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Where has he disappeared off to? I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, since the Knight journalism fellowship finished I’ve been teaching back to back graphic novel writing classes, first at Stanford’s EPGY Summer program, and now currently to a group of mature students in the heart of the rural hinterland that is Idyllwild College. It’s 6000 feet up a mountain, about 2 hours east of LA, and I’ve reverted back to a dial-up modem to send this missive from my little cabin in the wilderness.
Both the courses have gone extremely well, and it’s always a pleasure to spread the good word (and image, wah wah) of visual storytelling to a larger audience across a broad age group. The current Idyllwild class is focusing on non-fiction comics, which I thought would be easier to structure a tentative first effort around, given the skeletal outline of facts/evidence etc. Topics range from: shootings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; escaping from North Korea; the burgeoning Lion fish population in the Atlantic and the Armenian genocide. I’ll post some sample panels forthwith. For those of you that missed it, the tier above is taken from my latest interactive piece on the Nisoor Square shootings, published on Cartoon movement last month. Click here to try it out.
Be sure to check out the news below the fold: I stumbled across a great comic on the Canadian mining corporation Goldcorp and their struggle to uproot indigenous communities to access gold mines in Guatemala. Not to mention the toxic effects of their mining process on the unfortunate families who are unable to move away from the site of the cyanide-oozing mines. In the interests of impartiality (ahem) it should be duly noted that “over 50 percent of the 1,900 people working at the mine were local residents at their time of hiring, and 98 percent were Guatemalan residents. In 2008, the Marlin operation spent more than $90 million in Guatemala on supplies and services, and paid over $20 million in taxes”. See for yourself here. Though the integral inclusion of cyanide in the gold extraction process has to raise a few eyebrows given the outbreak of skin diseases amongst the local population: [thanks to Chris Van den Ven for the summary below]
Cyanide leaching…uses a cyanide solution to dissolve gold from host rocks for later precipitation. Rock is removed from the ground with explosives. After the ore has been excavated, it is brought to a grinding mill, where the ore is crushed into sand or smaller sized grains. Next, it is transported to the leaching plant where the ore is mixed with the cyanide solution. The cyanide solution dissolves the gold from the crushed ore. Next, the gold-bearing solution is collected. Finally, the gold is precipitated out of solution.
At last! A powerful piece of comics journalism on the tragic treatment of indigenous communities at the hands of Canadian mining corporation Goldcorp. Rights Action has done a fantastic job of chronicling the spread of health issues, infant mortalities and suffering endured by communities near the gold mines, which you can see for yourselves here.
In the meantime, here’s the comics piece below – published on Scribd.
Extraction!: Comix Reportage – Gold (Guatamala) reportage by Dawn Paley/ comix by Joe Ollmann
