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Click here to read this 2007 comic on mountain top removal from the start. Also, be sure to check out the updates to the Knight Project page and scroll down for news. Or order your hard copy of all my comics over at the store page. Support independent comics journalism today!
In case you couldn’t make it to Litquake on Saturday, here is the live recording of Lucas Laredo and Anna Rosales’ talk about their experience of being part of the Stanford Graphic Novel team. As you’ll see, they did us proud. Nice work Lucas and Anna!
I’m preparing an assignment for my Human-Computer Interaction class, with a hefty overlap with my Knight project, and want to get a sense for how many of you read the news on your smartphones, and if so, what about that experience could be improved.
I’m currently thinking that a purely visual (comics/slideshow) app to give you the gist of news stories or delve deeper into more complex issues is the way to go, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Thanks!
Chaos erupted in Ecuador yesterday as members of the police and military protested budget cuts proposed by the government. 150 troops occupied Quito (Ecuador’s capital) airport to contest the move made by Congress, but it was when President Correa became involved that things truly got ugly. At an address to the disgruntled police and troops outside the Presidential Palace, a volley of tear gas canisters were fired at the President’s entourage, and members of the police were caught on video attempting to assault him. Clearly struggling to breathe from behind his gas mask, the President was bundled from the scene to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for tear gas inhalation. He immediately responded to what many have commented on as the early tremors of a coup attempt:
PRES. RAFAEL CORREA (VOICEOVER TRANSLATION): If you want to kill the president, here I am. Kill me. Kill me if you’re not happy. Kill me if you’re brave. But we will continue with one policy, one of justice, dignity, and we will not take one step backwards.
Thankfully, Ecuador didn’t follow Honduras’s lead (for more on the 2010 military coup that ousted President Zelaya, visit the Honduras page) as one of the top military chiefs has come out in defense of Correa. Let’s hope he doesn’t go the same way as Chilean Army Chief of Staff Rene Schneider, who was murdered in a bungled kidnapping attempt co-sponsored by the CIA for standing behind Chilean President Salvador Allende. His death led the way for Augusto Pinochet to take the reins and lead the now infamous coup that plunged Chile into a military dictatorship. To read that story in comics form, click here. For an interesting debate on the US’s level of involvement, read this post from Foreign Affairs.
Courtesy of SOAW (School of the Americas Watch):
In his radio address the President did talk about this being a Coup attempt lead by the Police, Military close to an ex-President, but also by the Opposition and the ex-President Lucio Gutierrez. He stated that there is an attempt to destabilize the democratic citizen revolution that has happened in Ecuador. At this moment, the pro-democracy movement is gathering in the thousands in the capital but in all the plazas across the country. There are also people marching to the hospital to protect the President.
For more on the story, check out Narco News’s coverage here.
Our Kickstarter time limit ran out 30 mins ago, by which time we had successfully sprinted past our funding goal finish line! Thanks to everyone who contributed and supported us, we literally could not have made this happen without you. Stay tuned for more updates and ways to stay involved in the project.
If you missed out but still want to order your copy, fear not! You can order through the Archcomix store here.
NB the image is a celebratory screenshot, there is no embedded video link!
One final chance to help us reach our Kickstarter funding goal – click here to pre-order your comic through Kickstarter and help us cover our print and distribution costs.
For more info, visit the official Borderland Comics website or here for a preview of some of the stories that are in the comic.
Any help in chipping in, retweeting, forwarding or shouting the news of the Kickstarter deadline is appreciated – deadline is 1045 EST tomorrow morning!
Thanks in advance and to those who have already helped us to get where we are (now at 90%!!!),
Dan and Olga
Thanks to all of those who came to see Olga and I speak at Stanford’s d.school on Thursday evening. About 40 people showed up to hear about how the project came together and discuss the challenges and obstacles creatives face in using their work to instigate social change. Journalist Cynthia Haven did a great piece about the event for Stanford, which you can read here. You’ll also notice that our fundraising tally is up – we’re at 76%, with less than 24 hours to go! Please RT and share the link to our Kickstarter page on digg, facebook, wherever – if you didn’t already know, Kickstarter will return all funds collected so far if we don’t make it to our $8000 goal by this time tomorrow.
Last week was also my first full week of classes at Stanford, which was simultaneously challenging, exhausting, exhilarating and fascinating. Running around to find my classrooms/lecture halls on the first day was surreal, but a week later I consider myself a veteran, though I’m still wrestling with some of the e-classroom/syllabi that we’re expected to attend or sign up for online. I consider it slightly ironic that my data visualization assignment took me almost as long to post to the course wiki as it did to complete. Teething troubles aside, I’ve really enjoyed throwing myself into new projects and classes that are clearly outside of my comfort zone: Human-Computer Interaction; Data Visualization; Beginner’s German; and Multimedia Production are my main courses this semester. Needless to say, good ol’ introduction to cognitive neuroscience didn’t even get a look in past week one – too many lectures to get to as it is! The project’s also coming along well, especially with the news that the Knight News Challenge is definitely on this year, so expect more about that in the next few weeks as I put my application together.
Is half of today’s choice quote, courtesy of Herb Simon: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. At least the first part is true from my first two days at Stanford, which have seen me speaking deutsch (alle ist guht), finding our natural blindspots in a neuroscience lecture (where all the retinal nerves feed back to the brain), designing an app for people waiting in line (or queuing as we say in the old world) and hearing about Edward Tufte in a data visualization lecture. Am thinking I’ve got to jettison the neuroscience in order to find some time to juggle new classes and work on this project. Speaking of which, find out about the very exciting developments with that on the project page.
In other news, the Playboy feature on the Stanford Graphic Novel is out, and the SF Chronicle have already been in touch to get Adam and my studied responses to appearing in its hallowed pages. Also gearing up for the big Borderland talk at Stanford’s d.School on Thursday at 5pm: Comics and Social Change. More on Borderland here and here – we’re almost at 50% of our total! We have it on good authority that most of the fund raising activity happens either in the opening or closing days of a pledge campaign, so please help us out if you haven’t already. We’ve had loads of RSVPs so are looking forward to a big crowd of socially-motivated graphic artists, writers and comicsphiles amongst others.
Image taken from Cagle.com
At last I’ve come up long enough for air to be able to post the notes from my interview with Daryl Cagle earlier on in the week, as promised. Daryl is MSNBC.com’s chief editorial cartoonist – click here for a vast catalogue of editorial cartoons about anything and everything topical, which is aggregated and licensed out to hundreds of different papers and websites around the world.
While to many, what Daryl and I do (single panel editorial cartoons vs. multiple-page journalistic comics) seem to be very closely related, I was surprised at how differently we approach our respective forms. It reminded me of friends and family members who interchange “animation, cartoon, comic, illustration and graphic novel writing” when asking me how my work’s going. The most obvious example of this was Daryl’s confession that:
“I don’t think our role is to inform – we hit people with our opinion…I don’t consider it my role to teach”.
Which was very interesting for me, as I consider the educational value of my work to be one of its most important aspects: how can we combine artistic and journalistic practices to create a more accessible, didactic -not to mention engaging- experience for the apathetic/inundated reader? Daryl went on to say that an editorial cartoonist’s role was “to make graphics that stand apart” from the rest of the text on the op ed page. But isn’t that selling the power of art form short? One of the fiercest contrasts with the UK in the US political forum is the vitriol that’s so liberally (no pun intended) showered on each and every polemic by the ever-burgeoning number of celebrity pundits. Combine that with the incessant torrent of the 24-hour news cycle and the average newsreader ends up being force-fed opinion without being given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a topic. Not that the art doesn’t look fantastic and stir a great deal of lively debate – I remember my editorial cartooning days from Uni and was proud to be a Times Young Cartoonist runner-up some years back for a cartoon that featured Blair and Brown on X-factor reality show. But much like X-factor, a lot of the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen feel more like graphic gimmicks – a sort of knowing wink that at best raises a chuckle and at worst reads like a expository diagram delivered by a smug stand-up comedian convinced of his own mirthsome genius. Matt Bors, who treads the line between multi-panel comics and single panel editorial cartoons (a la Lloyd Dangle, Tom Tomorrow et al) skewers the worst offenders over at his blog if you want examples.
Still, a lot of the work Daryl’s doing as an ambassador for the form (not to mention the US State Dept) is heartening, and the global prominence of the form is something that he thinks will sustain well into the future, even if its practitioners have to be flexible to make it work financially: Daryl admitted that roughly only 75 editorial cartoonists make a living, and that “all income is from print clients”. How? By producing work with the highest resale value: cartoons on global issues, that don’t take up a lot of space, with few words. Is that really what “art for the masses” should be about?
That was the title of last night’s talk at The Hub, San Francisco featured Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, in conversation with David Batstone, President of Not for Sale as led by Michael Kieschnick, CEO of CREDO Mobile and Urban Studies Prof at Stanford. I’ll edit my video of the talk and put it on youtube later today. For the time-pressed amongst you, the highlights are below.
Olga and I cornered Jack and David at the end to tell them about our trafficking comic, Borderland (two weeks left until our Kickstarter time limit expires – order your comic now, plug plug!), as well as to discuss the opportunities for incorporating more storytelling into social media as a way of packaging the seemingly endless torrent of tweets, posts etc. Dorsey steered me towards Posterous as a way of embedding visuals in tweets – any Posterous users out there who use it to sync their WP, twit, Fb accounts?
“The power of twitter isn’t the number of people following you, it’s the potential of the universe in just one tweet” (JD)
Products in Development:
Social Media Collaborations that came up:
Thanks to the Hub for putting on a great event.
