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Wow, where did January go? I was sure it was here a second ago. It feels like the second semester only just started, and yet here’s Feb knocking on the door and I’m wondering where all my carefully chronicled Knight exploits have gone. So here’s my attempt to sum up what’s happened over the last few weeks at Stanford:
Hmm I’m sure I’ve missed a few things off the list, but that’ll do for now. Oh, and the small matter of figuring out my life post-Knight…
Hit ‘previous’ for the full lowdown on Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech, and the first part of this comic. Scroll down to read about what I’ve got up to over the last month at Stanford.
UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has reached a preliminary decision about the proposed Newcorp buyout of BSkyB I mentioned a few weeks ago. Click here for the full skinny. His verdict? He’s going to refer to it Ofcom, the British regulator (huzzah!). Oh, but wait. He would, if he wasn’t going to take the middle ground and give Newscorp time to make amends first. We’ll see. Click here for the Beeb’s coverage, and here for the full government statement. A brief synopsis of the media consolidation pros and cons here.
From President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, 50 years ago last week:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
A fitting match with my comic on the US/UK military base currently occupying Diego Garcia, first conceived off only a few years before Eisenhower’s term of office came to an end. Click here to read the full comic.
Former British PM Tony Blair took the stand yesterday to offer an addendum to the comments from his previous appearance at the Iraq inquiry, explaining that:
“At the conclusion of the last hearing, you asked me whether I had any regrets. I took that as a question about the decision to go to war, and I answered that I took responsibility. That was taken as my meaning that I had no regrets about the loss of life and that was never my meaning or my intention. I wanted to make it clear that, of course, I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life, whether from our own Armed Forces, those of other nations, the civilians who helped people in Iraq or the Iraqis themselves.”
Yet another signup to the “let history be the judge” camp it seems – not least the part of history that saw him planning regime change with Dubya back in 2001 (see 1:13 in the video). But it wasn’t the heckling that best summed up the public’s reaction to Tone, fresh from his book tour – it was the fact that he arrived at the inquiry 2 hours early to avoid the crowds of protestors who set up outside the premises. Watch Sky’s coverage of his testimony here.
Borderland, the comic I did with Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova last year, just got a great review from The Comics Journal, together with a review of the latest issue of World War 3 Illustrated, which is carrying an extract from What a Whopper – talk about a double whammy:
Borderland is easily the most focused and best-looking work of his career…The stories are all different (and horrifying) enough so as not to start to drone; rather they succeed in grabbing the reader’s attention and raising awareness.
Above is a continued sequence from Hardhats, my graphic novel in progress, set in May 1970 at the height of anti-Vietnam sentiment. Hit “previous” to read from the start of this little interlude. It being Martin Luther King day here in the US, celebrate it wherever you are in the world by listening to one of his speeches on Vietnam here: “the press generally won’t tell you these things, but God told me to tell you this morning…” RIP MLK.
I’m now only a page or two from finishing the first third of my graphic novel, Hardhats – which you can read more about here. The above panels are part of a flashback sequence as two of the main characters talk on their way to an anti Vietnam protest at the Federall Hall in downtown Manhattan. I’ll post some follow-up panels over the next few days. Please leave your comments! You can also checkout my latest sketchbook doodles and watercolours here.
Remember to scroll down – news and updates are just a scroll away, under the fold.
Sketchbook page from last night's Zittrain lecture
In the first of many blogging experiments, and to minimize the amount of time I spend at my computer this semester – not to mention to hone my cartooning skills – I’m going to post pages from my sketchbook from some of the lectures I attend this semester. Last night’s was part of the Liberation Technology series and featured Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain discussing the ethical pitfalls and perils of crowdsourced jobs – especially ones that seem innocuous at first but actually have nefarious goals. Such as what if the Iranian government (whose involvement would obviously be kept hidden) attempted to identify protestors at a rally by building an entertaining face-matching game, or companies luring “turkers” (from Amazon’s now notorious “mechanical turk” site) to provide bogus product reviews for points or minimal (3-5 cents) return.
We are all complicit when the promise of fake online points prompts gamers to overlook their ethical responsibility to society – check out this so-sinister-it’s-laughable true story of an anti-Health Reform Organization bribing facebook game players with points to send an email to their member of congress decrying the evils of Health Care reform. In a beautiful instance of technology spawning some great metaphorical neologisms, this process is called astroturfing – because it’s fake grass roots campaigning.
Find out more about Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, here.
Sketches of Condi during our Q&A
The Winter term kicked off this week, and already it feels like I’ve been back ages. In true Stanfordian fashion, yesterday’s highlights included: an introduction to multimedia reporting (hello Final Cut Express), catching up with the globe-trotting antics of the rest of the Knights, planning a group ski trip to Tahoe, reading Jeremy Scahill‘s scathing expose of Blackwater and the role of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then sitting down with ex-National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss her take on them. While thinking about how all this fits into my project, and working out which courses to shop. Just your average day back at school really.
Geri Migielicz’s class on Multimedia Storytelling is the definite course highlight of my year, as I’ve been wanting to tinker with video, audio and animation to complement my comics work for a while now. Naturally, a lot of the same compositional/framing devices for comics apply to (and are directly borrowed from) film, so that helps. I’ve been addicted to storytelling shows like this American Life and The Moth podcasts for years (ever since depending on them at White River for accompaniment during the hours spent inking at my drawing board in fact), so it was great to see Jessica Abel and Ira Glass’s Radio: An Illustrated Guide in the syllabus. In fact, just this afternoon a bunch of us are getting together to learn how to make a podcast, courtesy of KBOO Portland Radio Director Jenka Sondenberg – so be sure to come back next week to listen to that. Some of the examples we checked out were the NYTimes Year in Pictures and the media-rich 5 Years Later from USA Today, focusing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I snapped up my copy of Final Cut Express from the bookstore that afternoon, and have just installed it, though I hear it’s a beast on a par with Photoshop in the menubar/features stakes. We’ll see.
The chat with Condi Rice was another year-long highlight, though the mood in the lounge was a lot lighter than expected when I walked in – probably a strategic decision on Jim and Dawn’s part to mix up the holiday catch-up festivities with an indisputably controversial speaker. Predictably, Condi came across as furiously intelligent, quoting in-depth resolution numbers and bilateral treaties in many of her answers (though arguably few of us could confirm or deny their veracity), and the possessor of a honed rhetoric that was nimbler and more acrobatic than the psuedo-kung-fu hand gestures that accompanied them.
