The Underground in Comics

The Underground already behaves like a comic. A journey is divided into frames: street, escalator, platform, carriage, tunnel, arrival. Doors crop the view. Windows turn neighbouring passengers into close-ups. A map reduces the city to coloured lines and decisive stops. Even before an artist draws a panel, Tube travel offers sequence, repetition, sudden cuts and unseen space between one moment and the next.

Two very different works show what comics can do with that structure. Asia Alfasi’s The non-savvy non-commuter, commissioned for the Underground itself in 2006, watches real passengers and asks how people read one another in public. The comics adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, scripted by Mike Carey and drawn by Glenn Fabry, turns the idea of a world beneath London into fantasy. One stays close to everyday travel; the other opens a door into London Below. Together they explain why sequential art suits the Tube so well.

A journey already divided into panels

Comics create movement from still images. The reader crosses the blank space between panels and supplies what happened there. Underground travel asks for a similar act. A train disappears into darkness and reappears elsewhere. The passenger knows that distance has been crossed, but most of the city between stations remains invisible.

That gap invites both observation and invention. Inside a carriage, the scene is intensely specific: patterned seats, vertical poles, advertisements, tired faces, a bag held between shoes. Outside the window, there may be little except reflected light. The ordinary interior and the unknowable tunnel sit beside each other like adjacent frames. A comic artist can preserve the social precision of the first and use the second as an opening.

The Tube map adds another graphic system. It is not a literal picture of the city, but a diagram that makes relationships readable. Comics also depend on selective simplification. A line can stand for a tunnel, a repeated colour for a route, and a compact image for an entire environment. Both forms ask the reader to accept that clarity may come from abstraction rather than from photographic likeness.

Asia Alfasi: watching the carriage watch back

Art on the Underground describes Asia Alfasi’s The non-savvy non-commuter as a semi-autobiographical story told through comic-strip sequences among the tunnels of the Underground. It ran from December 2006 to April 2007 as part of the Thin Cities series and was associated with Piccadilly Circus. The official project page says the work focuses on the Tube as a place where hundreds of nationalities and personalities mix at close quarters.

That premise is small enough to recognise and large enough to matter. Public transport puts strangers together without requiring them to speak. Passengers build quick stories from clothes, posture, expression and behaviour; those stories can be perceptive, comic, defensive or wrong. Alfasi’s two young Muslim women discuss the faces around them and the different meanings people attach to personal expression. The work makes looking itself part of the subject.

The commission also reverses the normal direction of attention. Advertising usually addresses passengers from the station wall. Alfasi’s comic invited passengers to consider how they address one another through glances, assumptions and distance. The viewer was not outside the scene. Anyone reading it while travelling was already performing the same kind of observation as its characters.

Art on the Underground notes Alfasi’s use of a naïve Manga style and her ironic sense of separation from fellow passengers. “Naïve” here describes an intentional visual directness, not a lack of thought. The accessible sequence carries a complex question: how can a crowded carriage feel socially distant, and how do identity and expectation shape that distance?

Public art that moves with its readers

The setting changes the meaning of the comic. On a gallery wall, a reader chooses to stop. On the Underground, the work meets people during an existing journey. Time may be limited to the wait for a train or the interval between arrivals. Panels reward that fragmentary attention because they can be read in stages while still forming a sequence.

Art on the Underground describes its wider purpose as commissioning work that changes how people experience the city and opens debate about public space. Alfasi’s project fits that mission unusually closely. Its form is public and portable; its content is the shared space in front of it. The station is simultaneously venue, subject and evidence.

The project is no longer available to visit, according to its official page. That absence matters. Underground art is often temporary, while the journeys it interprets continue. Documentation becomes a second life for the work, but it cannot reproduce the exact encounter: reading a story about fellow passengers while fellow passengers gather around you.

Neverwhere: the network as another city

If Alfasi’s comic concentrates on the visible carriage, Neverwhere asks what might exist beyond it. DC’s collected edition presents a nine-issue adaptation of Gaiman’s novel, scripted by Mike Carey with art by Glenn Fabry. Its ordinary Londoner is drawn into a struggle involving London Below, an underworld kingdom hidden beneath the familiar city.

The official description makes the contrast explicit: the protagonist begins in ordinary London and is pulled into a strange realm after helping an enigmatic young woman. The first issue’s description calls London Below an alternate world beneath the modern city, populated by people who have fallen through the cracks of life above. The phrase is fantastical, but its mechanism is rooted in urban experience. Great cities contain places and lives that remain invisible to many of their inhabitants.

The Underground gives that metaphor physical credibility. Passengers know there are locked doors, service passages, ventilation shafts, sidings and disused spaces beyond the public route. London Transport Museum’s Hidden London programme offers access to some of those real environments: abandoned platforms, lift shafts, corridors and tunnels normally closed to passengers. None of this proves a magical city, of course. It explains why the imaginative leap feels available. The infrastructure already exceeds what the everyday traveller can see.

Names become doors

Neverwhere is especially alert to the suggestive power of London names. A station name on a map can sound like a person, a command, a building or a fragment of folklore. That ambiguity lets language become architecture. In fantasy, a familiar label may open into a literal place or character; in history, the same label may preserve a vanished road, estate, stream or trade.

This is where the comic’s imagined London Below meets the work of a station-history site. The methods differ, but both begin with the suspicion that names contain more than commuters usually notice. The factual task is to recover documentary layers without turning legend into evidence. The fictional task is free to make those layers walk, argue and fight.

Comics are particularly effective at holding both readings on one page. A recognisable station sign can anchor a panel while an impossible space opens beside it. The reader does not need a smooth cinematic transformation. A gutter between frames can perform the crossing instantly: London Above on one side, London Below on the other.

The visible and the hidden

Alfasi and Neverwhere use “hidden” in different ways. Alfasi draws attention to social information that is already visible but poorly understood. Expressions, clothing and silence are in plain sight; the difficulty lies in interpretation. Neverwhere builds an entire realm from physical and social invisibility. Its underworld is concealed, yet it reflects who and what the city overlooks.

The distinction prevents the two works from being reduced to the same idea. One is a site-specific public commission shaped by the experience of two young Muslim women. The other is a commercial fantasy adaptation with named writers and artists, collected after a nine-part series. Their audiences, scales and purposes differ. What connects them is the Underground as a machine for encounters and thresholds.

In both, the reader must examine transitions. Who sits beside whom? What changes when a door opens? Which London is acknowledged by the map, and which remains outside it? The Tube supplies a disciplined visual environment—tiles, lines, signs, repeated cars—against which small differences become powerful.

Why comics fit the Underground

Comics can slow a journey down without stopping it. A film determines the pace of each shot. A comic allows the eye to linger, jump back, compare faces or move ahead. That freedom resembles the mental life of commuting, when attention drifts between a book, another passenger, the route diagram and the station outside.

They also make repetition expressive. Similar panels can show a train arriving again and again, while one altered detail changes the mood. A grid can echo the regularity of tiles or carriage windows. A full-page image can suddenly expand a confined tunnel into an impossible city. The form moves easily between routine and revelation.

Most of all, comics respect the productive blank. The reader knows that something happens between panels, just as the passenger knows that a city exists above the tunnel. Neither space is empty. It is where memory, inference and imagination work.

Reading below the map

Writing about comics also requires care with the artwork itself. A discussion can identify creators, formats, dates, settings and themes without reproducing protected panels. That is why the illustration accompanying this article is a new composition. It borrows the general grammar of sequential art—borders, halftone texture, repeated figures and visual transitions—while avoiding existing characters, pages and logos. The distinction matters because criticism should point readers towards the credited work rather than quietly substituting for it.

Credit is part of the history. The official records name Alfasi as the artist of her Underground commission. DC credits Carey for the adaptation script and Fabry for the art, with further contributors identified on the issue record. Comics are often collaborative objects: writing, drawing, colour and lettering shape the reading experience together. A transport setting can feel anonymous, but the page is made through specific creative labour.

The Underground in comics is more than a backdrop for chase scenes or gothic shadows. It can be a social observatory, as in Alfasi’s work, where public space reveals the stories people project onto strangers. It can be an engine of fantasy, as in Neverwhere, where the literal network supports an unseen alternative London.

These uses are strongest when they remain specific. The real commission has a date, artist, station context and stated concern with identity. The fantasy adaptation has credited creators, nine issues and a collected edition. Keeping those facts visible does not diminish interpretation; it gives interpretation a firm platform.

The next time a train enters a tunnel, imagine the journey as a sequence. The lit carriage is one frame. The dark window is a gutter. The next platform is another frame, similar but changed. Somewhere between them sits the enduring attraction of the Underground in comics: a public system precise enough to recognise, and incomplete enough to dream through.

Notes and sources

1. Art on the Underground, “The non-savvy non-commuter” — official project record for Asia Alfasi’s 2006–07 comic-strip commission, its Piccadilly Circus context and themes of identity and observation.
2. Art on the Underground, “About Us” — the programme’s role in commissioning contemporary art that shapes public space.
3. Art on the Underground, 2026 programme announcement — current statement of the programme’s history, public-space purpose and reach.
4. DC, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere graphic novel — official credits, collected nine-issue format and London Below synopsis.
5. DC, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere #1 — first-issue credits, publication details and description of the hidden city.
6. London Transport Museum, Hidden London tours — official descriptions of disused platforms, lift shafts, corridors and tunnels normally inaccessible to passengers.