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It’s been a busy week since the cover went up on Monday – plans are afoot to secure distribution of the comic in Honduras, but more on that once it -finally- goes to print. After the success of the interactive cover vote last week, I’m launching more ways to get you, dear readers, to voice you own vitriol down the archcomix megaphone. The main way for now is through the forum I’ve set up on the Archcomix fan page here – go and post comments or share links/info that you want to see included in an upcoming piece that I’m working on about the Jewish lobby in the US. Any suggestions for a wordpress-friendly forum widget would also be good.
The hard copy of the Independent World Report also arrived this week, featuring my Chagos comic, as well as a moving photo journalism piece on African immigrants who are permanently stranded in Malta after abortive efforts to get to europe and have adopted a WW2 hangar as their home. Speaking of Chagos, for those of you from glorious Britannia who contacted your MPs about the Early Day Motion I mentioned last week, here’s to hoping the response you got was more successful (not to mention vague) than mine: “whilst I cannot commit to signing EDM 960 at this point in time, I will certainly give the issue my consideration”. Any chance the said point in time is after the elections have been and gone? The Chagossians’ plight has recently been added to with the introduction of a plan to turn the surrounding nature area around the base on Diego Garcia into Britain’s ‘Great Barrier Reef’. A big coup for conservation, but unfortunately Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s conservation focus lies on flora and fauna, and not the thousand or so remaining displaced inhabitants who were evicted or born in exile since the 1960s. Worse still is the fact that many people were duped into signing a petition for the creation of the said area, with no idea that the organizers had been forced into denying the Chagossians’ their rights in its establishment. More on this from the Guardian UK here. Speaking of marine conservation, here’s a great example of animation being used for edutainment – though is it informative enough to inspire/engage with someone with no background knowledge of the issue? Leave a comment and let me know.
I don’t think I was alone in finding Barack Obama’s nuclear change of heart a little odd, and more than a little hypocritical. Let’s skip back to December, and his Nobel Peace Prize address. Which, incidentally, made him one of the few prize winners to argue for war in his acceptance speech: “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”. When it comes to waging war, reason will apparently only take you so far. Presumably after that it’s intuition, or maybe divine inspiration – we need only look back to the former President for that, courtesy of the Independent UK.
But I digress. The important thing here is Obama’s policy towards nuclear weapons, which incidentally was the reason he was awarded the Nobel in the first place. Here he is again: “One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. I am committed to upholding this treaty. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.” That was December 2009. Hence the double-take when he announced in the latest budget that the agency responsible for the US’ nuclear weapons stockpile would receive a 13.4% increase from the previous fiscal year, totalling $11.2 billion. Granted, some of that would go towards controlling and securing existing nuclear warheads, but then there’s also “plans to go to full production of the refurbished Navy W-76 Trident submarine warhead, to refurbish the B-61 bomb, and to study options for maintaining the W-78, the warhead in the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.”
Coincidentally, in the same month that this nuclear leap was taken, one of the lone survivors of both of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tsutomo Yamaguchi, died aged 93. Amazingly, he was within the designated ground zero area (3km from the blast) for both. The students of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project have chosen his incredible testimony as the basis for their graphic novel, and the first few pages were excitedly written on Monday. To get a sense of the unbelievably apocalyptic level of destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs dropped, check out this recent NPR podcast with the author of Last Train from Hiroshima, a collection of survivor testimonies.
In other news, the Independent World Report is running my Diego Garcia comic in their latest issue, but you can check it out here. And there’s only a week to get your pre-orders for the Honduran coup comic in! See the widget to the right and spread the word.
