As I mentioned in this previous post, about a month ago I spent a week in the woods outside LA (near Palm Springs), 6000 feet up a mountain, teaching a course on graphic novel writing. The adult students were amazingly dedicated and came on leaps and bounds in their visual storytelling skills, as you can see from the above tiers by Claudia Bear. Click here to visit her new site and read the rest of her comic. More from the other students to come.
In other news: The first mini-review of Yiddishkeit, featuring the 55 page comic I did with Harvey Pekar, is up online here. I’ll post more about it in the Non-fiction page (click on the above tab to access it normally). Here’s the official book page at Abrams if you’re interested in reading about the other collaborators, amongst them the mighty Peter Kuper and Spain Rodriguez.
Comics journalism is in the headlines more than ever these days: check out these two articles, one from The Atlantic (with a list of must-read titles), the other, from Truthout by Adam Bessie, features myself, Ted Rall, Sarah Glidden, Matt Bors and of course Joe Sacco in a round-up of the form’s movers and shakers.
That’s right, click here for the full 1.5 hr audio of “The World in Frames” panel organized at Stanford last week. Featuring Andrea Lunsford (Professor of English), Adam Johnson (Assoc Professor in English and Creative Writing), Adam Rosenblatt (Ph.D. Candidate, Modern Thought and Literature, representing the Program in Human Rights) and, of course, myself (Comics Journalist, John S. Knight Journalism Fellow).
Joe goes into detail on his process, what tools he uses (nibs and paper types, the whole shebang), his influences, and why he chose comics as the medium for his journalism.
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.
At last, the comics are now back from the printers and I’m glad to say they look great. They are currently being stuffed into envelopes and will be with those of you who ordered them next week. If you haven’t ordered one, then click on the button on the right-hand sidebar and do so immediately.
Now that the Honduran comic is at last completed, I’m re-focusing on my graphic novel, Hardhats, about the 1970 Hardhat riots and the parallels between the anti-war movements then and now. Click on the ‘Hardhats‘ tab at the top of the page for more info and to read an extract, which I’ll be adding more panels to over the next few months. You’ll also be able to check out all the research that’s going into the book and offer your comments and suggestions on what should or shouldn’t go in.
Big news this week in journalistic circles was the announcement that the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning has gone to an animator, the first time in history that the prize has gone to someone whose work only appears online. The judges went on to say “[Fiore’s] biting wit, extensive research and ability to distill complex issues set a high standard for an emerging form of commentary. Let’s hope this leaves the door open for other like-minded visual distillers of complex issues – certainly comics journalist Joe Sacco winning the Ridenhour Prize for investigative reporting is a similar step in the right direction.
At last, a sign that innovation and creative use of multimedia in visual journalism is being rewarded -not to mention, taken seriously- by the industry. The winner, Mark Fiore, has loads of free animations available to view over at his website, so check them out. Question is, how different are Mark’s animations to single-panel/editorial gag cartoons? Is their purpose to inform or entertain? Certainly they’ve managed to stir up their fair share of controversy. With the advent of the ipad, you’d think this sort of content would be embraced with open arms by the tech companies, but news came this week that Apple have blocked Mark’s ipad app on the grounds that:
“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”
More on this story at the Columbia Journalism review. UPDATE: Looks like it won’t be long before Apple let Fiore’s app in after all, even though it took Steve Jobs himself to intervene.
Join the ongoing debate about the future of journalism in these technology-obsessed times, courtesy of authors Robert McChesney and John Nichols and their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. The authors argue for increased government subsidies (like in the Old World) to support the US media and encourage a free press to combat the growing spectre of coporate dominance of content providers, best exemplified by Comcast’s takeover bid for NBC. It’s currently being reviewed to see if it complies with anti-trust laws, though seeing as Comcast currently provides 24m homes with cable, 16m with internet and will suddenly be granted cable networks such as Telemundo, MSNBC and Bravo, TV shows such as Jay Leno’s, regional stations such as Washington’s WRC (Channel 4), and Universal movie studios, it’s clearly a step towards massive media consolidation. Not to mention posing a big threat to net neutrality. How do you feel about it? Leave a comment below.
In other news, the first ever Tea Party convention is currently taking place in Nashville, proving that the right can actually mobilise and protest with just as much (perhaps even more) vitriol than the left. For those outside the US bubble unfamiliar with the trend, it’s essentially a grass roots organization against what they perceive as Obama’s socialist agenda (forcing healthcare, tax hikes and increased state control on an unsuspecting populace). Personally, I think it’s great to see more people engaged in the political process, standing up for what they believe in. Unless, of course, they aren’t so sure why they have those beliefs in the first place – see this video of their march to the White House last year.
One reason, Dr David Runciman argues, that people can feel so passionately against measures that are designed to help them is that they have fallen for the narrative of a specific agenda, despite its lack of substantiating evidence. For more, read this article from the BBC on how interesting stories can speak to voters more than facts and figures, courtesy of Steve Bissette.
Yet further proof that we need to rethink the way news content and information is presented – comics journalism, anyone? Speaking of which, if you haven’t already, you need to check out legendary comics journalist Joe Sacco‘s latest graphic opus, Footnotes in Gaza – a devastating piece of comics journalism form on Israeli policy towards Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as an investigation of historical truth.
And last but not least comes the news of a corruption scandal at the heart of the world’s second largest arm manufacturer (the UK’s own BAE), and the £300m it has been forced to pay out in compensation. Check out the Guardian and the Serious Fraud Office’s combined efforts to bring the company to justice over the past 30 years here. Remember my Jan 28th post about Attorney General Goldsmith from the Chilcot Inquiry? Turns out he was once again silenced by Tony Blair, this time when it came to investigating BAE’s £43bn al-Yamamah fighter plane sales to Saudi Arabia. Which was on a par with the sale of a hi-tech military radar system to poverty-stricken Tanzania. Naturally, both cases were of the utmost concern to the respective parties’ national security.
At last the US has successfully brokered a deal between Zelaya and Micheletti. Hopefully this will also result in an investigation of the de facto regime’s litany of human rights abuses over the past four months, which are still continuing on the streets of Tegucigalpa. Articles about police ‘meowing’ and firing sonic blasts of pig noises at the Brazilian embassy in total impunity to keep the Zelaya party deprived of sleep sound both surreal and horrendous: here’s a great article by Joe Shansky at Pulsemedia.org on the worrying use of psychological weapons by police, both in the US and abroad.
Today’s comic is the first page of a new piece based on Diego Garcia, which many are labelling ‘the new Guantanamo’ for its role as one of the prime US Military bases for Iraq/Afghanistan, not to mention in interrogating ‘enemy combattants’. I’d entered it in the Observer Graphic Short Story Competition 2009, but perhaps as Joe Sacco was mysteriously taken off the judging panel in their final press release announcing the winners, it may have led to a bigger step away from any non-fictional entries. Who knows.
Although it’s been in the papers as a popular transit point for illegal rendition flights run by the CIA and MI6, my piece concentrates on the backstory to the island, more specifically how the UK and US governments conspired to illegally evict the island’s inhabitants from their home in the 1960s. Two invaluable sources were David Vine’s Island of Shame and John Pilger’s Stealing A Nation, which I thoroughly recommend. As always, the whole comic is posted on the COMIX page, so please forward the link around to raise awareness for the Chagossians’ campaign to return to their homeland.