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The follow-up to the Honduran Coup: a graphic history that I’m serializing above is now up at the Huffington Post. Click here to read it. Please digg/facebook/retweet the link once you have!
Commondreams.org have posted my graphic history of the US base on Diego Garcia on their homepage, which you can check out here. Meanwhile here’s the next instalment of the Honduran coup comic – click previous to skip back to the start.
For those of you interested in a hard copy of the Honduran coup comic, I’ve installed a widget in the sidebar to the right through Chipin, which is a way of getting online donations through paypal. Click here to visit my Chipin page. Basically, I need you to pay for your copy ($5) of the comic upfront, in order to cover print and distro costs – as a bonus, you’ll get your name printed in tha back of an educational tool (32pages, full colour) that will be sent to libraries, NGOs, activist networks to raise awareness of the true nature of US involvement in Central America. Please spread the word so I can make a hard copy happen.
At last, here’s the promised follow-up I’ve been working on, in a slightly different format from usual. From now on I’ll post comix in a tier by tier format (1-3 panels at a time) as opposed to whole pages. This piece is also the first time I’ve used first hand reporting from a journalist in Tegucigalpa, so thanks to Joe Shansky of Pulsemedia.org, who is the narrator in the panel above, and whose article, ‘Smashing the Silence: Community Defiance in Honduras’ I turned into comics for the first part of this piece.
In case you missed it, here’s the link to a recent radio interview I did on the Honduran coup comic that aired on KALW news recently. In other news, my Diego Garcia comic is going up online at Commondreams.org soon, and will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology ‘Salon Des Refusés’. More details when I have them.
I had my interview for KALW’s Crosscurrent’s show yesterday on the Honduran Coup graphic history, the role of comics in the news and how new media can help foster grass-roots activism. It’ll be broadcast next Weds (the 18th) at 5pm Pacific, giving listeners enough time to get indignant about the Honduran election that’s slated to go ahead on the 29th. Whilst there, Holly Kernan, the News Director, told me about a new online project to encourage community-sponsored journalism, spot.us. It’s a fantastic site, only a year old, that allows journalists to pitch a story to the public in order to secure funding through micro-payments. Sadly it’s limited to local news coverage at the moment, so no ties to Honduras, but I have a number of other pitches on the back burner.
I’ve also had emails about difficulties with sharing specific comics via email – as opposed to sending the link to the gallery page, so here’s an experiment: I’ll post the Diego Garcia comic as a gallery post below and you should be able to share it around by clicking the twitter/fbook/digg etc tabs below. Let me know if it works. Honduran follow-up is 2/3 done! Keep coming back for updates and I’ll let you know when the ink’s dry on the last page.
[GALLERY=14]
Now that we’ve reached the end of the Diego Garcia comic, it’ll be a few days before I post more finished comics up as I return to the drawing board and my thumbnails for some other projects – one involving Harvey Pekar. If you’re hungry for more comics, then head to the COMIX page, where you’ll a selection to choose from, including one on the Prop 8 protests in California last year – timely, given what’s just happened in Maine. If that’s still not enough, then stop by the store, order some hard copies, and I’ll ship them to wherever you are in the world.
A date in your diaires: I’ll be on KALW local public radio next Weds, Nov 11, talking about comics journalism and developments in Honduras. I’ll post a link to the show when it’s up.
Speaking of which, after cautious celebrations of an agreement in Honduras, people are beginning to smell a rat at the small print hidden in the US-brokered deal, which sees the US recognizing the upcoming elections regardless of whether Manuel Zelaya is reinstated. The staunchly republican Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) states: ” I take our administration at their word that they will now side with the Honduran people and end their focus on the disgraced Zelaya”. So much for Zelaya’s proposed non-binding consultation that got him into all this trouble in the first place then. Read the full statement here. This from the man who today also campaigned to keep Guantanamo in use for another year, where the prisoners are “by all accounts …being treated better than any prisoner in American jails”.
Here’s the tragic end to the Diego Garcia story, which covers up the House of Lords’ decision a year ago to deny the Chagossians the right to return to their homeland. Speaking of tragic outcomes, after a massive turnout in Maine, prop 1 was passed yesterday banning same-sex marriage in the state. I’m thinking of doing a piece on the money trail behind the yes campaign – which also worked in California, so stay tuned.
Here’s the next page of my Diego Garcia comic – those of you new to the site, skip back using the previous posts on the toolbar to the right, or else visit the COMIX page to read the whole thing as a slideshow. Thanks for all your support, and remember to spread the word about the Chagossians’ struggle.
Beyond that, you can take steps from wherever you are in the world here – just follow the ‘How you can help’ link on the left toolbar.Donating aside, you can directly contact the relevant MPs who are defending the British government’s stance on the issue, as well as read their little back and forth in the House of Commons from back in 2004. If you’re a brit, it’s worth registering at theyworkforyou.com – it’s a free, easy way of keeping tabs on exactly what your local MP is doing for you. And if you’re American, then remember to support the Vote No on 1 campaign in Maine and help stop the ban on same-sex marriage that went through here in California last year.
As returning readers to the site will see, I’ve added some new widgets to let you share my comics far and wide to spread the word about topics like the US base on Diego Garcia and the Honduran coup. At the bottom of every post is a veritable plethora of links to facebook, twitter, email, you name it – so feel free to pass on the link. It also looks like I’ve found a home for the Diego Garcia comic outside the confines of this site. More details to come when it’s all official. For now, here’s p2 of 4.
Thanks to the Jan Oberg, Director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research and Celia Whitaker of the Chagos Support Foundation for their support.
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.
Here’s the last of the Honduran coup pages: the follow-up is on the drawing board, and the spanish version is now being revamped thanks to some helpful translation tips from Nicolas Ariztia. We may have a bead on a Mexican paper interested in posting it, so keep coming back for updates. Also I’ll be posting my latest piece (and first forray into watercolour) either tomorrow or over the weekend, which involves the British Indian Ocean Territory and the new guantanamo. Plus checkout my flickr page and add me as a contact in the links to the right for more sketches, studies and doodles. The more activist art we can get onto Flickr the better.
Shouts out to the brazilian visitors to the site: Jefferson, Alexandre Lucas from the Faz Caber design/arts blog and Douglas Duarte from the O livreiro blog.
