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Part 2 of another comic from the upcoming human trafficking comic, Borderland. Featuring 7 true stories told by human trafficking victims in comics format. Now at 1/3 of our goal! Please order your comic via Kickstarter here – $5 for a digital version, $10 for a hard copy, as well as more luxurious options like signed posters, behind the scenes views of the project’s artwork, and the chance to sponsor a copy for a Ukrainian school or NGO. More news on yesterday’s SF Zine fest journalism panel below.
First panels from one of the stories featured in my upcoming Borderland comic – featuring 7 true stories told by human trafficking victims. I’ll be posting the next panels over the next week, but please order your own copy of the comic through our Kickstarter page to help us raise money towards printing and distribution costs. You can also help us out by sharing the link on FB, Twitter, Digg etc – thanks for your support!
This brings my wordless comic on the economic meltdown to a close, but feel free to click here to read it from the start, tier by tier.
News below the fold, so scroll down. Today’s bulletins: the Iraq withdrawal and a report back on a talk at IDEO Palo Alto on the future of news and storytelling, given by Neal Baer, executive producer of ER and Law and Order, Special Victims Unit.
Please support my human trafficking comic on the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.com if you haven’t already! Here’s the link to the pledge page, currently at 21% of our goal. Also checkout my new sketchbook uploads to Flickr (right hand sidebar).
As the Borderland comics kickstarter fund (see right) chugs along, we’re getting contacted by NGOs around the world who want to share and coordinate efforts to combat human trafficking. One of these was Oasis Global, who are behind the Stop the Traffik campaign. Click here to watch their intro video and learn how human trafficking might even affect how your favourite chocolate bar was made – apparently almost half the world’s chocolate is grown in Cote D’Ivoire. In the words of Steve Chalke, Stop the Traffik’s Founder and UN Special Advisor for Community Action against Human Trafficking:
“When Cadbury’s and Hershey and Mars and Lindt and Nestle and all of the others produce chocolate that is traffic-free, you can be sure that they will be the first to put a little mark on those bars telling us that. If a chocolate bar doesn’t say it’s traffic-free, it’s just not – it’s as simple as that”
In other news, the sketchbook studies on my Flickr page continue, this time with a Hardhats focus as I gear up for some enormous crowd scenes in Part 2 of my upcoming graphic novel, Hardhats. More on the Hardhats page here.
New here? Go to the start of the comic here. You can order a copy of my latest comic on human trafficking here. Scroll down for an update on what’s new in the Archcomix universe below the fold. Today’s stories: a belated commemoration of the Hiroshima atomic bomb drop, 65 years ago on Friday, Wyclef Jean runs for Haitian President, and direct action against US military bases in Colombia.
New here? Go to the start of the comic here. You can order a copy of my latest comic on human trafficking here. Scroll down for an update on what’s new in the Archcomix universe below the fold.
If you’re looking for more information on my latest human trafficking comic, Borderland, then go here. Most importantly, please pre-order our comic through Kickstarter so we can meet our fundraising goal and get it printed and distributed here in the US to raise awareness about human trafficking. A big thank you if you’ve already pledged. Us independent creators would not exist without your support.
If you want to see the latest installment of stop motion genius from some more of the 8th graders I’ve been teaching, then go here for “Mr Toast”.
Meeting Eric Drooker last week got me thinking back to my experiments with wordless comics, which peaked with the above piece for Bash magazine in Dec 2008. So much was being said about the then imminent financial crisis, I thought a wordless approach with all of its symbolic ambiguities was a novel way of pointing the metaphorical finger at the Credit Default Swapping troublemakers. Scroll down for lots of updates below the fold, and don’t forget to cast your cover design vote for my Borderland comic – voting closes in a few hours.
As I near the end of putting Borderland together (my human trafficking comic, for those of you new around here), I’ve been debating various different cover designs, some of which I’ve pencilled at full size only to find that they lack the impact (emotional or visual) I’m looking for. So in keeping with the Honduran coup comic, I’m throwing it open to you: peruse the options below and choose your favourite in the poll underneath. I’ll reveal the winner in a few days, as the cover is due by the middle of next week.
1. Half realistic portrait of one of the victims, the other half filled in with a map of Eastern Europe/Ukraine against a black background.
Cover 2: Similar to the Honduran Coup cover: reflections of imminent danger in the close-up eye of one of the victims
Cover 3: Understated. Assorted items presumably belonging to a victim - passport, identity papers, etc with "Borderland" rubber-stamped on top
Cover 4: Scattered ID papers belonging to the 7 different victims whose stories comprise the comic. A bit cluttered perhaps.
Cover 5: The victims walking towards us down a typical Ukraine high street with Kiev landmarks in the background. Subtle nods to the locations mentioned in the stories (nightclub signs, bakery etc).
Cover 6: The victims in the foreground, overshadowed by the different buildings that constitute their homes/work/prisons in the comic
cover 7: A beaten-up, weathered Ukrainian passport (in dark blue), which you open up to see the contents laid out like a passport (photo ID, DOB etc) Cons: Passport cover design alone not enough to grab a reader's attention.
cover 8: my favourite (no bias). The black is a Ukrainian passport, with assorted mocked-up papers/ID photo stapled over the top, as if we were the case worker for one of the victims.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the back story to the coup in Honduras that happened a year ago today, here’s a short and sweet video synopsis for you. The music is “Innocence” by “Working for a Nuclear Free City” off their “Businessmen and Ghosts” album.
Please digg/tweet/FB/fwd the link on and here’s to the ongoing struggle for justice that rages on in the face of continued repression.
