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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.
It’s nose to the grindstone time at Archcomix HQ (temporarily based out of Ithaca, NY for the next 2 weeks), as I’m fighting to reach my daily goal of 1.5 pages of Borderland (my human trafficking comic), inked and penciled. So far, so good – even managed to get some done in Detroit airport at 6 in the morning. Just finishing a story about a worker who was kept enslaved at a Polish bakery and about to move on to a construction worker who was treated like an animal in one of Moscow’s most prestigious patches of real estate.
On a more upbeat note, my Knight Fellowship for 2010 is now only a summer away, so I thought I’d shed a little more light on the program and give you a chance to see what previous fellows spent their year working on.
June is Torture Awareness Month, so at the very least you can check out this video from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. (Yes, even if you’re a devout pagan). Here’s a good place to start if you’re new to the US’s private use and public condemnation of torture. As for the discrepancy over why the debate over torture continues to preclude taking any actual steps to end it, check out this article from Slate on Maher Arar, best summarised by this quote:
Each time an American court declines to address this issue because it’s novel, or complicated, or a matter best left to the elected branches, it reaffirms yet again that there is no precedent for doing justice in torture cases. By declining to find torture impermissible, they are helping to make it acceptable…Given that [torture is illegal], he wondered, why was the majority of the panel searching high and low for some diplomatic, national security, or supersecret policy reason to defer to the other two branches of government to set the parameters of U.S. torture policy. There is no U.S. torture policy. We don’t torture. So why are the courts leaving it to Congress to set its boundaries?
Which is all the more interesting in light of Ex-VP Dick Cheney’s comments from last year on Fox News, as reported by the NYTimes:
“I knew about the waterboarding, not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved,” said Mr. Cheney, who noted that neither a gun nor a drill had actually been used on detainees. “The fact of the matter is the Justice Department reviewed all those allegations several years ago…
…The judgment was made then that there wasn’t anything that was improper or illegal”
You have to love that relative clause in the first sentence. Move over Jack Bauer, Fox has a new all-american hero re-writing its constitution.
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]
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.
