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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Panel 1: For more background on WINEP, go here (a little out of date, but still relevant) and here for more about the Brookings Institute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).
As promised, here’s the first page of my latest project on human trafficking in Eastern Europe. All of the oral testimonies were collected and translated from the Ukrainian by my collaborator Olga Trusova, who’s spent the year visiting NGOs and talking to those who have experienced the horrors of modern-day slavery first hand. I’ve been experimenting with spot colours to give the art more depth and substance – what do you think about the tone? Got an idea for a better one? Suggestions and comments welcome. I’m trying to tracking down a ‘No trespassing sign in Ukrainian, so that explains the empty white box in the last tier, in case you were wondering. The AIPAC comic will continue to run next week. More news below the fold, so scroll down.
Adding the spot tone using a Cintiq screen/tablet
Congratulations to the determined, dedicated, bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, incredibly talented elite from the Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2010 who got our 192p graphic novel finally off to the printer yesterday. After a weekend full of post-production work on Illustrator and Photoshop, Monday night saw the handful of diehards switch seamlessly to Indesign to layout the final print-ready pdf, incorporating text tweak and colour edits along the way. This is only the third year of the Stanford GN project, but the progress the class has made is clearly visible from the jump in the production values, artwork and storytelling. Great job guys!
Now that Pika Don (“flash boom” in Japanese – the word used to described the atomic bomb blasts)’s finally finished, the next deadline is for the human trafficking comic I’m putting together with Fulbright Fellow, Olga Trusova. Olga’s been out in the Ukraine visiting NGOs and collecting victims’ testimonies for me to then turn into graphic narratives to give those that have been exploited a real voice. Too often even the most well-intentioned literature on human trafficking features the same visual motifs of girls in short skirts with pixelated faces walking down dimly-lit alleyways – despite the fact that sex trafficking is only one part of what is an enormous global industry. (Sweatshops, forced labour, piracy and fruit/vegetable picking are just some of the other categories). I’ll post some extracts on Friday to give you an idea.
An experimental vertical panel from my latest comic, which was published in full over at Religion Dispatches earlier this week. Please take the time to digg it by clicking here to get it to the top of the “politics” charts. Scroll down for news.
My comic on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is now headlining the newly-relaunched Religion Dispatches website. Above is the third extract of the piece. Click here to read it from the beginning. Sources/substantiating evidence below. New visitors: welcome! More comics are free to read by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page. Be sure to add the Archcomix RSS Feed to never miss an update, or become a fan on facebook here. Click here to support this site by ordering a hard copy of an issue of Archcomix.
Also, please click here to Digg the link to the RD article, or RT/Fwd. Thanks!
panel 7: for a full list of its offices, click here.
panel 8.1: for more information on the differences, click here.
panel 8.2: see below for the 3 page comic, “Lunch on K Street”, on the lobbying process in DC, that first ran in DC’s own Bash magazine a few years ago.
[GALLERY=25]
panel 9: paraphrased from an actual lobbying firm’s website.
panel 10: For more info, click here and here
Friday, May 8th 1970 marked the 40th anniversary of the Hardhat Riots, the subject of my upcoming graphic novel. Read all about it on the Hardhats page, together with some new photo evidence from the day that recently surfaced. Also, I’ve created an official press release for the Honduran Coup comic on the Honduras page – the link is so please RT it and share it around!
