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As I’m currently working on my Knight project these days, I thought I’d point you towards some of my earlier work you may not have seen – a piece that ran in Bash Magazine a few years back. Go here to read the whole comic, hidden as it is under the US Politics tab at the top of the page. Remember to RT/share it around it if you liked it, or -even better!- head to the Archcomix store to order your hard copy. ($5 plus shipping/P&P). More news after the jump.
As I’m currently working on my Knight project these days, I thought I’d point you towards some of my earlier work you may not have seen – a piece that ran in Bash Magazine a few years back. Go here to read the whole comic, hidden as it is under the US Politics tab at the top of the page. Remember to RT/share it around it if you liked it, or -even better!- head to the Archcomix store to order your hard copy. ($5 plus shipping/P&P).
Our Kickstarter time limit ran out 30 mins ago, by which time we had successfully sprinted past our funding goal finish line! Thanks to everyone who contributed and supported us, we literally could not have made this happen without you. Stay tuned for more updates and ways to stay involved in the project.
If you missed out but still want to order your copy, fear not! You can order through the Archcomix store here.
NB the image is a celebratory screenshot, there is no embedded video link!
We did it! A predictable sprint to the finish line, but we made it (see above for our triumphant screenshot – the video is NOT a live link!) and you supportive pledgers will be receiving your comics, posters, badges, pdfs, special feature packages and original artwork (depending on what you chipped in, of course) soon. A massive thank you to everyone who pledged, tweeted, shouted from the rooftops, mentioned it to their mates, wrote about it, you name it – your efforts buoys us independent creators who can once again prove to the world that it is possible to use art to effect social change.
For those of you who want a copy but have only just heard about the project, there are still plenty of ways to pre-order your copy – I’m just adding Borderland to my “store” page now, plus there should be a link to Borderland Comic’s paypal site too: $10 for your own full-colour copy.
One final chance to help us reach our Kickstarter funding goal – click here to pre-order your comic through Kickstarter and help us cover our print and distribution costs.
For more info, visit the official Borderland Comics website or here for a preview of some of the stories that are in the comic.
Any help in chipping in, retweeting, forwarding or shouting the news of the Kickstarter deadline is appreciated – deadline is 1045 EST tomorrow morning!
Thanks in advance and to those who have already helped us to get where we are (now at 90%!!!),
Dan and Olga
and help us support the IOM in the fight against modern day slavery. Last day today!!!! We need to raise $8000 or all of the money raised will be returned! Check out the preview below. More Archcomix news below the fold.
Thanks to all of those who came to see Olga and I speak at Stanford’s d.school on Thursday evening. About 40 people showed up to hear about how the project came together and discuss the challenges and obstacles creatives face in using their work to instigate social change. Journalist Cynthia Haven did a great piece about the event for Stanford, which you can read here. You’ll also notice that our fundraising tally is up – we’re at 76%, with less than 24 hours to go! Please RT and share the link to our Kickstarter page on digg, facebook, wherever – if you didn’t already know, Kickstarter will return all funds collected so far if we don’t make it to our $8000 goal by this time tomorrow.
Last week was also my first full week of classes at Stanford, which was simultaneously challenging, exhausting, exhilarating and fascinating. Running around to find my classrooms/lecture halls on the first day was surreal, but a week later I consider myself a veteran, though I’m still wrestling with some of the e-classroom/syllabi that we’re expected to attend or sign up for online. I consider it slightly ironic that my data visualization assignment took me almost as long to post to the course wiki as it did to complete. Teething troubles aside, I’ve really enjoyed throwing myself into new projects and classes that are clearly outside of my comfort zone: Human-Computer Interaction; Data Visualization; Beginner’s German; and Multimedia Production are my main courses this semester. Needless to say, good ol’ introduction to cognitive neuroscience didn’t even get a look in past week one – too many lectures to get to as it is! The project’s also coming along well, especially with the news that the Knight News Challenge is definitely on this year, so expect more about that in the next few weeks as I put my application together.
Welcome to Archcomix – if you’re new here, take a look around by clicking on the tabs above. Some have drop-down menus for individual stories under that theme. See what I’m working on at the moment as part of my John S.Knight Fellowship here and please support my Borderland comic through Kickstarter here – less than a week left to raise our money or it all gets returned. And we wouldn’t want that. Also, check out the new comics journalism page I’ve set up.
Is half of today’s choice quote, courtesy of Herb Simon: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. At least the first part is true from my first two days at Stanford, which have seen me speaking deutsch (alle ist guht), finding our natural blindspots in a neuroscience lecture (where all the retinal nerves feed back to the brain), designing an app for people waiting in line (or queuing as we say in the old world) and hearing about Edward Tufte in a data visualization lecture. Am thinking I’ve got to jettison the neuroscience in order to find some time to juggle new classes and work on this project. Speaking of which, find out about the very exciting developments with that on the project page.
In other news, the Playboy feature on the Stanford Graphic Novel is out, and the SF Chronicle have already been in touch to get Adam and my studied responses to appearing in its hallowed pages. Also gearing up for the big Borderland talk at Stanford’s d.School on Thursday at 5pm: Comics and Social Change. More on Borderland here and here – we’re almost at 50% of our total! We have it on good authority that most of the fund raising activity happens either in the opening or closing days of a pledge campaign, so please help us out if you haven’t already. We’ve had loads of RSVPs so are looking forward to a big crowd of socially-motivated graphic artists, writers and comicsphiles amongst others.
Image taken from Cagle.com
At last I’ve come up long enough for air to be able to post the notes from my interview with Daryl Cagle earlier on in the week, as promised. Daryl is MSNBC.com’s chief editorial cartoonist – click here for a vast catalogue of editorial cartoons about anything and everything topical, which is aggregated and licensed out to hundreds of different papers and websites around the world.
While to many, what Daryl and I do (single panel editorial cartoons vs. multiple-page journalistic comics) seem to be very closely related, I was surprised at how differently we approach our respective forms. It reminded me of friends and family members who interchange “animation, cartoon, comic, illustration and graphic novel writing” when asking me how my work’s going. The most obvious example of this was Daryl’s confession that:
“I don’t think our role is to inform – we hit people with our opinion…I don’t consider it my role to teach”.
Which was very interesting for me, as I consider the educational value of my work to be one of its most important aspects: how can we combine artistic and journalistic practices to create a more accessible, didactic -not to mention engaging- experience for the apathetic/inundated reader? Daryl went on to say that an editorial cartoonist’s role was “to make graphics that stand apart” from the rest of the text on the op ed page. But isn’t that selling the power of art form short? One of the fiercest contrasts with the UK in the US political forum is the vitriol that’s so liberally (no pun intended) showered on each and every polemic by the ever-burgeoning number of celebrity pundits. Combine that with the incessant torrent of the 24-hour news cycle and the average newsreader ends up being force-fed opinion without being given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a topic. Not that the art doesn’t look fantastic and stir a great deal of lively debate – I remember my editorial cartooning days from Uni and was proud to be a Times Young Cartoonist runner-up some years back for a cartoon that featured Blair and Brown on X-factor reality show. But much like X-factor, a lot of the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen feel more like graphic gimmicks – a sort of knowing wink that at best raises a chuckle and at worst reads like a expository diagram delivered by a smug stand-up comedian convinced of his own mirthsome genius. Matt Bors, who treads the line between multi-panel comics and single panel editorial cartoons (a la Lloyd Dangle, Tom Tomorrow et al) skewers the worst offenders over at his blog if you want examples.
Still, a lot of the work Daryl’s doing as an ambassador for the form (not to mention the US State Dept) is heartening, and the global prominence of the form is something that he thinks will sustain well into the future, even if its practitioners have to be flexible to make it work financially: Daryl admitted that roughly only 75 editorial cartoonists make a living, and that “all income is from print clients”. How? By producing work with the highest resale value: cartoons on global issues, that don’t take up a lot of space, with few words. Is that really what “art for the masses” should be about?
