For those of you who aren’t familiar with the back story to the coup in Honduras that happened a year ago today, here’s a short and sweet video synopsis for you. The music is “Innocence” by “Working for a Nuclear Free City” off their “Businessmen and Ghosts” album.
Please digg/tweet/FB/fwd the link on and here’s to the ongoing struggle for justice that rages on in the face of continued repression.
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).
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 http://bit.ly/hondcomicrelease so please RT it and share it around!
Knight fellowship update, Trafficking, Karla Lara and Honduras in Berkeley
May 6th, 2010 | by adminA bit more information on Monday’s big news about my Knight Fellowship: it’s essentially a year-long stint at Stanford university during which fellows are expected to develop a project thesis on a specific area of innovation within their journalistic field. Not to mention having full access to the gold mine of Stanford’s classes and resources, fellow Knights and students/faculty. My pitch, as you’ll see from the impressive line-up of project summaries, will involve the creation of a rich content digital comic, taking full advantage of the flexibility of the web’s infinite canvas along with its capacity to stream video, animation and include interactive elements. Once the fellowship begins in September I’ll start chronicling the development of the project as I tie its disparate elements together.
Speaking of innovation, one project that’s been slowly percolating over the last several months has been my work with Fulbright fellow Olga Trusova on raising awareness about human trafficking through digital/interactive comics, in conjunction with the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Olga’s been in the field since the end of last year, visiting NGOs in her native Ukraine and interviewing staff and victims who have dealt with the reality of trafficking first-hand. She then sends me her detailed notes which I translate into comics. We recently premiered the first comic at an NGO meeting in Kiev and are currently revising the artwork to incorporate the feedback, so I’ll post some finish panels sometime next week.

Karla Lara performing at Sunrise Cafe, SFO
Last week I made it down to the Sunrise Cafe in the mission to hear Honduran artist, performer and activist Karla Lara sing and report back on the situation in Honduras. It was a great chance to meet members of the resistance (local to SFO and Tegucigalpa), as well as promote the comic, which went down really well. I’ll be attending the Sunday May 16th meeting at the Berekely Fellowship of Unitarians to sell more comics and talk to delegates fresh from Honduras, so save the date if you’re in the bay area – more details to come. If this is the first you’ve heard of the Honduran comic, then click here to find out more.
Recientemente he visto más visitas desde algunos países hispanohablantes, en lo que imagino tiene que ver con mi cómic sobre el golpe de estado hondureño. Si este es el caso, quiere ir aquí
para la versión española. Y no se olvida ir a mi pagina de facebook, en donde puedes registrar como seguidor de Archcomix para poder ponerse al día con todo mis cómics nuevos.
For the rest of you, see above for the latest hardhats panels. Sneak preview of the now almost finished AIPAC comic coming up tomorrow.
The Danish paper Dagbladet Arbejderen (Daily Worker) is running a feature on the last three pages of my Honduran comic today, click here for this just-about-intelligible-enough translation courtesy of Google translate.
Latin American Solidarity meeting in Seattle, Honduran comic in the Danish Press and more Japanese pages up
April 8th, 2010 | by adminFor those of you in the Seattle, Washington area tomorrow, be sure to check out the NW Latin American Solidarity Organization conference, where the first copies of the Honduran Comic will be making their technicolour debuts. The rest of you will be pleased to know that copies have left the printers so should be with you in roughly two weeks. Another first is in order on Tuesday when the comic will appear both in print and online for Denmark’s The Daily Worker. Staying on the translated tip, more pages of the japanese translation can now be found at the bottom of the Honduras page.
To print at last and “the most revolutionary magazine in the world”
April 1st, 2010 | by admin
After what felt like an age of translating, tweaking, laying out, re-tweaking and all the rest in photoshop and indesign, I’m proud to announce that the first print run of the Honduran comic is underway as I type this. It should be ready in a few weeks time, so expect your copies around April 20th (US readers) and end of the month (rest of the world). I am now more aware than ever of the inevitable delays in going to print, but having seen one of the vast (almost full US letter size – see left with a stunt hand to give you a sense of proportion) copies in all its technicolour glory, I can tell you it’s well worth the wait. Thanks to Angela Vidergar for correcting my spanish translation for the second part. Now all I need are more orders to ensure I can push up the size of future print runs.
It’s always gratifying to see that it’s not just us self-publishers who are treading the precarious profit trail – apparently as of June, readers of the times in the UK will pay a princely £1 for the privilege of access to www.thetimes.co.uk for a day, or £2 for the working week. Here’s the full skinny, courtesy of that trusted bastion of fine journalism, The Sun. Surely it can’t mean a wholesale lockout/access denied scenario for the more parsimonious amongst us – it’ll probably be a bare bones version with none of the rich content that’s up there at the moment. Question is, will that prompt a split in news content between raw twitter-esque headlines and live feeds, embedded content and video/audio sources? Answers in the comments section. Speaking of which, the illustrious winner of the last post’s quiz on the most corrupt country in the world is…Somalia, closely followed by Afghanistan. The verdant wonderland that is New Zealand sneaked the least corrupt prize.
Perhaps the self-proclaimed “most revolutionary magazine in the world” holds some of the answers to the above question. Launched by Andy Warhol 40 years ago, Interview magazine’s ipad version seems remarkably unrevolutionary from the below video. In fact, the only stand out moments from the slideshow/larger iphone feel of the preview is the embedded live video. Until creators start to rethink the way they create content instead of simply publish it, all this digital innovation will seem like whistle-and-bells add-ons to the existing mode of information delivery. Decide for yourselves below:
Honduran coup comic in spanish and japanese, a Palestinian cartoon and Google’s living stories
March 29th, 2010 | by adminI’ve finally come good on my promise to translate the rest of the Honduran coup comic into spanish, which the polyglots amongst you can read here. Feel free to send me any corrections, suggestions or translation errors that may have slipped past my iron-clad grammatical grasp. I’ve also added a Honduran comic thread to the discussion forum on the Archcomix page, so click here and get posting on it. The other big news is that Ryuhei Okada of the Caracas Cafe blog has offered to translate the Honduran coup comic and Right to Return into japanese, so big thanks to him.
Lately I’ve been looking into how animators around the world have been combining narratives with a journalistic message to give a different perspective on news issues and show us what life is like in typically inaccessible parts of the world. One striking example is Fatenah (left) from Palestine, telling the story of a young girl of the same name who’s grown up in the Gaza strip.
Speaking of bringing stories to life, I also recently came across Google’s living stories, part of an online experiment that houses all the contextual information to a specific news story in the same template, similar to a google wave document in a lot of ways. Granted, it still suffers from the same scroll down beyond the break ad infinitum of standard online news sources, but it’s certainly a start. Let me know what you think in the comments section. More cartoons and sequential journalism later on tomorrow.









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