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With two days to go before the elections in Honduras, now is as good time as any to clue yourself up on the situation on the ground via the following blogs: www.quotha.net, Honduras Coup 2009 (with a must-read introduction outlining why it would have been impossible for Zelaya to be extending his term, as his detractors keep repeating), and Honduras Resists! – you’ll recognize their banner image from the panel in today’s extract. As ever, if you want a hard copy of the Honduran comic to happen, please pre-order here or the chipin widget to the right and be part of a grassroots effort to raise awareness about US foreign policy – all for $5.
Also, check out ExpressBuzz.com (a South Indian online magazine)’s article on my Diego Garcia and Honduras comic here. According to reporter Amish Mulmi, “what Archer has done is to recreate history in a new medium, an alternate history that delves into the wrongs that superpowers may have committed and the consequences of those errors in today’s world.”
The follow-up to the Honduran Coup: a graphic history that I’m serializing above is now up at the Huffington Post. Click here to read it. Please digg/facebook/retweet the link once you have!
At last, here’s the promised follow-up I’ve been working on, in a slightly different format from usual. From now on I’ll post comix in a tier by tier format (1-3 panels at a time) as opposed to whole pages. This piece is also the first time I’ve used first hand reporting from a journalist in Tegucigalpa, so thanks to Joe Shansky of Pulsemedia.org, who is the narrator in the panel above, and whose article, ‘Smashing the Silence: Community Defiance in Honduras’ I turned into comics for the first part of this piece.
In case you missed it, here’s the link to a recent radio interview I did on the Honduran coup comic that aired on KALW news recently. In other news, my Diego Garcia comic is going up online at Commondreams.org soon, and will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology ‘Salon Des Refusés’. More details when I have them.
Now that we’ve reached the end of the Diego Garcia comic, it’ll be a few days before I post more finished comics up as I return to the drawing board and my thumbnails for some other projects – one involving Harvey Pekar. If you’re hungry for more comics, then head to the COMIX page, where you’ll a selection to choose from, including one on the Prop 8 protests in California last year – timely, given what’s just happened in Maine. If that’s still not enough, then stop by the store, order some hard copies, and I’ll ship them to wherever you are in the world.
A date in your diaires: I’ll be on KALW local public radio next Weds, Nov 11, talking about comics journalism and developments in Honduras. I’ll post a link to the show when it’s up.
Speaking of which, after cautious celebrations of an agreement in Honduras, people are beginning to smell a rat at the small print hidden in the US-brokered deal, which sees the US recognizing the upcoming elections regardless of whether Manuel Zelaya is reinstated. The staunchly republican Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) states: ” I take our administration at their word that they will now side with the Honduran people and end their focus on the disgraced Zelaya”. So much for Zelaya’s proposed non-binding consultation that got him into all this trouble in the first place then. Read the full statement here. This from the man who today also campaigned to keep Guantanamo in use for another year, where the prisoners are “by all accounts …being treated better than any prisoner in American jails”.
At last the US has successfully brokered a deal between Zelaya and Micheletti. Hopefully this will also result in an investigation of the de facto regime’s litany of human rights abuses over the past four months, which are still continuing on the streets of Tegucigalpa. Articles about police ‘meowing’ and firing sonic blasts of pig noises at the Brazilian embassy in total impunity to keep the Zelaya party deprived of sleep sound both surreal and horrendous: here’s a great article by Joe Shansky at Pulsemedia.org on the worrying use of psychological weapons by police, both in the US and abroad.
Today’s comic is the first page of a new piece based on Diego Garcia, which many are labelling ‘the new Guantanamo’ for its role as one of the prime US Military bases for Iraq/Afghanistan, not to mention in interrogating ‘enemy combattants’. I’d entered it in the Observer Graphic Short Story Competition 2009, but perhaps as Joe Sacco was mysteriously taken off the judging panel in their final press release announcing the winners, it may have led to a bigger step away from any non-fictional entries. Who knows.
Although it’s been in the papers as a popular transit point for illegal rendition flights run by the CIA and MI6, my piece concentrates on the backstory to the island, more specifically how the UK and US governments conspired to illegally evict the island’s inhabitants from their home in the 1960s. Two invaluable sources were David Vine’s Island of Shame and John Pilger’s Stealing A Nation, which I thoroughly recommend. As always, the whole comic is posted on the COMIX page, so please forward the link around to raise awareness for the Chagossians’ campaign to return to their homeland.
Here’s the first page of a graphic history of the Honduran Coup that’s been published online at Alternet – click here to read the whole story or on the thumbnails below.
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