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At the risk of politicizing one of the few days when politics are supposedly left aside to commemorate the sacrifice made my US servicemen and women (that’s Memorial Day, to all of you reading this from outside the US bubble), the inclusion of Freedom’s Watch in today’s extract from my recent AIPAC comic is a stark reminder of where the bellicose foreign policy agendas that cost so many lives often take root. Be sure to check out the links below for more information on Freedom’s Watch nefarious agenda (as if having the name “Freedom” in a political group’s title didn’t set off enough alarm bells) and its (thankfully) abortive efforts to provoke the US into a military intervention in Iran.
Panel 1: For more background on WINEP, go here (a little out of date, but still relevant) and here for more about the Brookings Institute
Panel 2: This quote taken from a NYTimes article. Bizarrely enough, one of Saban’s greatest ever cash cows was his ownership of the rights and royalties to the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, which he recently bought back from Disney. The licensed products and promotional value of the MMPR is estimated at $5bn.
Panel 5: More on Freedom’s Watch. For coverage of the story from the NYTimes, click here.
For more info on the Conference of Presidents, click here. To read the whole AIPAC comic, visit the Religion Dispatches website.
Big thanks to Manos Symeonakis for completing the Greek translation of the Honduran Coup: A graphic history. I’ll be adding the full greek translation to the Honduras page soon, but for the time being, you’ll have to head over to his blog to read it. The comic will also be serialised in the Greek paper Epohi Weekly – I’ll post a link when it’s up.
That brings the total number of languages the comic is now available in to 5 (Danish, English, Greek, Japanese, Spanish), with French (and possibly Italian and Portuguese en route).
My comic gets the group crit treatment for the first time in Kiev, Ukraine
One massive advantage for Olga and I as we’ve put together this comic on human trafficking has been the support of NGOs and student groups in the Ukraine. Knowing that you’ve been able to incorporate feedback from sources on the ground is critical not only to the credibility of a project, but also to dispelling any doubts that creep in about putting the world to rights from behind the cosseted safety of my drawing board, here in sunny California. The same was true of the Honduran comic, which included eyewitness reporting and drew on various different sources in Tegucigalpa. To give you a great example of this sort of collaboration, a few weeks ago, Olga presented the first draft of the story (3p) you see above to a group of students, professors and NGO workers in Kiev. They then workshopped the piece, bringing up concerns over the wording (always tricky given the tightrope between remaining faithful to a translation and not seeming too stilted), visual references (my original dumpster wasn’t right) and how effectively they thought it communicated the victim’s story. The second draft goes back to them next week, so fingers crossed they’ll be happy with the revisions.
I’ve steered away from commenting on news headlines of late to focus on what I’ve been working on, but one article about the recent furore around the ever-encroaching oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico caught my eye and is worth a mention. No, it’s not this priceless quote from BP CEO Tony Hayward:
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”
More from the Huffington Post here, or the Guardian’s interview with Hayward here.
Current estimates put the total amount of oil leaked at 400,000 gallons (1.5m litres) – not quite up there with the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill at 40.9m litres, but with the potential to rival it, given the vast area the BP spill looks set to cover. Another thing the two spills have in common is the response from the company executives. Here’s Mark Boudreaux, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, responding to claims that 18 years after the disaster, there are still 26,600 gallons of oil clogging up Prince William Sound:
“Based on our initial review of the report, there is nothing newsworthy or significant in the report that has not already been addressed. The existence of some small amounts of residual oil in Prince William Sound on about two-tenths of 1% of the shore of the sound is not a surprise, is not disputed and was fully anticipated.”
I’m not even going to go into the fact that Obama himself has weighed in on the “ridiculous spectacle” of oil executive finger pointing to chastise the companies’ refusal to accept any of the blame and pay for the cleanup, despite BP’s profits last year of $4.4 billion – an increase of 70 per cent on the same period in 2008.
No, what I’m interested in is BP’s elaborate attempts to cover up the magnitude of the spill from the media. Their measures include hiring local teams to ally with the coastguards and prevent journalists from getting access to the affected coastal areas (see left), as well as vetoing the taking or dissemination of aerial photography that would show the extent of the damage.
One man’s solution? DIY Aerial photography with nothing more than a makeshift rig, a balloon, and a cheap camera. Thanks to the Mediashift/Knight Projects Idea Lab for this excellent article. Visit grassrootsmapping.org for more info, and to get involved. Here’s the man behind the scheme (Jeffrey Warren)’s flickr page for more images.
As promised, here’s the first page of my latest project on human trafficking in Eastern Europe. All of the oral testimonies were collected and translated from the Ukrainian by my collaborator Olga Trusova, who’s spent the year visiting NGOs and talking to those who have experienced the horrors of modern-day slavery first hand. I’ve been experimenting with spot colours to give the art more depth and substance – what do you think about the tone? Got an idea for a better one? Suggestions and comments welcome. I’m trying to tracking down a ‘No trespassing sign in Ukrainian, so that explains the empty white box in the last tier, in case you were wondering. The AIPAC comic will continue to run next week. More news below the fold, so scroll down.
Adding the spot tone using a Cintiq screen/tablet
Congratulations to the determined, dedicated, bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, incredibly talented elite from the Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2010 who got our 192p graphic novel finally off to the printer yesterday. After a weekend full of post-production work on Illustrator and Photoshop, Monday night saw the handful of diehards switch seamlessly to Indesign to layout the final print-ready pdf, incorporating text tweak and colour edits along the way. This is only the third year of the Stanford GN project, but the progress the class has made is clearly visible from the jump in the production values, artwork and storytelling. Great job guys!
Now that Pika Don (“flash boom” in Japanese – the word used to described the atomic bomb blasts)’s finally finished, the next deadline is for the human trafficking comic I’m putting together with Fulbright Fellow, Olga Trusova. Olga’s been out in the Ukraine visiting NGOs and collecting victims’ testimonies for me to then turn into graphic narratives to give those that have been exploited a real voice. Too often even the most well-intentioned literature on human trafficking features the same visual motifs of girls in short skirts with pixelated faces walking down dimly-lit alleyways – despite the fact that sex trafficking is only one part of what is an enormous global industry. (Sweatshops, forced labour, piracy and fruit/vegetable picking are just some of the other categories). I’ll post some extracts on Friday to give you an idea.
An experimental vertical panel from my latest comic, which was published in full over at Religion Dispatches earlier this week. Please take the time to digg it by clicking here to get it to the top of the “politics” charts. Scroll down for news.
My comic on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is now headlining the newly-relaunched Religion Dispatches website. Above is the third extract of the piece. Click here to read it from the beginning. Sources/substantiating evidence below. New visitors: welcome! More comics are free to read by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page. Be sure to add the Archcomix RSS Feed to never miss an update, or become a fan on facebook here. Click here to support this site by ordering a hard copy of an issue of Archcomix.
Also, please click here to Digg the link to the RD article, or RT/Fwd. Thanks!
panel 7: for a full list of its offices, click here.
panel 8.1: for more information on the differences, click here.
panel 8.2: see below for the 3 page comic, “Lunch on K Street”, on the lobbying process in DC, that first ran in DC’s own Bash magazine a few years ago.
[GALLERY=25]
panel 9: paraphrased from an actual lobbying firm’s website.
panel 10: For more info, click here and here
Amidst the craziness of last week, I forgot to write up my part in an innovative new educational exercise created by social workers in Missouri. On Friday afternoon, Bay Area community leaders and organizers gathered at the Garden House Hotel in Palo Alto to be given an alias, as well as a background history. We were then ushered into one of the conference rooms to meet other members of our “family”: in my case, I was Pablo Perez, a 23-year old who had abruptly become head of the family when my divorced Dad was thrown in jail, leaving me to care for my two young teen sisters and their baby sister. The rules were as follows: we had to survive for 4 weeks (15mins of real-time each) below the poverty line, negotiating the kafka-esque labyrinth of social services, state benefits and pawn shops while ensuring that all household members were fed and the utilites weren’t shut off. The perimeter of the conference room was arranged with tables representing the different organizations we needed to visit: employment agency, bank, pawnshop, supermarket, utility company, daycare, police station – and to add an extra headache-inducing element, we could only move from table to table by surrendering a ‘transport pass’, which we had to buy when we ran out. This was to reflect the proportion of benefits that end up wasted on expensive local transport when people try to make their way out homeless shelters for real.
Here’s a video of the same poverty simulation being run in Pittsburgh to give you more of a sense of what it felt like to participate:
Needless to say, what started out as an interesting interactive exercise turned into a stressful, exhausting nightmare as we were deliberately kept waiting, hamstrung by misfiled paperwork and long queues everywhere we went. Some particular highlights included being robbed of a transport pass by none other than local council member Greg Scharff, or of $20 by a homeless outreach specialist. I might add that both were in character at the time, but the irony wasn’t lost on me. Here’s a full write-up of the afternoon by the local Palo Alto Daily, including a description of the above incidents:
Dan Archer, a social issues cartoonist from Mountain View, stood befuddled in the middle of the room after his character was robbed of his cash on the way to the grocery. It was the same money he had spent so long obtaining in the previous week that he was late picking up his child at day care.
All in all, it was an excellent way to raise awareness of a vital issue that applies to communities nationwide, far more powerful and resonating than a lecture or article, and further proof that interactivity is a key trigger for engaging with an audience on what some might deem “dry” topics. For more information, visit visit Step Up Silicon Valley’s website at www.catholiccharitiesscc.org/stepupsv/ or the Downtown Streets Team’s website at www.streetsteam.com.
Last but not least, here’s the full video of comics journalist Joe Sacco‘s acceptance speech of his highly deserved Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Journalism. Interesting to see the stigma against the term “graphic novel” in his closing comments, as opposed to “comic book”, which he prefers. Surely it’s a formal question of length (comic books being serialised 28pp saddle stiched), while a graphic novels are self-contained, 80pp+ works? As ever, your comments are welcome below.
Friday, May 8th 1970 marked the 40th anniversary of the Hardhat Riots, the subject of my upcoming graphic novel. Read all about it on the Hardhats page, together with some new photo evidence from the day that recently surfaced. Also, I’ve created an official press release for the Honduran Coup comic on the Honduras page – the link is so please RT it and share it around!
