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A bit more information on Monday’s big news about my Knight Fellowship: it’s essentially a year-long stint at Stanford university during which fellows are expected to develop a project thesis on a specific area of innovation within their journalistic field. Not to mention having full access to the gold mine of Stanford’s classes and resources, fellow Knights and students/faculty. My pitch, as you’ll see from the impressive line-up of project summaries, will involve the creation of a rich content digital comic, taking full advantage of the flexibility of the web’s infinite canvas along with its capacity to stream video, animation and include interactive elements. Once the fellowship begins in September I’ll start chronicling the development of the project as I tie its disparate elements together.
Speaking of innovation, one project that’s been slowly percolating over the last several months has been my work with Fulbright fellow Olga Trusova on raising awareness about human trafficking through digital/interactive comics, in conjunction with the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Olga’s been in the field since the end of last year, visiting NGOs in her native Ukraine and interviewing staff and victims who have dealt with the reality of trafficking first-hand. She then sends me her detailed notes which I translate into comics. We recently premiered the first comic at an NGO meeting in Kiev and are currently revising the artwork to incorporate the feedback, so I’ll post some finish panels sometime next week.
Karla Lara performing at Sunrise Cafe, SFO
Last week I made it down to the Sunrise Cafe in the mission to hear Honduran artist, performer and activist Karla Lara sing and report back on the situation in Honduras. It was a great chance to meet members of the resistance (local to SFO and Tegucigalpa), as well as promote the comic, which went down really well. I’ll be attending the Sunday May 16th meeting at the Berekely Fellowship of Unitarians to sell more comics and talk to delegates fresh from Honduras, so save the date if you’re in the bay area – more details to come. If this is the first you’ve heard of the Honduran comic, then click here to find out more.
The Danish paper Dagbladet Arbejderen (Daily Worker) is running a feature on the last three pages of my Honduran comic today, click here for this just-about-intelligible-enough translation courtesy of Google translate.
Roy Bourgeois, SOAW founder, at the NW Latin American Solidarity Conference on April 9
The Honduran comic made its printed debut at the NW Latin American Conference on Friday, where it was excitedly picked up by NGO leaders and activists from around the US, as well as by Archcomix hero Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch (see left). If you haven’t seen it already, check out the online documentary Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins here. Thanks to Bruce Wilkinson for his support in organizing the event and getting me involved. A fundraiser in Washington DC to get more comics out to Honduras is also in the pipeline. I’ll keep you posted.
Now that I’m deep into the research stage of my upcoming comic on the Israeli lobby, I’ve been mulling over the creation of a visual database that would contextualize a number of seemingly disparate individuals (all of them influential and wealthy) within the various power-broking industries they belong to. A sort of yellow pages of power that would let readers see the connections between lobbying groups, political parties and multinationals on a personal level. Along the lines of transparency advocacy sites such as Open Secrets and Transparency International, but functioning at the level of the individual. With a sprinkling of interactivity thrown in for good measure. I’m delighted to say that the folks over at Muckety have beaten me to it – go there now (well, after you’ve read this, at least), enter a name into their search bar, and you’re instantly able to interactively explore their business, political and financial connections. Granted, it’s not an exhaustive directory, but it’s a fantastic tool for getting a sense of affiliations and influence.
Staying with that same goal of making websites easier to navigate and peruse information, you’ll notice I’ve re-organized this site’s pages to categorise the ever-expanding directory of comics into relevant topics, as well as added some new pages from recent projects. One of which is my recent collaboration with underground comics legend Harvey Pekar on a 55-page graphic history of Yiddish literature and culture. More about that on the Social Histories page.
Here’s the last of the Honduran coup pages: the follow-up is on the drawing board, and the spanish version is now being revamped thanks to some helpful translation tips from Nicolas Ariztia. We may have a bead on a Mexican paper interested in posting it, so keep coming back for updates. Also I’ll be posting my latest piece (and first forray into watercolour) either tomorrow or over the weekend, which involves the British Indian Ocean Territory and the new guantanamo. Plus checkout my flickr page and add me as a contact in the links to the right for more sketches, studies and doodles. The more activist art we can get onto Flickr the better.
Shouts out to the brazilian visitors to the site: Jefferson, Alexandre Lucas from the Faz Caber design/arts blog and Douglas Duarte from the O livreiro blog.
Now the Guardian newspaper has picked up the Honduran comic, and given it a positive review to boot:
“A journalistic take on the Honduran crisis whose attention to context puts conventional media coverage to shame. By flipping the pages of history this graphic novel reminds us why the White House is dragging its heels.”
Meanwhile I’m working on a spanish translation of the comic whilst writing the blurb about my upcoming graphic novel, The Hard Hat Riots for Insomnia Publications. I’m also updating the COMIX section of the site, so check it out via the tabs at the top of this page to read the back catalogue of my work.
The piece is indebted to John Perry’s summation of the crisis in the August 6, 2009 issue of London Review of Books. Perry does a great job rooting the crisis in the continuing relationship between the United States and Honduras.
Maria Lohman of Somos Sur’s slideshow “Honduras: mas alla del golpe”
Honduras Coup 2009
Broadcasts from Democracy Now!
We’d also like to recognize the following sources for picture reference:
Susan Meiselas
Democracynow.org
BBC News
