her life in the squat is repeatedly interrupted by her work in a care home where she has grown particularly close to Doris, a resident with dementia, who used to live in their flat. Through Doris’s stories we discover the history of the tower and another, older love triangle.
Shortlisted for the Myriad First Graphic Novel Prize, Welcome Home manages to deal with the heavy topics of urban regeneration, care homes, and dementia, while maintaining a light touch.
Bio: Welcome Home was written by sisters Clarrie and Blanche Pope, and is inspired by their experience in squatting and housing struggles, as well Blanche’s time spent working in care homes. They want to give readers insight into the class, race and gender politics involved in both through a humorous look at the way in which these issues affect the minutiae of people's lives.
312 pages, Paperback
Published April 22, 2022
40 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 25, 2022
As the hunger to build new homes in London intensifies, older communities in older housing are being pushed aside so new developments can be built. One particular tower block is already emptying out. This makes it a prime target for squatters Rain, Eva, Tomek, Will and Luca. They identify an empty flat, gain access, and make it a home. Optimistically, they have improbable plans on how to rally the community and save the tower block, but to many of the remaining flat-dwellers, the squatters are an additional trouble they don’t wish to deal with. A small core, however, accepts them, and a slow integration into the community takes place.
This could be a story about trying to save a tower block, but, like all good stories, it’s about the people that you meet along the way. Welcome Home is a reasonably thick original graphic novel, and so without characters you give a damn about it would be something of a struggle to get through. Thankfully, this isn’t a problem.
The story centres around Rain, an instantly likeable young woman who has got herself into something of a rut. She’s in love with the girlfriend of her house-mate but can’t see it for the folly that it is. She’s living in a squat in a building set for demolition, which is trading some aspects of freedom for a different set of problems. And she’s working in a care home where the staff are little more than an after-thought. She’s got a good heart, making a difference with the residents of the home, but seemingly stuck in a personal limbo.
It’s not just Rain that is well written here. There’s anarchistic Will, as misguided and hopeless as they come. There’s Doris, the confused but buoyant care home resident, and Julie, the indifferent and careless care home manager. Adam plays the theremin and has some sort of romantic past with Doris, and then there’s Yaz, someone Rain knew at school who Rain isn’t so sure she wants to know now. Against the backdrop of the gradual gentrification of the area, and the small injustices and triumphs they all go through, each of these characters and more are given the space to breathe. It feels like a community, and that you’re part of it too.
One of the most joyous touches comes from the casual sprinkling of new development brochures and care home adverts interspersed amongst the pages. The creators run amok with the pretentious word salads, creating a plethora of nonsense that would be a shoe in for Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. Equal fun is had with the garbled spoutings of council staff, too detached from the community’s situation to see beyond their own babble.
Given the set-up, the story is bittersweet. Amongst the skip-diving behind supermarkets for food, the squalid living conditions, the borderline neglect by the care home owners, and the disintegration of a community to make way for modern housing, there is hope and laughter and love. What we learn is that there are some things you just can’t change, but that doesn’t mean you have to stand still.
An excellent debut book full of heart and humour. If you enjoy a good story, you’ll enjoy this.
This could be a story about trying to save a tower block, but, like all good stories, it’s about the people that you meet along the way. Welcome Home is a reasonably thick original graphic novel, and so without characters you give a damn about it would be something of a struggle to get through. Thankfully, this isn’t a problem.
The story centres around Rain, an instantly likeable young woman who has got herself into something of a rut. She’s in love with the girlfriend of her house-mate but can’t see it for the folly that it is. She’s living in a squat in a building set for demolition, which is trading some aspects of freedom for a different set of problems. And she’s working in a care home where the staff are little more than an after-thought. She’s got a good heart, making a difference with the residents of the home, but seemingly stuck in a personal limbo.
It’s not just Rain that is well written here. There’s anarchistic Will, as misguided and hopeless as they come. There’s Doris, the confused but buoyant care home resident, and Julie, the indifferent and careless care home manager. Adam plays the theremin and has some sort of romantic past with Doris, and then there’s Yaz, someone Rain knew at school who Rain isn’t so sure she wants to know now. Against the backdrop of the gradual gentrification of the area, and the small injustices and triumphs they all go through, each of these characters and more are given the space to breathe. It feels like a community, and that you’re part of it too.
One of the most joyous touches comes from the casual sprinkling of new development brochures and care home adverts interspersed amongst the pages. The creators run amok with the pretentious word salads, creating a plethora of nonsense that would be a shoe in for Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. Equal fun is had with the garbled spoutings of council staff, too detached from the community’s situation to see beyond their own babble.
Given the set-up, the story is bittersweet. Amongst the skip-diving behind supermarkets for food, the squalid living conditions, the borderline neglect by the care home owners, and the disintegration of a community to make way for modern housing, there is hope and laughter and love. What we learn is that there are some things you just can’t change, but that doesn’t mean you have to stand still.
An excellent debut book full of heart and humour. If you enjoy a good story, you’ll enjoy this.
May 23, 2022
Comics are cheap and primal: easy to create, disseminate and understand. That’s why (after music) they’re the most subversive and effective form of revolutionary art. Just see straightforward polemical texts like The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, Speechless and Wildcat Anarchist Comics, Home, or subtler cartoon sagas masking a message in ostensible entertainment narratives like Brought to Light, The Stringer or Pogo.
Welcome Home sits in the latter category, with Clarrie & Blanche Pope using a contemporary soap opera cast to carry their observations about the way society is heading and the disturbing questions that path leaves unaddressed and unanswered. The sisters drew from and referenced personal experience whilst employing humour and pathos to hone their scalpel-like investigations: trusting to the familiarity of shared context to make their point.
Haven’t you wondered what and who occupied your space before you did? Don’t you dread the fading of your memories and loss of places that punctuated your time on earth? And who hasn’t had a mate or relative who was more Trouble than Worth?
Having been young, squatters and care home workers, the creators weave a rowdily rousing, frighteningly authentic yet engagingly upbeat yarn of activism riding piggyback on modern need and ingrained privation that begins when a disparate band of acquaintances and old friends break into an empty flat.
The place is in a condemned tower block, where tenant families wait powerlessly for rehoming and the building’s demolition. The squatters range from die-hard Believers in a cause to friends and lovers who can’t afford rent, united in a mission to rouse the entire block and organize resistance to the destruction of homes and a community that only needs a little financial care and attention.
Sadly, before the last page, romance, passion (so NOT the same thing), ambition, confusion and the distractions of everyday life will play hob with their good intentions and grand dreams…
The story is told primarily through the actions of Rain, a professional care worker who can’t make ends meet despite being worked to death with compulsory extra shifts at the Fairview home that was built as part of the original housing estate. Its post-privatisation owners (Who Care) and on-site manager Julie are positively Dickensian in their blindly self-indulgent hypocrisy, but at least by talking to residents like dementia-afflicted Dottie/Doris – whose vacant flat they now illicitly occupy – Rain gradually builds up a potent picture of the generational community the imminent demolition will finally end. Ultimately, the young/old bond will also allow the fraught and confused protagonist to sort out her own feelings and stop looking for love in all the wrong places…
This bleak yet beguiling monochrome study of urban dissolution, societal safety nets, relationship triangles, generational cultural continuity, dementia and the disempowerment of the old, young, different, nonconformist and poor is peppered with ferociously barbed faux ads drenched in the contemporary Thought Speak used by Local Councils, Cabinet Ministers, social engineers and gentrifying property companies who constantly find nonsensically bland and comforting ways to restate “you’re the wrong colour, too poor, and love the wrong sort to live here anymore”.
Welcome Home is an enticingly introspective, painfully universal saga to appeal to anyone who ever had a moment of monetary despair and emotional outrage at what we’ve allowed ourselves to become. It will not appeal at all to many of the societal predators listed at the end of the last paragraph, but they should be made to read to too. Or maybe hit with it: It’s a free country, after all, if you’re prepared to accept the consequences of your actions…
Welcome Home sits in the latter category, with Clarrie & Blanche Pope using a contemporary soap opera cast to carry their observations about the way society is heading and the disturbing questions that path leaves unaddressed and unanswered. The sisters drew from and referenced personal experience whilst employing humour and pathos to hone their scalpel-like investigations: trusting to the familiarity of shared context to make their point.
Haven’t you wondered what and who occupied your space before you did? Don’t you dread the fading of your memories and loss of places that punctuated your time on earth? And who hasn’t had a mate or relative who was more Trouble than Worth?
Having been young, squatters and care home workers, the creators weave a rowdily rousing, frighteningly authentic yet engagingly upbeat yarn of activism riding piggyback on modern need and ingrained privation that begins when a disparate band of acquaintances and old friends break into an empty flat.
The place is in a condemned tower block, where tenant families wait powerlessly for rehoming and the building’s demolition. The squatters range from die-hard Believers in a cause to friends and lovers who can’t afford rent, united in a mission to rouse the entire block and organize resistance to the destruction of homes and a community that only needs a little financial care and attention.
Sadly, before the last page, romance, passion (so NOT the same thing), ambition, confusion and the distractions of everyday life will play hob with their good intentions and grand dreams…
The story is told primarily through the actions of Rain, a professional care worker who can’t make ends meet despite being worked to death with compulsory extra shifts at the Fairview home that was built as part of the original housing estate. Its post-privatisation owners (Who Care) and on-site manager Julie are positively Dickensian in their blindly self-indulgent hypocrisy, but at least by talking to residents like dementia-afflicted Dottie/Doris – whose vacant flat they now illicitly occupy – Rain gradually builds up a potent picture of the generational community the imminent demolition will finally end. Ultimately, the young/old bond will also allow the fraught and confused protagonist to sort out her own feelings and stop looking for love in all the wrong places…
This bleak yet beguiling monochrome study of urban dissolution, societal safety nets, relationship triangles, generational cultural continuity, dementia and the disempowerment of the old, young, different, nonconformist and poor is peppered with ferociously barbed faux ads drenched in the contemporary Thought Speak used by Local Councils, Cabinet Ministers, social engineers and gentrifying property companies who constantly find nonsensically bland and comforting ways to restate “you’re the wrong colour, too poor, and love the wrong sort to live here anymore”.
Welcome Home is an enticingly introspective, painfully universal saga to appeal to anyone who ever had a moment of monetary despair and emotional outrage at what we’ve allowed ourselves to become. It will not appeal at all to many of the societal predators listed at the end of the last paragraph, but they should be made to read to too. Or maybe hit with it: It’s a free country, after all, if you’re prepared to accept the consequences of your actions…
April 28, 2022
I really, really enjoyed reading this book - it's one of those that I found hard to put down, finishing it within a couple of days. It's laugh-out-loud funny in parts, its pretty sobering in other.
It centres around a group of squatters. They're trying to do things differently, trying to *change things* - we see their good intentions, we also see where they fail to live up to their own ideals. It manages to be both light- and heavy- hearted at the same time. The commentry on the challenges of working in a care home - under paid, under recognised - felt particularly vivid and relevant.
Theres a quote at the front of the book about not taking yourself too seriously. This quote rings true throughout - it's a serious book, which doesn't take itself too seriously.
It centres around a group of squatters. They're trying to do things differently, trying to *change things* - we see their good intentions, we also see where they fail to live up to their own ideals. It manages to be both light- and heavy- hearted at the same time. The commentry on the challenges of working in a care home - under paid, under recognised - felt particularly vivid and relevant.
Theres a quote at the front of the book about not taking yourself too seriously. This quote rings true throughout - it's a serious book, which doesn't take itself too seriously.
February 18, 2026
Welcome home è un graphic novel sulla resistenza, quella contro il capitalismo e i poteri forti. Un palazzo di Londra, la torre - ma potrebbe essere in qualsiasi città europea - sta per essere abbattuto e i suoi inquilini cercano di renderla ancora più viva, prima dello sfratto e dell'ennesimo condominio nuovo con prezzi impossibili.
Questo romanzo grafico è molto denso, ci sono tante pagine e tanti dialoghi. Ci sono vite che si incrociano alle vicende burocratiche, relazioni che nascono e si evolvono. E ci sono tenerissime tavole ambientate in una RSA, che tanto ricordano Rughe di Paco Roca.
Una lettura molto piacevole, forse non la prima da cui partire se non si è abituati al mondo del fumetto, ma sicuramente molto interessante.
Questo romanzo grafico è molto denso, ci sono tante pagine e tanti dialoghi. Ci sono vite che si incrociano alle vicende burocratiche, relazioni che nascono e si evolvono. E ci sono tenerissime tavole ambientate in una RSA, che tanto ricordano Rughe di Paco Roca.
Una lettura molto piacevole, forse non la prima da cui partire se non si è abituati al mondo del fumetto, ma sicuramente molto interessante.
May 13, 2022
Absolutely brilliant! Thought I’d read one chapter before going to bed, then ended up reading the whole book in one go. Needlessly to say that I was very tired the next day in the office... Important topics around the possibilities for social change presented in a light hearted way. Good for any age group. The narrative engages in critical thought without being pedantic. The art has a distinctive bounciness too it which makes the drawings dynamic and playful, interesting but not childish. Can’t recommended it enough!
April 28, 2022
Such an enjoyable read, and beautifully illustrated too! A great reflection on the times we are living in, touching on issues like care homes and the realities of housing struggles, but very funny and touching with its witty writing. Highly recommend!
June 27, 2022
Communicated a lot of complex thoughts and ideas really effortlessly - and made me well up in the process!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews