A COMICS PIONEER
Toronto author Jewel Kats motivated young readers and inspired a groundbreaking Archie character. Legacy,
Toronto author Jewel Kats was determined to create the inspirational role models she couldn’t find as a kid.
The 37-year-old, whose real name was Michelle Meera Katyal, wrote picture books featuring princesses who had cerebral palsy or autism, or who used a wheelchair like Kats herself.
Her fearlessness led to the introduction of the first recurring Archie comic book heroine to have a disability: Harper Lodge.
Artist and writer Dan Parent created the character after Kats challenged him on the omission at the Toronto Comicon Fan Expo in 2013. “I remember how she asked me in a straightforward manner how come there weren’t any disabled characters in Archie,” Parent wrote in an email. “And I didn’t have a good answer!”
Kats helped Parent develop the character, who looks like the author.
Kats died on Jan. 7 after complications following surgery in October to repair a bowel obstruction.
Her mother, Renu Katyal, says her daughter grew up wanting to motivate children with disabilities to go after their dreams.
“She wanted to spread the message, over and over and over for the young kids: Do not give up,” says Renu, who quotes her daughter’s favourite saying: “Reach for the stars, even if you have to grab on to them differently.”
Kats was 9 when she was in a car accident that left her leg shattered. The North York native spent three months recovering in Sick Kids Hospital and suffered chronic pain throughout her life. She was reliant on her wheelchair to get around outside.
A graduate of Milliken Mills High School in Markham, Kats went on to the University of Toronto Mississauga. She enrolled in writing courses at George Brown College after her first marriage ended in divorce in 2008. Her mother offered to pay for the courses.
Her second husband, Alan Borgolotto, whom she married three years ago, says that as a teenager his wife yearned for a book with a main character who had a disability and was motivated to write by her inability to find such a book.
“She would say that she found books, but normally the principal character was someone able-bodied who made friends with a person who had a disability,” notes Borgolotto. “She wanted to see books where peo- ple with disabilities were empowered. Where they had dreams and goals and achieved them.”
The first manuscript she submitted to publishers — Cinderella’s Magical Wheelchair — was rejected dozens of times. One publisher called Kats and suggested that she write about ablebodied heroines, Borgolotto says. But the author persevered, and Reena’s Bollywood Dream: A Story About Sexual Abusewas accepted by a small publisher in Michigan two days after she submitted it.
The same publisher accepted the Cinderella story, which won a silver medal at the international Mom’s Choice Awards in 2013 in the inspirational/motivational category of children’s picture books.
Kats continued to write even as she struggled through pain that could only be managed by morphine, as well as periods of depression and a bout of anorexia.
Kats went back to Sick Kids as an adult to volunteer as a clown, and her middle sister, Meghan Dhingra, 35, remembers her as a jokester even when she was young.
As kids, the two would claim that they were the same age at the local community centre so they wouldn’t get separated into different age groups. “They would say, ‘But you’re sisters,’ ” recalls Dhingra. “But we’d stick to the lie. We were always doing silly things like that.”
Kats matched her loving, outsized personality — youngest sister Roopali calls her “a real character” — with a wardrobe of brightly coloured clothing, shoes and wigs, refusing to conform to a conservative dress code at events such as book signings.
“She wanted to buy clothes that she wanted to buy,” says her father, Brij. “She said she didn’t care what other people said.
“Anyone who came to know her, they all talk about Michee,” he says, using a family nickname. “They are all so sad. When she walks in the room, the party starts. That’s what she was.”