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Panel 1: Order the book here More on its polemical background here.
Panel 2: More on Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein.
Panel 3: For more on the anti-semitic tract in this panel, go here.
Panel 4: Quote from RollCall, an online magazine.
Remember, there’s more Archcomix news below the fold.
Order your copy of the Honduran coup comic here.
Become a friend of Archcomix here.
I’m now well into the Borderland comics project, with just over half of the artwork done and nearly all the thumbnails. In my focus on churning out pages, I missed the auspicious milestone that the US treasury passed last week, blazing past the 13 trillion dollar debt line with no hint of a slowdown. This is fast approaching 90% of the US’s GDP, though quite what difference it’ll make when the US spends more than it makes is open to debate. Want to see what part the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are playing in all this? Then visit the National Priorities Cost of War project.
Other interesting curios include the US’s fake theater of war, subject of a great new indie documentary. I first came across this on seeing that the US gov’t was using comics and video games to train troops, providing them with helpful visual guides to help categorize who they’re dealing with and how to adhere to the local mores and customs.
I’m delighted to say that the International Organization for Migration, one of the world’s largest NGOs dealing with trafficking, is going to print 10,000 copies of my upcoming Borderland comic to distribute in and around Eastern Europe as part of an initiative to reach at-risk youth. This week, the whole “Pick of the crop” comic (featuring the panels above) – about a worker’s exposure to harmful pesticides while being forced to pick strawberries – is being handed out in Kyiv at an event for Ukranian youth: it’s on Saturday at Khreschatyk, 11 am till 3 pm, if you happen to be in the area.
On a different note, I recently came across these amazing online lectures from the RSA, which are a hybrid form of audio lecture and accompanying visual presentation, done with speeded-up time-lapse photography. The lecture itself is interesting in its own right – a defense of cartooning you might argue, given the focus on mastery (room for improvement), satisfaction (doing some good in the world) and being your own boss as the most important qualities of a job. See what you think and leave a comment!
[For some reason, you may need to hit the spacebar to start the video, instead of clicking on it]
Above is a sample from my current project on human trafficking, called Borderland. The name comes from the translation of “Ukraine“. The comic, which will be around 32-36pages long, is made up of several different real-life stories recorded during interviews with victims at NGOs around the Ukraine over the past year. The finished pages will be B/W with a single spot colour over the top: search for “Roma” or “Trafficking” in the Apture search bar at the top of the page and you’ll find a complete page from a different story to see what I mean.
We’ll (my colleague and Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova and I) then bundle those together with information and anti-trafficking resources (helplines, websites, NGO contact details), translate them into Ukrainian and Russian and disseminate them around Eastern Europe. I’ll be creating a dedicated page called ‘Trafficking” over the next few weeks that will feature more information on the project, as well as a gallery of pages, so be sure to come back and check it out.
Panel 1: Go here for more FW videos.
Panel 2: Voila Adelson’s financial status in 2007. This quote taken from Forward magazine.
Panel 3: Quote from the excellent Dutch documentary program “Tegenlicht” about the Israel lobby in the USA. This documentary (April 2007) is available to view for free online: (left)
The quote appears at 10:21sec. For more information on Christians United for Israel, go here.
At the risk of politicizing one of the few days when politics are supposedly left aside to commemorate the sacrifice made my US servicemen and women (that’s Memorial Day, to all of you reading this from outside the US bubble), the inclusion of Freedom’s Watch in today’s extract from my recent AIPAC comic is a stark reminder of where the bellicose foreign policy agendas that cost so many lives often take root. Be sure to check out the links below for more information on Freedom’s Watch nefarious agenda (as if having the name “Freedom” in a political group’s title didn’t set off enough alarm bells) and its (thankfully) abortive efforts to provoke the US into a military intervention in Iran.
Panel 1: For more background on WINEP, go here (a little out of date, but still relevant) and here for more about the Brookings Institute
Panel 2: This quote taken from a NYTimes article. Bizarrely enough, one of Saban’s greatest ever cash cows was his ownership of the rights and royalties to the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, which he recently bought back from Disney. The licensed products and promotional value of the MMPR is estimated at $5bn.
Panel 5: More on Freedom’s Watch. For coverage of the story from the NYTimes, click here.
For more info on the Conference of Presidents, click here. To read the whole AIPAC comic, visit the Religion Dispatches website.
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).
My comic gets the group crit treatment for the first time in Kiev, Ukraine
One massive advantage for Olga and I as we’ve put together this comic on human trafficking has been the support of NGOs and student groups in the Ukraine. Knowing that you’ve been able to incorporate feedback from sources on the ground is critical not only to the credibility of a project, but also to dispelling any doubts that creep in about putting the world to rights from behind the cosseted safety of my drawing board, here in sunny California. The same was true of the Honduran comic, which included eyewitness reporting and drew on various different sources in Tegucigalpa. To give you a great example of this sort of collaboration, a few weeks ago, Olga presented the first draft of the story (3p) you see above to a group of students, professors and NGO workers in Kiev. They then workshopped the piece, bringing up concerns over the wording (always tricky given the tightrope between remaining faithful to a translation and not seeming too stilted), visual references (my original dumpster wasn’t right) and how effectively they thought it communicated the victim’s story. The second draft goes back to them next week, so fingers crossed they’ll be happy with the revisions.
I’ve steered away from commenting on news headlines of late to focus on what I’ve been working on, but one article about the recent furore around the ever-encroaching oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico caught my eye and is worth a mention. No, it’s not this priceless quote from BP CEO Tony Hayward:
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”
More from the Huffington Post here, or the Guardian’s interview with Hayward here.
Current estimates put the total amount of oil leaked at 400,000 gallons (1.5m litres) – not quite up there with the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill at 40.9m litres, but with the potential to rival it, given the vast area the BP spill looks set to cover. Another thing the two spills have in common is the response from the company executives. Here’s Mark Boudreaux, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, responding to claims that 18 years after the disaster, there are still 26,600 gallons of oil clogging up Prince William Sound:
“Based on our initial review of the report, there is nothing newsworthy or significant in the report that has not already been addressed. The existence of some small amounts of residual oil in Prince William Sound on about two-tenths of 1% of the shore of the sound is not a surprise, is not disputed and was fully anticipated.”
I’m not even going to go into the fact that Obama himself has weighed in on the “ridiculous spectacle” of oil executive finger pointing to chastise the companies’ refusal to accept any of the blame and pay for the cleanup, despite BP’s profits last year of $4.4 billion – an increase of 70 per cent on the same period in 2008.
No, what I’m interested in is BP’s elaborate attempts to cover up the magnitude of the spill from the media. Their measures include hiring local teams to ally with the coastguards and prevent journalists from getting access to the affected coastal areas (see left), as well as vetoing the taking or dissemination of aerial photography that would show the extent of the damage.
One man’s solution? DIY Aerial photography with nothing more than a makeshift rig, a balloon, and a cheap camera. Thanks to the Mediashift/Knight Projects Idea Lab for this excellent article. Visit grassrootsmapping.org for more info, and to get involved. Here’s the man behind the scheme (Jeffrey Warren)’s flickr page for more images.
