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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
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