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Borderland, the comic I did with Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova last year, just got a great review from The Comics Journal, together with a review of the latest issue of World War 3 Illustrated, which is carrying an extract from What a Whopper – talk about a double whammy:
Borderland is easily the most focused and best-looking work of his career…The stories are all different (and horrifying) enough so as not to start to drone; rather they succeed in grabbing the reader’s attention and raising awareness.
More from the follow-up on last week’s post revealing the real reason behind the UK government’s support for a marine preserve on Diego Garica – namely to use the leverage of the environmental lobby in the UK against the less powerful Chagos Support group, who are fighting to return the expelled islanders to their homeland.
Another legal revelation here (though not as scandalous and therefore far more likely to stay in the headlines) is that tweeting is now possible in court, as ruled by the Lord Justice Judge of the High Court (quite the title):
“The use of an unobtrusive, hand-held, virtually silent piece of modern equipment for the purposes of simultaneous reporting of proceedings to the outside world as they unfold in court is unlikely to interfere with the proper administration of justice.”
As opposed to a camera…
Radio silence of late has been due to our snowy return to the UK, where naturally all transport has ground to a halt in the wake of a few inches of snow. As the itinerant comics journalist, I’ve been using the time to chronicle the wonder of the big smoke in my sketchbook – above is the commercial black hole of Mordor, aka Oxford St, in all its festive glory. Some washes to come later on this week, along with a long post on Honduras and Canadian Mining Companies in Central America. It doesn’t get more festive than that.
As the first Stanford semester winds up, I’ve been working on my sketching and had the time to start experimenting with some projects I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. But before I get into them, I want to mention the excellent talk we had from Patrick Meier at Ushahidi (Swahili for “witness”) this week. Ushahidi is freeware that allows users to input data points on a map via the web or SMS, and is increasingly being used in crisis situations. Regulars to this site will remember I posted several months ago about its effectiveness in helping emergency forces reach victims in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Patrick’s talk was insightful (telling us about how the Haiti response team essentially comprised of pizza-hungry undergrads at Tufts university on the east coast, who sat and inputted map coordinates, totally voluntarily, during the crisis); honest (I loved his quote about ‘technology only being 10% of the battle – too often are the solutions to these grand problems – journalism, education, literacy, etc – said to be “solved” by mere programs and software alone); and candid – he made it clear the company still had a long way to go, but was buoyed by the positive response they’d received, if slightly bewildered by the inordinate amount of hype and press. He also mentioned Crowdmap, a spin-off of the Ushahidi platform, and again, totally free, that’s more intuitive and less involved on the front-end for users to set up their own map. As an experiment, I’ve started a human trafficking map in the US (I was going to use the one made by Survivors Connect, but it’s down for some reason) which you can check out – and add to – here. Still early days yet, but I want to build a picture of the main areas for trafficking around the 4 most prominent cities in the US for trafficking. For more on what those are and to learn about the project, go to the “trafficking” page above.
And now, back to the art projects…
The first, and most ambitious, is the largest comics “page” I’ve ever worked on – on a 6 x 8 foot piece of wood, whichI’ve cut into panels, primed with gesso and now pencilled the first wide establishing shot of. It’s of London, if you’re wondering where the title for the video comes from. My goal is to ink it later on today with a FAT sumi brush and a lot of Higgins ink. Stay tuned for the result. I’ve also been putting more time into drawing from life and been looking in particular at the assorted gods of linework: Albrecht Durer and Bernie Wrightson. See below for some samples. Check them all out over at my flickr page.
The crowds line up for a copy of Pika-Don
The literary maelstrom that was the Miami Book Fair is now over, and both the Stanford Graphic Novel panel and my comic journalism panel with David Axe went very well. The SGNP on Thurs saw Adam Johnson, English Professor at Stanford and the creator of the SGNP, talk about the origins of the program, how he conceived of it, how the process varied across our three books (Shake Girl, Virunga and Pika-Don) and what advice educators need to follow to start a similar course of their own. The response was overwhelmingly positive so here’s to offshoots popping up all over the country. Below is one of the many watercolour sketches I’ve been banging out during the lectures – apologies for the low quality, it’s from a blurry iphone photo. Anyone out there recommend a decent portable scanner?
On the tail of that positivity, check out this article from the Miami NewTimes on my work. I’ll post a longer update on my talk (it was recorded, so perhaps even the video of it too) tomorrow, as well as some more sketches, and the lowdown on Joe Sacco’s talk.
Last but not least, some fantastic news from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who reached a historic agreement last week with the Florida Tomato Grower’s Exchange. See above for a few sample panels from my first comic, What a Whopper, featuring none other than Reggie Brown from the said exchange, who seems to be eating his words from 2007. Click here to read the Whopper comic online, which is about Burger King’s then exploitation of migrant labour from Central America.
A brazilian comicsphile feels the inky pull towards a page of Archcomix
Congrats to Augusto Paim for organizing the Comics journalism conference in Brazil at the Porto Alegre Goethe Institute. I wasn’t there in person sadly, but some of my artwork made it through the ether- check out this photo from my comic on Chagos, a panel of which is above, back in the days when I used to watercolour. To read the whole comic, click here.
More details are now out about my upcoming talk on comics journalism at the Miami Book Fair, so those of you on the east coast looking for some thanksgiving sun prime your diaries for 4pm this Sunday. Get the full skinny here. I’m sharing the panel with war correspondent David Axe, writer of War is Boring, which was then turned into a comic by Matt Bors. (Wars might be, but coups definitely aren’t).
For an update on my Knight fellowship project at Stanford, click here.
Me, Olga and an Ogre in a tutu
A big shout to everyone who came by the Archcomix/Center for Cartoon Studies table at Alternative Press Expo this weekend. Copies of the hot-off-the-press Borderland comic (which arrived nail-bitingly late last week, just in time for the con) flew off the table, hotly followed by the second print run of the Honduran Coup: a Graphic History, now with newly amended Honduran Spanish translation (thanks to Fabiola Maldonado). Although I didn’t get much time away from manning the table, I managed to see the Dan Clowes interview panel as well as hang out with fellow comics activist Gan Golan, who has put out an amazing looking new graphic novel that takes the aesthetic of vintage superhero comics to explain the recession and current economic crisis. When else would I bring myself to pose with costumed superheroes? Ladies and Gents, I present: The Adventures of Unemployed Man. It’s actually out tomorrow from Little Brown, so beat the rush and get a copy as soon as you can! I also had the pleasure of hanging out with
My kind of superheroes (Tights optional)
Matt Bors and David Axe – otherwise known as the War is Boring team – as well as Susie Cagle, fresh with issue 2 of her Microcosm-published mini, 9 Gallons, to chew the comics journalism cud. In amongst the weekend’s hectic cocktail-party-conveyor-belt-atmosphere of pitching my work to anyone in the vicinity of table 276, I also found the time to read Ken Dahl‘s truly awesome Monsters, at last collected by Secret Acres into one volume. It’s about as approachable and confessional as herpes lit could be.
More on last week’s events at Stanford, plus a new comic and a breakthrough in my Knight Project, once I get some sleep.
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!
As I’m currently working on my Knight project these days, I thought I’d point you towards some of my earlier work you may not have seen – a piece that ran in Bash Magazine a few years back. Go here to read the whole comic, hidden as it is under the US Politics tab at the top of the page. Remember to RT/share it around it if you liked it, or -even better!- head to the Archcomix store to order your hard copy. ($5 plus shipping/P&P). More news after the jump.
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.
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!
