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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.
After a week or two off (imagine that!), allow me to showcase some of the incredible talents from the two classes I taught directly after my knight fellowship ended. For more on the classes, click here to read my previous post. The first featured creators aged 14-17 from Stanford’s EPGY program, which ran for 3 weeks, during which time I crammed as much graphic novel know-how into their porous brains as I could. Like any of the workshops I teach, we covered the creative process (writing, thumbnailing, pencilling, inking, scanning, photoshop, indesign) with the invaluable addition of also critically analysing some stand-out examples of the form. This being me I put a heavy slant on non-fiction visual storytelling, meaning we covered Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Photographer by Guibert/Lefevre, Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, Wordless woodcuts from Franz Masereel, Lynd Ward and Giacomo Patri, as well as Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Douglas Wolk’s How to Read Graphic Novels.
For more samples of the students’ final artwork, scroll down.
Where has he disappeared off to? I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, since the Knight journalism fellowship finished I’ve been teaching back to back graphic novel writing classes, first at Stanford’s EPGY Summer program, and now currently to a group of mature students in the heart of the rural hinterland that is Idyllwild College. It’s 6000 feet up a mountain, about 2 hours east of LA, and I’ve reverted back to a dial-up modem to send this missive from my little cabin in the wilderness.
Both the courses have gone extremely well, and it’s always a pleasure to spread the good word (and image, wah wah) of visual storytelling to a larger audience across a broad age group. The current Idyllwild class is focusing on non-fiction comics, which I thought would be easier to structure a tentative first effort around, given the skeletal outline of facts/evidence etc. Topics range from: shootings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; escaping from North Korea; the burgeoning Lion fish population in the Atlantic and the Armenian genocide. I’ll post some sample panels forthwith. For those of you that missed it, the tier above is taken from my latest interactive piece on the Nisoor Square shootings, published on Cartoon movement last month. Click here to try it out.
Be sure to check out the news below the fold: I stumbled across a great comic on the Canadian mining corporation Goldcorp and their struggle to uproot indigenous communities to access gold mines in Guatemala. Not to mention the toxic effects of their mining process on the unfortunate families who are unable to move away from the site of the cyanide-oozing mines. In the interests of impartiality (ahem) it should be duly noted that “over 50 percent of the 1,900 people working at the mine were local residents at their time of hiring, and 98 percent were Guatemalan residents. In 2008, the Marlin operation spent more than $90 million in Guatemala on supplies and services, and paid over $20 million in taxes”. See for yourself here. Though the integral inclusion of cyanide in the gold extraction process has to raise a few eyebrows given the outbreak of skin diseases amongst the local population: [thanks to Chris Van den Ven for the summary below]
Cyanide leaching…uses a cyanide solution to dissolve gold from host rocks for later precipitation. Rock is removed from the ground with explosives. After the ore has been excavated, it is brought to a grinding mill, where the ore is crushed into sand or smaller sized grains. Next, it is transported to the leaching plant where the ore is mixed with the cyanide solution. The cyanide solution dissolves the gold from the crushed ore. Next, the gold-bearing solution is collected. Finally, the gold is precipitated out of solution.
I’ve just posted a mini-treatise on all the steps involved in putting together my recent interactive comic on the 2007 Nisoor Square shootings. What? You haven’t seen it yet? Well go here and check it out on Cartoon Movement. Also, do me a favour and vote it up over at Boing Boing would you? Just click here to balance your comic karma for the day. (It’s right at the bottom of the page).
Seen it? Right then, well now you can click here to read about it all came together over at Graphicjournos.com, home to the finest stable of comics journalists the internet has to offer.
I’m pleased to announce that one of the interactive multimedia comics that I worked on during my Knight fellowship is now live over at Cartoon Movement. To read the piece, click here. (Above is a sample tier). The piece tells the story of the Nisoor square shootings that took place in Sept 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq involving US contractor Blackwater (now renamed “Xe Services”). The tragic event saw 17 Iraqis killed and 24 wounded during the controversial shootings, which civilian witnesses argue was unprovoked. The case was dismissed by US courts in 2009 but reopened just a few months ago, in April 2011.
Meanwhile, Xe’s polemical CEO Erik Prince has moved to Abu Dhabi to export his unique brand of mercenary training:
Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times…
Stay tuned for a separate post on what looks frighteningly like a School of the Americas for the middle east.
That’s right, now is one of the few times you can honestly help me improve my mojo. (Mo)zilla + (Jo)urnalism that is, you dirty-minded lot. Simply go here, read my awesome proposal and click ‘vote’ in the top right hand corner. Essentially, it’s what you’ve come to expect around here, discerning fan of comics journalism that you are – combining the visual storytelling devices of comics with the souped-up power of web 2.0 (or is that passe already?) to incorporate video, animation and audio within comics panels. Voting closes today, so make it count! Winners go through to the next round, earning themselves some top-notch coding training in the process. Believe me, after wrestling with my interactive Blackwater piece (now pushed back til Monday on Cartoonmovement, sorry folks), I could use it.
Here’s the blurb from the Mozilla:
Video is a central part of many people’s daily news experience. But most online video is still stuck in a boring embedded box, like “TV on a web page,” separated from the rest of the page content. This offers little in the way of context or opportunities for viewers to engage more deeply.
New open video tools make it possible to pull data from across the web right into the story. Information related to the video can literally “pop” into the page. And videos themselves can change, dynamically adapting as stories evolve. The challenge is to use these tools in ways that serve the story. How can we enrich news video through things like added context, deeper viewer engagement, and the real time web? What are the untapped possibilities inherent in many-to-many, web video?
Cartoon Movement, the internet’s #1 platform for high quality political cartoons and comics journalism (and sister site of VJ movement) , is publishing my latest piece on the Sept 2007 shootings that occurred in Nisoor Square, Baghdad – there’s a little taster about it on their blog here. The piece will go up next wednesday, June 15th. In the run up to next week I’ll post some previews of the panels and give more of a sense of how the piece works, and the importance (not to mention the untapped potential) of incorporating interactivity into comics journalism pieces.
For now, let me break down the above screenshot, which is the main viewing area for the piece (which, incidentally, loads in its own window due to sizing constraints). The viewing area is comprised of 3 main parts: the timeline (corresponding to the 15 minutes that the incident took place over), which can be advanced by clicking on the play button, or dragged to a specific point); the background, which is comprised of a satellite picture of Nisoor Square together with an additional layer of brightly coloured icons (corresponding to the various people and vehicles involved in the incident) that move along their respective paths as the incident unfolds; and, of course, the panels, which appear as the user hovers over the said icons, providing an eyewitness account of the event from that specific perspective (the majority of which are taken from direct testimonies).
