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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.
Click here to read my latest comics experiment, gleaned from a series of interviews I did at the Occupy Oakland protest on Thursday night. Something of a change in how I normally put work together, I skipped thumbnailing and dived straight into transcribing the interviews to let the subjects speak for themselves. I sprinkled in some interactivity too to keep/force readers to engage with it – and added some audio into the mix while I was at it. See what you think – it’s also been posted on this occupy portraits site too.
You’ll also notice that I’ve added a Multimedia page along the top, where you’ll find videos, animations, audio recordings and links to my most recent interactive visual storytelling experiments.
Ok, so it’s been a while since my last update – I can happily report it’s because I’ve been juggling deadlines for the past few weeks. That, and being at San Franciso’s Alternative Press Expo and starting a new semester back at Stanford teaching the graphic novel project. For your aural delight here is the recording from the panel I moderated at APE on “Exploring Comics Journalism”. Thanks to Matt Bors, Susie Cagle and Jen Sorensen for their contributions.
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As ever, the fruits of my recent labours will be posted soon, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for now. What better opportunity could you want for perusing the archived non-fiction comics waiting for you behind the tabs at the top of the screen? Hover over them and then choose a comic to read from the drop-down menu.
In the meantime, above are some panels from my current project in progress on Alcatraz – check out the Alcatraz page for more details and the story behind them.
Pardon the brief hiatus, but I’ve spent the last little while with my head down working through the historical record with Paddy Hirsch, Senior Editor at Marketplace, on ways to make the financial crisis easier to understand and accessible to the general (ie. non-economically-minded) public. The fruits of our labour are now up online at Marketplace to coincide with the 3rd anniversary of Lehman Bros’ collapse – check out the 2 minute animation below and the rest of the comic here.
My latest interactive comic is now live at Poynter.org – click here to read it in all of its interactive glory.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will also notice that my latest comic on the Hard Hat Riots of 1970 is now available for pre-order via the widget on the right-hand sidebar.
Here’s a link to another of my forrays into interactive flash design, featuring background info and interviews with Bhutanese refugees in Oakland. Madhu Acharya and I put the series of videos and audio together towards the tail end of the Knight fellowship, and the story went live this week on the Penipress website, which also feeds SFGate and the Bay Citizen. The above sketches were done in situ as I was wrestling with the idea of combining direct reporting with post-production work, sort of like the Bo Seremsky piece I posted a few weeks back.
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.
