I’m delighted to say that the International Organization for Migration, one of the world’s largest NGOs dealing with trafficking, is going to print 10,000 copies of my upcoming Borderland comic to distribute in and around Eastern Europe as part of an initiative to reach at-risk youth. This week, the whole “Pick of the crop” comic (featuring the panels above) – about a worker’s exposure to harmful pesticides while being forced to pick strawberries – is being handed out in Kyiv at an event for Ukranian youth: it’s on Saturday at Khreschatyk, 11 am till 3 pm, if you happen to be in the area.
On a different note, I recently came across these amazing online lectures from the RSA, which are a hybrid form of audio lecture and accompanying visual presentation, done with speeded-up time-lapse photography. The lecture itself is interesting in its own right – a defense of cartooning you might argue, given the focus on mastery (room for improvement), satisfaction (doing some good in the world) and being your own boss as the most important qualities of a job. See what you think and leave a comment!
[For some reason, you may need to hit the spacebar to start the video, instead of clicking on it]
Above is a sample from my current project on human trafficking, called Borderland. The name comes from the translation of “Ukraine“. The comic, which will be around 32-36pages long, is made up of several different real-life stories recorded during interviews with victims at NGOs around the Ukraine over the past year. The finished pages will be B/W with a single spot colour over the top: search for “Roma” or “Trafficking” in the Apture search bar at the top of the page and you’ll find a complete page from a different story to see what I mean.
We’ll (my colleague and Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova and I) then bundle those together with information and anti-trafficking resources (helplines, websites, NGO contact details), translate them into Ukrainian and Russian and disseminate them around Eastern Europe. I’ll be creating a dedicated page called ‘Trafficking” over the next few weeks that will feature more information on the project, as well as a gallery of pages, so be sure to come back and check it out.