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Above is a screenshot from one of the many hypercomics experiments you’ll find at my online launchpad/testing ground for the comics platform I’ve been working on as part of my Knight fellowship. Click here to visit the site, and please send me your feedback! I’d love to hear it. Those of you die-hard Archcomix fans may have already visited it since I launched it under the radar a few weeks back, but I’ve since added new content, ranging from flash-based scrollable comics to hypercomics.
The idea is to combine the need for context in today’s never-ending torrent of 24 hour news with a more intuitive visual interface that allows for more of a personal connection between the reader and the hundreds of stories they scan each day.
Speaking of new ways to read the news, the more eagle-eyed among you will have also noticed that I’ve added a new “Iphone Apps” page to the site, which houses the first previews of the Honduran coup app that I’ve put together with the help of Chris DeLeon. Not to mention a subtle signpost to you lot to read some of the comics that are published online above – just hover over the tabs at the top and you’ll be shown a range of visual narratives to feast your eyes on. If you enjoy what you see, you can even send a micro (or macro) donation my way using the button on the left hand sidebar. Thanks!
Last week saw the 20th anniversary of the protest, originally started by Father Roy Bourgeois, to close the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school’s magnetism for controversy stems from the number of its latin american graduates who have gone on to perpetrate crimes against humanity in their home countries. See above for part of my comic on the SOA (now thoughtfully renamed WHINSEC in a Blackwater to Xe-related case of PR). Stick SOA in the search bar above to read the whole comic, which I posted online a while back. It was printed in Presente! earlier this year, so if you mention that with your next Archcomix order I’ll pop a copy of the issue in with your purchase. Read more about the protest from the NYTimes here.
Miami Book Fair Part 2: Sunday saw panels from Dean Haspiel and Joe Sacco for Cuba: My Revolution and Footnotes in Gaza respectively. The Cuba panel, given the Miami location and proximity to Little Havana, was sparsely attended, but the room filled up for Joe’s talk. Although I haven’t read the Cuban book, it threw up some interesting questions for me, primarily to do with the trend in graphic biographies these days. David Axe touched on this in his talk, when he said part of the beauty of collaborating with artist Matt Bors is having him recreate the settings, environments and memories he’s described in words. He also described it as a kind of voodoo, whereby seeing his doppelganger recreated on the page meant he could empty all of the stress, pain and negative feelings he associates with the experience of war reporting into it. Click here for a C-SPAN video interview with him. Dean Haspiel told us that “image is text…artists are authors too”, and then went on to describe how in one of the book’s torture scenes, in which the protagonist is being brutally interrogated by Castro’s secret police, Dean drew himself in as the torturer to provide comfort for his collaborator (no pun intended).
Anyway – the Sacco talk, for better or worse, was far more focused on the content of his material as opposed to its form as comics. Joe emphasized his humble role as cartoonist chronicler, highlighting how pen and ink just happen to be his tools – if he were a filmmaker, he’d make films about what he’s seen. He did touch on a good point about the immersive experience of visual storytelling, where using “hundreds of pictures…[can] sum up the details of a story” in a way that a few photos can’t wholly capture. I also managed to ask him about his shorter (10-12pp) comics for magazines like the Guardian UK, to which he replied that he’d like to do more, but had trouble getting the funds together in order to get to where the story was. No mention of the use of comics on the web though. He also emphasized that he was not an activist, and that his next project would not be some explicitly political: instead, he’ll be turning to more of a sociological/anthropological look at human behaviour in conflict through history.
For those who read my previous post on Miami (click previous above to read it), here are some of the links to speakers I didn’t have time to include:
Bill Zimmerman’s use of drag and drop comics templates to encourage kids to tell stories is interesting: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/
Good interview with James Bucky Carter over at Graphic Novel Reporter on the use of comics to guide literacy in the classroom: http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/james-bucky-carter-behind-scenes
The crowds line up for a copy of Pika-Don
The literary maelstrom that was the Miami Book Fair is now over, and both the Stanford Graphic Novel panel and my comic journalism panel with David Axe went very well. The SGNP on Thurs saw Adam Johnson, English Professor at Stanford and the creator of the SGNP, talk about the origins of the program, how he conceived of it, how the process varied across our three books (Shake Girl, Virunga and Pika-Don) and what advice educators need to follow to start a similar course of their own. The response was overwhelmingly positive so here’s to offshoots popping up all over the country. Below is one of the many watercolour sketches I’ve been banging out during the lectures – apologies for the low quality, it’s from a blurry iphone photo. Anyone out there recommend a decent portable scanner?
On the tail of that positivity, check out this article from the Miami NewTimes on my work. I’ll post a longer update on my talk (it was recorded, so perhaps even the video of it too) tomorrow, as well as some more sketches, and the lowdown on Joe Sacco’s talk.
Last but not least, some fantastic news from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who reached a historic agreement last week with the Florida Tomato Grower’s Exchange. See above for a few sample panels from my first comic, What a Whopper, featuring none other than Reggie Brown from the said exchange, who seems to be eating his words from 2007. Click here to read the Whopper comic online, which is about Burger King’s then exploitation of migrant labour from Central America.
A brazilian comicsphile feels the inky pull towards a page of Archcomix
Congrats to Augusto Paim for organizing the Comics journalism conference in Brazil at the Porto Alegre Goethe Institute. I wasn’t there in person sadly, but some of my artwork made it through the ether- check out this photo from my comic on Chagos, a panel of which is above, back in the days when I used to watercolour. To read the whole comic, click here.
More details are now out about my upcoming talk on comics journalism at the Miami Book Fair, so those of you on the east coast looking for some thanksgiving sun prime your diaries for 4pm this Sunday. Get the full skinny here. I’m sharing the panel with war correspondent David Axe, writer of War is Boring, which was then turned into a comic by Matt Bors. (Wars might be, but coups definitely aren’t).
For an update on my Knight fellowship project at Stanford, click here.
Yet another busy week, though I’ve managed to claw some hours back to sit down at my drawing board and hammer out some more hardhats pages. What is Hardhats, you ask? It’s my graphic novel about the May 1970 NYC riots led by construction workers who were protesting against the rising anti-war student movement/New Left. Check out the Hardhats page for more info. Why is that the longer pause between pages, the more hatching and detail you put down on the said pages? Above is a sneak preview of a sample panel from Hardhats, which I’m 3 pages away from completing the first part of, including a brand new prologue.
One of Israel’s largest business dailies is running a feature piece on the story behind Borderland, the human trafficking comic that Olga Trusova and I put together over the last year. Practice your hebrew with the original piece here, or read the slightly odd-sounding-but-basically-intelligible google translation here.
I’ve downed webtools recently to finally make time to pick up my drawing tools, and am pushing ahead with Hardhats pages for my latest graphic novel project. The first part will be done and ready for release by this time next week – I’ll be posting previews in the Hardhats page of the site over the coming days.
More software jiggerypokery today with my first forray into Processing, a data-viz tool aimed at amateur programmers/artists/designers who haven’t got hours of eyeball-searing coding experience. Check out this example for an interactive version of the image above – opens in a new window and play around with moving your mouse around the rectangle, as well as holding it down and moving it. Download this incredible freeware from: www.processing.org
Once again, another hiatus means another prototype – this time with an all-singing, all-dancing javascript component. I can’t take much credit for building the framework (big thanks to the folks at Imageflow for that), but it’s certainly a step in the right direction for a more user-friendly platform that throws panels into greater relief. Now all I need to do is add a vertical scroll and additional pop-up functionality. Check out the prototype here and leave your comments. More info over at the Knight Project page in the morning for the full skinny of what I’ve been up to.
(Most of) the Stanford Graphic Novel Project (L-R): Chris Bautista, Katie Pyne, Sam Julian, Anna Rosales, Lucas Loredo, Topher Lin, James Lipshaw, Guillermo Huerta
Last night saw the star-studded launch of the SGNP’s latest opus, Pika-Don, from which the above splash page has been artfully cropped (excuse the low res). Veteran readers will know exactly what this is about, but for those of you who don’t it’s the graphic retelling of the story of one of the world’s few double atomic bomb survivors, Tsutomu Yamaguchi. Use the search bar up top to find my original post which has all the details.
Thanks to all of you who came out to support – a video featuring interviews with the students as well as my co-Instructors Adam Johnson and Tom Kealey will be online soon. As will a link to where you can get your hands on a copy.
The other big news is a major breakthrough in my Knight Project – my first working prototype is up and ready for testing. Ladies and Gents, I proudly present…Newspanels. Have at it!
I’m pleased to say that all of you who pledged your support for our Borderland human trafficking comic will be receiving your comics very soon – hopefully by the end of the week (domestic) and sometime next week for the internationals. The comic looks fantastic, even if I do say so myself, and was well received at the Alternative Press Expo last weekend. For more on that, scroll down to read my full report.
Here’s another taster from one of the stories to give those of you who aren’t familiar with it an idea – more online at the Borderland page.
