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From a collaboration with the late underground comics legend Harvey Pekar, who was found dead earlier today in his Cleveland home. Scroll down for a video of the man in action.
Harvey Pekar, the legendary underground comics writer and creator of the American Splendor series, was found dead at his Cleveland home earlier today. Pekar was an uncompromising champion of the American everyman, most famously in his tirades on the David Letterman show (see clip, left) and candid disregard for celebritydom and its trappings. I was lucky enough to collaborate with Harvey earlier this year on one of his final projects, a history of Yiddish literature and culture, which will be out in the Fall. Go to the social histories page for more extracts of Yiddishland, and RIP one of comics’ true greats.
Update: Above are sample panels from Yiddishland. As you may have guessed, the site is currently undergoing a redesign and I’m still ironing out some kinks, with the help of Stanford CS student Alex Easton. Thanks Alex!
More from my upcoming non-fiction project on human trafficking in Eastern Europe. Stick “Borderland” in the apture search bar at the top of the page for more info, or hit previous twice to go back to the start of the story.
As promised, the story continues. Hit “previous” for the start of the story, or stick “Borderland” in the Apture search bar at the top of the page for the full lowdown on the project, new page to be updated soon.
Russian lettering to be inserted into the roadside sign in the the first panel. Also, check out a over at the Comics Journal.
Hot off the drawing board, here’s a new piece from the upcoming Borderland comic I’ve been working on over the past year, turning the real-life testimonies of human trafficking victims from the Ukraine in partnership with Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova. Comments, as always, very welcome. Especially on the spot colour.
More panels to come, as well as a good review and exciting update on the Honduran Coup comic. More regular updates will start back up again now that I’m nearing the summit of the mountain of pages needed to complete Borderland.
Panel 1: Obama quote from NPR
Panel 8: Kessler appears in this video of the recent AIPAC 2010 Student summit at 3:56:
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]
