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Kudos to Matt Bors, Tjeerd Royards and Caroline Bins over at Cartoon Movement for their excellent comics journalism work on Haiti and the ongoing plight of the thousands of disenfranchised people there, now that the mainstream media circus has predictably gotten bored and rolled out of town. What’s especially impressive is that CM has turned the mic over to Haitian journalists and creators to give them a chance to tell the story in their own voice, as opposed to the traditional 3rd person reporting we’re used to seeing. Here’s the first instalment of a comic by Chevelin Pierre & Pharès Jerome, “Tents Beyond Tents” that you should check out.
As if that wasn’t groundbreaking enough, there’s also an innovative mash up of comic art, audio and video in another related piece, this time focusing on the LGBT community in Haiti and the precarious nature of their survival in the tent cities:
I’m back, after an extended hiatus in south america (sketchbook pages and an interview to follow) and a blistering sprint finish with several different pre-xmas deadlines before that. One of which was a short story featuring the snippet of panels above, chronicling miscarriages of justice in the american legal system. Another, out next week, is a second interactive piece for cartoon movement. More about it in the “news” section, just a scroll away, down below the fold.
Work on Alcatraz continues as I near the finish line, now that I’m well into colouring the inked pages. You’ll have to check out the “Extras” page from the tabs above for a glimpse of the finished pages as they come off my drawing board – but for that, you’ll need to get the passcode, which you can only get from the latest edition of the Archcomix newsletter (next one drops on Monday). Simple.
All this and I haven’t even mentioned my next big project, focusing on human trafficking in SF. I’m currently researching and doing interviews, and should have something for you in a few weeks. I’ll post separately about it soon.
Head over to the Marketplace site to get the lowdown on each of the GOP contenders vying for Presidential glory next year – accompanied by a Gerald Scarfe-esque caricature done by yours truly.
In the build-up to a bumper deadline December, it’s been all hands on deck at Archcomix HQ, as the inked bristol slowly piles up on my desk. So as a taster to hold you over until next month when I can reveal what I’ve been up to, here’s a pencil (run through an iphone filter) of John Giles, the (anti)hero of my Alcatraz comic for the National Parks Conservancy Trust. See the Alcatraz page for more details. If you’re interested in how the pencils turn miraculously into inks, then check out my new time-lapse video on you tube by scrolling down (new users to the site: news is below the “fold”, under this here header announcement, and free comics are accessible through the drop-down menus above and via the buttons in the sidebar to the right).
I’ve also added some recent sketches to my flickr stream – check them out and follow my photostream here. And just in time for the festive season, check out my prints section and order some original artwork for the art lover/comic artist/discerning aesthete in your life – all come signed (with dedications optional).
A brief video intermission from the wishful thinking dept today – something to keep you sated until I can officially point you towards some of the myriad projects that have kept me busy for the past months. By busy, I mean manacled to my drawing board. This is from my upcoming comic on Alcatraz and will give you an idea of the new noir-ish style I’ve moved towards. Drybrush aplenty. Now if only I could speed up my inking process this easily…
As promised above, here is a link to the Yiddishkeit slideshow detailing my process of turning a comics script into finished pages, including using visual references, digital colouring in photoshop, thumbnailing, all that good stuff. Here is the Kickstarter campaign to erect a statue in Harvey’s native Cleveland.
Many thanks to Sterling Warner at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose for inviting me to talk about my work and comics journalism in general on Wednesday. It was great talking to the next generation of visual storytellers afterwards and I hope that some of them have made it here to the Archcomix online HQ – if so, welcome! Be sure to browse comics using the drop-down menus at the top of the page.
Meanwhile this week Alcatraz continues to rumble ahead, with the finish line now finally in sight; a new animation-based project involving Vietnam is in the works; I’m building another interactive piece, this time on the history of the International Criminal Court; pencilling some pages on a potential legal academic graphic novel; working on the follow-up to my crisis comix for Marketplace; AND laying the groundwork for my follow-up to last year’s Borderland, which will tell the story of trafficking in the US. Oh and the Stanford Graphic Novel Project! More about that on the soon to be re-launched”teaching” page – stay tuned for updates.
Last weekend I was invited to talk on the process behind my 50+ page collaboration with the late, great Harvey Pekar on Yiddishkeit, a comics anthology that collects and celebrates the forgotten gems of Yiddish culture, published by Abrams Comics Arts in September (from which the above pages is taken). Many thanks to Paul Buhle for organizing the event, and for fostering my involvement in the project from the outset! Paul is a one-man non-fiction comics powerhouse, responsible for other comics histories covering topics as diverse as the history of the SDS, The Beats, Studs Terkel’s Working and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire. I had no idea about the historical connection between Yiddish and marxism in the early twentieth century – Paul’s reasons for initially studying the language and its literature in the first place was to gain access to the wealth of material on working class movements in the US, which were predominantly written in yiddish. If such things pique your curiosity, then I recommend “the unrepentant marxist” blog, which features one of the most insightful reviews of Yiddishkeit out there.
If you scroll down to the “news” section of this site, you can watch a very brief video (you’ll need to pause it, as each slide only pings up for a few seconds in the “convert to movie” mode of powerpoint) that’ll give you a visual journey of the process I went through in turning Harvey’s script into print-ready comics pages. Plus some other Kickstarter-based drives to honour the beloved everyman of comics. Here are just a few of Harvey’s handwritten script pages, so you can see what I started with. I especially love the “jewish man” and “horse” labels on the last page.
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That’s right, my comics interviews with various partipants in Occupy Oakland is now live at Yes! Magazine. Check out their slideshow here, or enjoy the fully interactive version here.
That not enough for you? Then you’ll want to peruse the latest pencilled pages from my current hush-hush project, now uploaded to the “Extras” section. Don’t know the password? For that you’ll have to subscribe to my newsletter. Them’s the breaks.
The latest Archcomix newsletter is out now: click here to read it online or . Find out more about the Global Forum on Human Trafficking from this set of live sketches, visit the updated trafficking page or check out some of the new pages from the tabs above.
New visitors, welcome! Be sure to browse the comics using the tabs at the top of the page.
I will be attending the Global Forum on Human Trafficking in Sunnyvale, CA today and tomorrow to meet like-minded abolitionists and discuss new ways of combatting human trafficking (through visual storytelling, in my case). If you’re a new visitor to the site, check out my trafficking page for information on my Borderland comic, which translated the voices of several victims of human trafficking in Eastern Europe into comics format. Also, be sure to check out the latest details of my new storytelling project, focusing on trafficking in India and Nepal, which will take place in April/May of next year at my new site Graphic Voices.
