This comic book is part of Adama’s desire for his story to be told: so that ‘people will listen to [my story] and learn a bit from it’ and ‘know how the life goes on’. It is an attempt to portray ‘how the life goes on’ for young West African men who sought a better future in Italy by taking the increasingly dangerous and criminalised route across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, known in Gambia as ‘the back way’.

Between 2014 and 2018, more than 70,000 unaccompanied minors arrived in Italy by sea, about 90% of whom were boys between fifteen and seventeen years old. The young men this comic focuses on are just some of those who made this journey and survived. Many do not: according to the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM)Missing Migrants Project, since 2014, more than 20,000 people have lost their lives trying to cross this maritime route, the most dangerous in the world. The real number is likely to be far higher. Indeed, the hardening of European border controls has resulted only in an increase in irregular migration and border violence.

This comic book is based on the lived experiences of eight young men (five Nigerians and three Gambians) who, like Adama, came to Italy to seek asylum as minors (under eighteen) in the hope of a better future. Their experiences emerged through ethnographic research conducted by Sarah Walker (a British researcher) as part of her PhD (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) and a follow-on postdoctoral research project (funded by the Leverhulme Trust, UK).