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[AUDIO LOGO] DEBORAH STARR: All right, why don't we get started? Whoa, that's loud. Sorry about that. I'm Deborah Starr, the chair of the Near Eastern Studies department. And thank you, those of you in person, those of you on Zoom, for joining us. I'm really, really excited about today's event.
This event is sponsored by the Near Eastern Studies Department, with the support of the Department of Literatures in English, Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell, and the Society for the Humanities and the American Studies Program, so thank you to all of our sponsors.
I wanted to actually start off with an introduction for one of our current students before I introduce our speaker today. But the way we've set things up is I am going to hand over the mic, and when we get to Q&A, we have one of our current Near Eastern Studies majors who will be handling the questions. So this-- is I'd like to introduce Danielle Greco, who is a concurrent degree student earning a BA in Middle Eastern studies and a BFA in Fine Arts here at Cornell and is particularly interested in how art pertains to Near Eastern societies and gender.
With these skills, she has held several unique internships with the United States government. After she graduates in May, she plans to attend Harvard University to obtain an MA in Middle Eastern Studies, and we're really delighted to have Danielle's participation tonight. So she'll get us started with the questions with some questions for Andy, and then she'll be the one to help field questions from the audience, both in person and online.
I am absolutely thrilled to have Andy Warner back at Cornell. Andy was Cornell Class of 2006 and is the author of-- I'll get some of his books-- Pests and Pets, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, This Land Is My Land, which I don't have a copy of at the moment, and Spring Rain. And I wanted to actually tell a little bit about both this book and my work with Andy.
Andy wrote a senior thesis under my direction on the Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat, on her novel, The Stone of Laughter. Fast forward to 2019 when Hoda visited campus, and I hadn't thought about Andy for a long time, but it came back to me and I felt, isn't it a shame that Andy wasn't here when Hoda visited.
And lo and behold, just a few months later, I get an email that Andy's book Spring Rain had just come out, in which he talks about his experiences somewhat as a Cornell student, but mostly as a study abroad student in Lebanon in 2005. So it was really this sort of fortuitous confluence. And that came out in 2020.
A lot of people had time to read books, right? So Andy's books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish. He's a contributing editor at The Nib, and he teaches cartooning at Stanford and at the Animation Workshop in Denmark. Please join me in welcoming Andy for our lecture today, "Power, Platforms, and Pipelines, Transnational Nonfiction Comics and the 21st Century." Welcome back to Cornell.
ANDY WARNER: Thank you, Debra, for having me. It is such a pleasure and honor to be here, sincerely. And it's very special day back. I spent all of the day walking around breathing in the air and feeling very pristine. So I'll get off to a start with this.
My name is Andy Warner, as we were all just made aware of. I specialize in nonfiction comics. I'm a cartoonist. I draw comics, but I pretty much only draw nonfiction comics. I work in nonfiction comics in a lot of ways.
I'm a writer-artist, so that means I write my books and also draw them. I'm a writer for other people's books that they draw. So one of my books, This Land is My Land, is about utopias. I wrote that one and somebody else drew that. I'm an Illustrator, so that means somebody else writes and then I illustrate their book. I'm working on a book right now that's coming out next year in that capacity.
I'm also an editor. That means I work with other people's nonfiction comics. I'm a publisher. I have published other people's nonfiction comics. And as a teacher, I pretty much only teach nonfiction comics. Nonfiction comics, nonfiction comics, nonfiction comics.
So what does that actually mean? I use the medium of comics to work with nonfiction. This includes creative journalism, popular histories, memoirs, explainers, and occasionally advocacy. I use the skills-- sorry for the typo there. I'm working in nonfiction comics. I teach nonfiction comics at Stanford, the California College of the Arts, and the Animation Workshop in Denmark. I work with both enormous faceless corporate publishers and small presses. I've run my own periodical and helped others run theirs.
The most visible part of my career is in publishing. I'm the author of four books. One of them is a memoir and three are histories. Spring Rain came out from Saint Martin's in 2020. It was a memoir of political violence and uprisings in Lebanon between 2005 and 2011.
Pests and Pets came up from Little, Brown in 2021. That's my most recent book. It's YA audience. It's how the animals that we love or who love us change the world. It's basically about the Anthropocene and domestication.
This Land is My Land came out from Chronicle in 2019. That was a collaboration where I wrote the text and a friend and former student drew the art. And it was a survey of utopian projects and all-consuming artistic visions.
And then my first book was Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, which came out from Picador in 2017. It was a funny [INAUDIBLE] history with length and mundanity as an ironclad constraint.
So I'm going to tell you about my own background, because I'm going to spend a lot of this time talking about the background of others, and I think it's important to talk about my own.
I'm American. I was born in California. I also spent a significant portion of my childhood outside the continental United States. My dad is a marine biologist, and our family would often live at his field research stations, especially in Panama, St. Croix, and Corsica.
The pictures of me as a child. We lived with an Indigenous community called the Guna in Panama on a series of small islands called the San Blas Archipelago.
From 2002 to 2006, I did my undergrad here at Cornell, double majoring in Near Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature. Here's a little drawing.
In 2005, I studied abroad at the American University of Beirut, AUB, as I will hereafter refer to it. I lived in the Hamra neighborhood. AUB is very lovely. So most of the art in here is going to be my own art, some of it drawn from my books, some from other projects. So if I'm showing other people's art, I'll let you know. I'm also going to be reading other comics at a certain point during the talk.
Being an American in the Middle East in 2005 meant living in the shadow of America's war in Iraq. Conversations in Beirut would inevitably circle back to Baghdad. But Beirut in 2005 was also on the rise. A generation had grown up without civil war. The Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon had ended five years previously, and Syria's occupation was ongoing, and the city was in a building boom.
This abruptly ended with the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Hariri had been one of the richest politicians in the world and the face of Beirut's post-Civil War reconstruction. I think at his height, he was the fourth richest politician in the world. [? I didn't mean to make it ?] that small.
The shocking killing was blamed on the Syrian occupying army and their ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Syria had largely controlled the country's politics since the end of the Civil War. After being initially pro-Syrian, Hariri was positioning himself in opposition, a threat to eliminate. Protests erupted immediately, demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops and the dissolution of the Lebanese government.
Five years before the quote unquote "Arab Spring" swept through the region, the frustrated people of Lebanon took to the streets to demand the end of their own government. At one point, a quarter of the country was in the streets of the capital calling for the fall of the regime. I was there too, of course, because I was 21, and it was incredibly exciting.
Within days, if not hours, politics in the country had split along familiar sectarian lines. There were counter-protests, there were occupations. There was a lot of honking and flags.
So Lebanon is set up as a sectarian democracy by its constitution. There's a power sharing agreement that basically ended the civil war, and it enshrines sectarianism into law that makes the state sort of captured by these interests that in a period of strife reassert themselves. These interests are also often armed.
A wave of political violence followed, both assassinations and targeted bombings. It seems it was meant to inflame divisions. To this day, the perpetrators of these attacks remain unknown, as do their true motivation, which is a pretty chilling thing. The killers of Hariri have actually been indicted by a court that was set up by the UN. It's the only time that's ever happened, because the country decided it couldn't prosecute itself, but the four people, all members of Hezbollah, vanished immediately and nothing was ever said of it again. So justice for political violence in Lebanon is sort of often not brought to a satisfying conclusion. And [INAUDIBLE]. I'll put it that way.
But the uprising worked, kind of. The Syrian army left and the government fell, but nothing really changed. The same political parties shuffled the deck, and most people ended up worse off. That's how things go.
I started drawing a lot of comics during this time. I was living alone in an apartment, and I'd go for walks or to the protests, then come home and draw. I returned to the US and Cornell that summer. And after graduating in 2006, I moved to San Francisco. I was still drawing comics, and in 2007, through friends of friends, I was introduced to email to a Beirut-based comic collective called Samandal.
The first comic I ever had published appeared in their first issue. I think [INAUDIBLE] actually brought it today. It's up there on that table. And then I did the cover art for their second issue ever, which I also brought. I drew a little scary dude making an evil potion.
Samandal, Arabic for salamander, was started by a group of four friends. Omar Kouri, who is Lebanese, grew up in the UK and Lebanon, went to university in the US. Hatem [? Imam, ?] who's Lebanese, grew in Beirut. Lena Merhej, German-Lebanese, grew up in Lebanon, went to university in Germany. And the Fdz, who's Syrian-Lebanese, grew up in Lebanon and Syria.
It had comics in Arabic, French, and English, the languages commonly spoken in Lebanon. Recruiting foreign cartoonists for their magazine was not unusual. Lebanese youth culture is very tied to the diaspora, which was [? stolen ?] by the Lebanese Civil War but it predates it by 50 years, if not a century.
So about this time, I kept making comics for Samandal. I appeared in their first 11 issues while also working as a graphic designer in San Francisco and trying unsuccessfully to get a puppet show off the ground.
Then the economy crashed. I lost all my freelance clients and decided to go to grad school for comics because everything else was a dumpster fire. And this was 2008-2009. So I got my MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies between 2010 and 2012 in Vermont.
Lovely school, great place to study comics if anybody is interested in that. In the middle of my time there, my partner's work took her from Dakar to Beirut in the spring and summer of 2011. After my semester ended, I joined her there, finally meeting the Samandal crew in person and guest editing an issue of the magazine with them.
This is me and Lena Merhej. We've at a merch table at the 2011 Samandal rooftop release party. Cool screenprints. I probably still have them in a closet somewhere.
Samandal's editorial editorship has changed over the years as the collective's membership shifts. In spring of 2011, I worked closely with Omar Khouri to put together Issue 11. So these are a bunch of different Samandal issues that I've [? curated ?] over the years.
Samandal had been founded as an explicitly transnational publication. It's solicited pitches worldwide from the first issue. Contributors were from Europe, the Arab world, North America, et cetera. Published in 3 languages-- English, French, Arabic, and it fostered networks of copyright-free international distribution.
On every page, every other page of a Samandal it says you can copy it, copy this, you can distribute it, get it out there, et cetera. That was their ethos from the beginning, sort of a '90s zine culture ethos.
Working with Omar for about three months on Issue 11, I saw how they put together the magazine from coordinating with contributors to arranging the stories to wrangling the printers. This is me doing screenprinting with Omar and Hatem for little zines that we were making as the companion for Issue 11, which is the issue that I worked on. And it has a really elaborate diecut cover.
So if you come and look at it, please be careful because Omar did not put a lot of thought into how the diecut cover would hold up like six years later. But it's very pretty.
So after returning to Vermont that fall to finish my degree, I wrote a 16-page mini comic about Rafik Hariri's assassination in 2005 in Beirut in 2011 for a class assignment. I had made a few short nonfiction comics before, but mostly worked in fiction. The Man Who Built Beirut was my first longer experiment.
I found that I was good at making nonfiction, and I also liked it. That's an important thing if you're going to make it your job. I graduated with an MFA in comics in 2012 from the Center for Cartoon Studies, and my first book was published in 2017.
So there was a five-year gap between that. In those five years, I made a living doing freelance comics and illustration work. So I graduated with an MFA and have basically been a full-time cartoonist ever since then.
Mostly, I've worked in the field of comics journalism. That means using the medium of comics to produce work as a journalist for media outlets. My knowledge of Middle Eastern politics got me work. Not only did I have a network of friends amongst cartoonists in the region, but I had kept up with the news and analysis since my undergraduate years, lived twice in Beirut, and traveled all throughout the region.
This was also in 2012, unfortunately, as the Syrian uprising became the Syrian Civil War, intense violence between several different state and non-state actors causing a huge amount of people to flee the deadly conflict. As an American with an understanding of the region, I was paid to interpret what was unfolding in Syria and Iraq for an American audience, so acting as a journalist being paid for writing about the region for a primarily American audience in American publications.
I was not the only cartoonist from outside the region to get swept up in this. Disaster and crisis provoke fascination. And fascination will at last create interpretive industries. Here are some of the other examples of different books. This is just a fraction of what became a whole cottage industry.
But I didn't only work creating work about the Arab winter and refugee crisis. I soon broadened what I was reporting on often to other subjects, often working in science reporting. Comics are a really great medium for that. This visual interpretation really sticks around.
I also sold lots of nonfiction on wide ranging bizarre topics that just interested me. So I wrote about when Google went on a spree buying robots. I got to write an article about Google's robots.
I got to write an article about these python hunters in Florida who had to catch the 17-foot long pythons and grab them by their tail and yank them. And that's how they tear them out. And it whips around you, and you run away. And then it runs away.
And then you run after and grab them by the tail. And you do it again. You do that until it gets tired, and then you put a tracking device on it. And then you track it back to its [? family ?] and kill all of them.
And so I got to write about these people. It's fun. Journalism is great. You meet so many bizarre, interesting people.
One of them was this Colombian-Australian woman named Maria Fernanda Cardozo, who is an artist, a sculptor. And she had created these flea circuses and also these big sculptures of three-dimensional insect genitalia, which sounds like a weird aside, but I'll get back to it in a minute.
So now we're going to go-- so in 2014, I was invited to a program with the US State Department to do comic workshops in Bahrain. It was pretty weird. I'm not going to lie. Bahrain is home to the US Navy base that basically allows America to project power in the Gulf.
I met with Bahraini cartoonists, shared a room with a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama, and was introduced to a US Marine cosplaying as a stormtrooper, which frankly is a little on the nose.
It wasn't my only or most consequential brush with the State Department. In 2016, as part of cultural programming by the US embassy in Egypt, I attended the CairoComix Festival. The festival was funded in part by the US and French embassies in Egypt.
CairoComix was headlined by the Tok Tok collective, a Cairo-based group of cartoonists publishing an anthology. Some of their founders have been in earlier Samandal issues.
While there, I got to give a talk at the American University of Cairo on nonfiction comics. Driving back from the city, my State Department minder pointed at a rusting construction site and said something that has always stuck with me ever since then.
"The cuts in the land just don't go away here. It never rains." Samandal's influence on comics collective publishing a periodical anthology was evident on Tok Tok and throughout the region. Collectives from Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, and the Gulf had either come to CairoComix or sent their books there to be sold by friends. It was an amazing networking event.
But any time people start flying you places or giving you money, it's never a bad idea to pause and ask what's going on. So why is the State Department interested in comics? Comics are part of the American soft power package. Familiarity breeds affection, and it's not an accident that these programs are happening in countries like [? CairoComix ?] in Egypt, Bahrain, with vested American interests and a population that might not be too keen of the local expression of US power.
It's not great, but the CIA also funded literary journals and abstract expressionism. And at least the State does it out in the open. At the end of the day, we're all working on the Death Star.
Trump was elected that fall which put an end to the Department of State currying goodwill abroad for a few years. I got to meet a bunch of people and talk about comics. And that was pretty much the end of that adventure.
It was also in 2016 that I began to work as a contributing editor at a nonfiction political comics publisher and website called The Nib. I mostly work on print magazine, which commissions short and long nonfiction around a single theme like death or power. They've published 13 issues since 2018, won several awards, and had book projects optioned from the contributor-owned work we've published.
When I work as an editor at The Nib, I mainly am working editing other people's nonfiction stories. So I do produce my own work for them, but I commission, I solicit pitches, I am pitched to, and I work closely with the people on both their scripts and all the visuals of their stories as they come out.
So I'm just going to explain what The Nib is for a second because it's going to form a big arc of the next part of the story. The Nib was founded in 2013 by Matt Bors.
Matt Bors is a political cartoonist. He's been a political cartoonist since he was in college. He was actually one of the youngest-- last young political cartoonists that existed because he came up in the world of free alt weeklies. Who here remembers free alt weeklies?
Hey! It was an ecosystem that was once enormous but pretty much no longer exists because they're entirely dependent on the paid classified advertising which Craigslist began to devour them in the mid-2000s.
It is crazy, though, that way that the alt weeklies were both a cradle of cartoonists, critics, and writers. And they once existed, and now they are gone. And it's because of an advertising model shift.
At the same time as the alt weeklies began to die off, the ecosystem of cartoonists that it supported began to migrate online. Tech took notice, and tech money began to flow into comics.
The first stop is a place called Medium. Medium was founded by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, the little bluebird. So Matt Bors had been introduced to comics journalism by Joe Sacco, whose books Palestine and the Safe Area Gorazde had created newly prestigious space for the medium.
In 2010, Bors raised money and funded a trip to Afghanistan with fellow cartoonist Ted Rall. From the beginning, he wanted to cross that tradition of comics journalism and the political cartooning that he had come up in the alt weeklies that actually brings in the outraged eyeballs.
This is a pretty classic model of journalism actually, where you have click-baity outrage stuff that supports the longer prestige [? things. ?] Anyway, this is Joe Sacco. This is Matt Bors. You can see the stylistic inspiration between the two of them.
Bors, again, it happened fast. This is the guy who founded The Nib. But before we get back to him, I want to give you guys a quick aside here about Joe Sacco because he is very important to my industry.
Joe Sacco was born in Malta. His childhood was in Australia. And he moved to America at age 12 and has lived mostly in Oregon since then.
He took out credit card debt to go to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in the 1990s, serializing his reporting from there through Fantagraphics for an American audience. This is really interesting.
So he actually self-funded his own grip on credit cards, and then basically established my industry that exists 40 years later. I'm not telling you guys to get into debt, but his two landmark books in the 1990s, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde establish comics journalism as a viable practice for cartoonists in America.
Here are some of the original fantagraphics covers from the series Palestine. It's a great collection. All those books are really good. It's a lot rougher and more cartoony than a lot of his later work.
The 2000s opened with 9/11 and were defined by the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout this time, Sacco not only published new books but also produced comic journalism for prominent American and British publications, including The Boston Globe, Harper's, The Guardian, and The New York Times.
He actually embedded with US soldiers for the invasion and then wrote a piece explaining why he did that. The 2000s were also the college years of the enormous US millennial generation I belong to.
Many editors who went on to found and run the new media publishing websites in the 2010s and today grew up reading Sacco's work. Some, myself included, were assigned to books in college courses there.
So he's entering into the academy-- Symbolia. The 2000s ended. Comics journalism had come into its own. You no longer had to make a case to editors that it was a serious use of the medium. In fact, for the first time, there were entire publications devoted to it. One was an iPad magazine called Symbolia.
For a minute around 2012, a bunch of people thought that iPad only magazines would be a big thing. They were totally not a big thing. Anyway, because I was doing lots of comics journalism for everyone else, I also started to draw some for Symbolia.
A bunch of 20 and 30-year-olds were also making comics journalism around this time, too, not just me. All of us were influenced by Joe Sacco. This work is getting published in places like Symbolia as well as getting distributed through zine distribution networks and indie comics conventions.
A couple of examples of my favorite [? friends ?] from that era were the Illustrated Press in Chicago, which was a group of three artists that functioned as a collective and Susie Cagle out of Oakland who did amazing work covering the Occupy protests.
So Matt Bors of The Nib is impressed by my drawings of insect genitalia for a Symbolia story-- there it is again-- and tweets a joke at me about them. We started talking, and soon he asked them to do nonfiction comics for The Nib.
The Nib, unlike any of the earlier publications like Symbolia or Cartoon Picayune has a ton of money to play with because of their tech funding. There's Ev Williams' Twitter money. And I get hired to do weird nonfiction comics for them on a monthly basis. I'm basically a columnist for them.
For a little while, I get to create commerce journalism about everything, from Boko Haram to the Hog Island Oyster Company. I pitch them three stories a month. They pick one. We develop it together, and it would get published.
So again a moment of great exuberance. People are giving you things. It's often good to pause and think about what's going on here. Medium is trying to build an audience. It has hired a bunch of different kinds of people to bring eyeballs to their network with free content that is designed to be shareable on other existing social networks than keep people inside the medium ecosystem.
They hope to eventually monetize this network in some way, either by selling ads, licensing IP, gatekeeping, or selling the company any IP generated by it. At this point, Medium is designed as a network of publications, most of which are structured like blogs or magazines. Medium hires prominent writers and editors from sites around the internet and with negotiated contracts where they own the publication and IP generated for it.
The Nib alone is different. Matt Bors has negotiated creator contracts with Medium in which creators own the intellectual property they generate for the site. It's a constant throughout existence of The Nib. Creators have always owned everything that is generated for The Nib. They only license things on a three-month period of exclusivity.
I believe, especially in the publishing industry, rent-seeking should be stamped out as much as possible. If a cartoonist creates something, they should have the right to sell it [INAUDIBLE] anywhere.
So he licenses the comics. He commissions for a short period of exclusivity. Cartoonists are notoriously shifty. We've been screwed over as an industry [? a bunch ?] of times. There's always these horror stories.
And also Matt Bors has just been watching the implosion of the alt weekly ecosystem for the past decade, so he's a little trigger shy. Good thing, because with no warning, Medium pivots from being a publishing network to a social network.
Employees hired over the previous two years to staff publications at the center of the previous company are fired en masse, including Nib staffers Matt Bors, Eleri Harris, and Mattie Lubchansky.
Matt Bors retains Nib name. Artists retain their rights to their comics. This is the first time that The Nib might have died. Instead, it rose like a zombie and went to Kickstarter.
Bors used the Kickstarter funds to pay for the licensing of existing comics in the first two years and print the book. The small money flowing into the scene as well as a promotion from the Kickstarter campaign keeps the network of nonfiction comics and journalism connected.
Then tech money flows back into comics. First Look Media buys The Nib and adds it to their expanding media empire, which also included The Intercept, Field of Vision, and Topic. First Looks Media was founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, another friendly oligarch.
It was at this point that I got hired on as a contributing editor at The Nib. That meant that I was creating weekly and monthly comics for The Nib as a contractor, not an employee. While at the same time I was soliciting pitches from and editing comics by other contributors.
Then it was relaunched at the Democratic National Convention to gain attention as it covered the Trump versus Clinton election. From the beginning, it was more often explicitly political than its first iteration.
The DNC launch was very, very weird. W. Kamau Bell was there. By weird, I mean really, really weird. We made these giant posters.
So aside from making enormous posters like Clinton's, what is The Nib doing at this point? It's setting up a pipeline. The Nib has a big funding and has a vague mission-- more on that later-- social media accounts, and an email list with reach. This means that it has a platform.
How others are to brought to that platform is the pipeline. During the First Look Media era, The Nib was edited by Matt Bors, Mattie Lubchansky, Shay Mirk, Eleri Harris, and me. We each lived in different places, had different focuses, and personal histories which shaped our network.
Mine was shaped in two major ways-- working on an indie comics anthology called Irene-- I'll talk about it a little bit later-- and my association with the Lebanese comics collective Samandal, which I briefly mentioned already.
Samandal and their network had been working with all different types of comics, including nonfiction since their first issue in 2007. In 2017, in fact, five cartoonists from France, Syria, and Lebanon, including Samandal co-founder Lena Merhej, created a project called Meantime, which used comics to document Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon.
It was published in English, French, and Arabic. I brought a copy of that as well. I was able to bring Samandal's network, from individual contributors to members of their editorial collective, over to create and publish paid work for The Nib, This provided a pipeline for comics that would have otherwise only appeared in Europe or the Arab world to be published for The Nib's primarily American audience.
We do have a global audience. It's a website after all. But we read the metrics, and our audience is mostly American, North American. There's Canadians.
So I want to give you an example of the stuff that we're putting out at this point. So Hussein Adil, that's a cartoonist who lives and works in Baghdad. I met him on Facebook through mutual connections that I'd gotten from CairoComix. I saw that he was producing nonfiction comics that looked amazing, and I reached out to see if he wanted to make them for The Nib.
I'm going to actually read two stories of his that we commissioned for him that I got to edit. Because he's Iraqi and this is around the anniversary of the war, I feel like it's important. The first one is actually about the First Gulf War. And the second one is about the Second Gulf War.
So this is Black Rain on the Highway of Death by Hussein Adil, which I edited for the "Empire" issue.
"February 26, 1991, two days before the end of the First Gulf War. After a series of defeats at the hands of the American-led coalition, the Iraqi army was hastily withdrawing from Kuwait. Adil Dawood, an Iraqi private from Nasiriyah, was amongst the lines of retreating tanks, armored vehicles, buses, and civilian cars."
Whoops. That's hard to read. I wonder if I can [? hide ?] that. Can you hide it?
DEBORAH STARR: We could actually get rid of it.
ANDY WARNER: Yeah.
"My name is Adil. I was 25 years old when the war broke out. I had planned to enroll as a student in the Fine Arts Institute. But instead, I was drafted into the army. War stole half my life. War dreams still play in my head.
I had to abandon my painting supplies at the camp when we left. Those drawings exist now only in my memory. Our battalion officer was hysterically jumping, screaming, and searching for shelter.
You're all crazy. I won't go with you. I'll stay here. You're all going to die if we leave the camp. We carried the officer out and pushed him into the front seat of the car. Leave me here!
It was one in the morning when we left the camp. I sat in the bed of the truck to protect myself if it turned over. I pushed my body into the bags of stuff that we'd brought.
After an hour and a half, we reached Highway 80. It was terrible. A line of military vehicles headed to the Iraqi border. I felt sad and broken, but not because we were losing the war. It was because I'd fought in the war, and I'd been forced to do so.
Anyone who refused to be drafted would be subjected to the most severe penalty. All the soldiers of the world are victims of the whims of their superiors and their leaders.
At 3AM, the bombing began. There were seven air raids of the American planes, bombing the Iraqi vehicles as they fled. On the eighth raid, a missile hit the vehicle in front of us.
The bags of stuff that I pushed my body into saved me from the impact. All survivors fled into the desert. It was a horrible scene. Corpses and burnt vehicles littered the road.
We had to walk beside the highway. The border was about four days by foot. Only one other soldiers in my battalion survived. His name was Abed. He was 52-years-old and wounded. I had to hold him.
After a few days of walking, it rained. I remember that day clearly because I'd never seen rain like that before. It was black rain. Black rain covered my face and the faces of the other soldier. It had mixed with the smoke from the Kuwaiti oilfields that Saddam had lit on fire.
We were more than one million soldiers. At one point, we paused to rest, only one day from the Iraqi border. I felt peace in that moment. It was like we were in another world, filled with endless soldiers.
As we all started to get up and to finish our journey, Abed refused to watch. Adil, I can't move. You finish walking. Leave me here. It's only one day. Just imagine your children and your wife waiting for you.
He decided to walk. Abed, don't surrender now. Soon, black clouds covered us. It was the black smoke coming from the burning oil fields. The black smoke was everywhere. Abed, where are you? We were all ghosts, walking on the road back to our home."
So that was Black Rain on the Highway of Death, which is from the perspective of the Iraqi army being bombed by American planes, which is honestly not a perspective that you often experience as an American reader. Hussein, he sources all of his stuff from interviews and then creates these narratives based on them. So I'm going to read one more about the Second Iraq War that I also got to edit.
Here's another story. This one ran in the "Cities" issue The Nib magazine called It's not a Game.
"I am Haider. It happened in Baghdad in 2004 when I was 11 years old. I went with my family to attend a relative's wedding. I wasn't interested in the party. My goal was to play with their PlayStation, and I was obsessed with a GTA game.
When I was playing, I heard a noise. Go away. Don't do this here. A group of Mahdi Army militia members were trying to fire a missile near the door of the house. Then I heard loud explosions and non-stop gunfire. Everyone in the party ran away or tried to hide.
I looked out of one of the holes. I saw many members filling the street. There is an armored car on the other side of the street. After the end of the US-Iraq War in 2003, many militias appeared, including the Mahdi Army militia, whose goal was to fight the American army.
They controlled the city and imposed their religious system on society. They tried to ban the song and only allowed their war songs to be heard. They hurt everyone with long hair.
Hours later, the bombing intensified. On that day, a militiaman shot down an American helicopter. The pilot escaped and hid in a mosque.
Militia members surrounded the pilot in the mosque until the American military convoy came to his rescue. My brother went out to find a car to take us home. Night came, and he didn't come back.
I was taking cover with my family under the stairs of the house to protect us in case a missile fell on the house. We were worried about him so much.
Then a knock on the door-- we thought it was my brother. Who is there? It was a group of Iraqi and American soldiers.
We're looking for someone who fired a missile near here. We asked if they had seen my brother. He's hiding in a house a few streets away from here.
After midnight, I left my family and went to play GTA until morning. The next day, my brother came back at 6:00 AM with a car. All to the car.
The city was full of corpses and American armored cars. Wow, mama, look. On the way, I saw a scene that I've never forgotten-- an old woman selling cheese near an American tank.
As we approached the house, we had to stop because of the intensifying shelling and shooting. Run, run! We left the car and went out on foot.
We arrived at a street with a sniper in it. We did not know which side he belonged to. We crossed the street one by one to avoid the sniper. Finally, we got home.
The next day, my brother went to get the car we left. We found that a missile had hit the car, but it did not explode. All I wanted to do was play my game." And that was the end of that one.
[INAUDIBLE]
Another Nib contributor I've edited a lot is Yazan al-Saadi, a Syrian-Canadian who grew up many places, especially Kuwait. He lives and works in Beirut.
I actually edited Yazan's first published comic, and he pitched it directly to me. That's because I met him in 2017 in Beirut while I was there for the Kahil Awards, a comic award at the American University of Beirut funded by Sawwaf and organized by Lina [? Ghalbeh. ?]
I first met Lina in 2011 through her twin sister's association with Samandal. And then we saw each other again at CairoComix in 2016, where she invited me to participate in the judging in Beirut that year.
Yazan al-Saadi is a journalist, former MSF worker, and amazing comics writer who gets other cartoonists from the region to draw his work. I edit for him [? mostly. ?]
So he's worked with-- he's created comics about Sudan, about Egypt, about Palestine, about Yemen, about Bahrain, which I'll read one of those in a minute. But the great thing about Yazan is that he worked as a journalist prior being a comics writer, so he really approaches it from that perspective.
And I'm going to read one of his comics that I edited, which is about Bahrain. It was drawn by Ghadi Ghosn, a Lebanese cartoonist and former Samandal editor who now lives in France.
"Bahrain is Arabic for "two seas." A fitting name. The body of water it sits in is subject to dispute. Whether it's in the Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf depends on who you ask-- two names for one sea.
Names are one thing. History is another. And in Bahrain, looking too far back in time can get you in trouble. From far away, Bahrain seems minuscule, quirky, harmless, rich, a cluster of islands in the Gulf, Qatar to its east, Saudi Arabia to its west, Iran's shoreline far across the water.
295.5 square miles in size, population 1.5 million, [? 800,000, ?] ruled by the al-Khalifa family since 1783, home to the naval base of the US Fifth Fleet, linchpin of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, it has been rocked by revolution and crushed by counter-revolution.
So when I used the "I" here, [INAUDIBLE] I worked as a journalist during the 2011 uprising. While having a drink in Beirut, Lebanon, a friend told me a story that took place in Bahrain, where she worked. She was teaching history in Manama, the capital. After Bahrain's ruling al-Khalifa family came from Zubara, Qatar and conquered Bahrain in the early 1780s [INAUDIBLE] the next day.
A student from a powerful family complained, if you ever mention the al-Khalifa family being from Qatar again, you're out. And the ruling al-Khalifa family is adamant that they are eternal. They are Bahrain. Bahrain is them. You understand?
The Bahrain story has more depth. The country's strategic location along the shores of the Arabian Peninsula has long been precarious for its people. The island saw domination after domination, Babylon, Persia, Alexander the Great, the [INAUDIBLE], the Portuguese, the Safavids, and, finally, in 1783, Ahmed the Conqueror. Backed by a fleet from Kuwait, an army of several clans and tribes, Ahmed ibn Muhammad ibn Khalifa seized Bahrain and established a dynasty that has ruled ever since.
In the early 1800s, the al-Khalifa turned to the British to shore up their rule against regional rivals. The British recognized the dominance of al-Khalifa and handed their security-- handled their security. When the petroleum-- when petroleum was later discovered, the British [INAUDIBLE]. The [? baton of ?] the Empire was passed to the US during World War II, although the British officially [? left ?] since 1971. The Americans maintained al-Khalifa's control and based their largest national presence in the Middle East in Bahrain's waters.
Bahrain's people never remained silent about al-Khalifa's absolute autocratic rule. Far back as the 1920s, Bahrainis launched one of the oldest civil rights movements and the first [? leftist ?] political party in the Gulf region. Almost like clockwork, uprisings flared up every few decades. Representation is at the heart of the struggle. Al-Khalifa is Sunni, while the majority of Bahrainis are Shia.
It is not just about [INAUDIBLE], which al-Khalifa did exploit to divide and rule. It is also monopolization of resources and the land rights of the ruling family, on top of Bahraini society's marginalization on a political, economic, and social level. Abuses like collective punishment, murder, and exile, large-scale incarcerations, and torture fuel dissent.
Inspired by uprisings in the region, the Bahrainis mobilize, once again, on February 2011. At one point, more than 300,000 Bahrainis from different sects and backgrounds flooded the streets, roughly 43% of the national population [INAUDIBLE] 140 million Americans that were protesting [INAUDIBLE].
Al-Khalifa security forces clamped down swiftly, backed by the Peninsula Shield, the regional army of the Saudi-dominated Gulf Coordination Council [INAUDIBLE] Protest bases were bulldozed. Emergency care for protesters was criminalized. And NGOs, like Doctors Without Borders, were ousted from the country. Thousands were incarcerated. Thus, Bahrain has one of, if not the highest prison population rate [INAUDIBLE] The [INAUDIBLE] was [INAUDIBLE] as an Iranian, a Qatar conspiracy, and ignored.
In 2014, which is when I was there in Beirut, I spoke over the phone with Nabeel Rajab, a prominent opposition leader and human rights activist, about these challenges. Even the Syrian regime supported the Peninsula Shield's invasion of Bahrain. Repressive regimes work together, when we are still finding it difficult being allies. Solidarity, it is our only hope.
Not long after, Rajab was arrested in October 2014, and was released in July 2015, arrested once more on June 2016, and earlier, in 2018, sentenced for criticizing the Saudi war in Yemen and disseminating false news statements and rumors about the internal situation of the kingdom that would undermine its prestige and status. Maryam al-Khawaja, a Bahraini-Danish human rights activist, she has been jailed, and lives in exile, and faces an arrest warrant in a handful of pending cases. Her father, a human rights activist leader, is currently in prison for life and has been tortured.
She, perhaps articulates it best. When I've describe-- ask to describe the revolution to audiences, especially western audiences, I resort to calling Bahrain an "inconvenient revolution." It's inconvenient to the West, the US, and Europe. It's inconvenient to the GCC and other Arab regime, while Iran uses Bahrain as a bargaining chip. There are reasons why coverage of Bahrain is limited. And al-Khalifa manipulates discourse and mechanisms of international human rights accountability to buy more time. The west simply says, oh, the Bahraini government has promised to reform, promised to stop abuses, promised accountability. Give them time.
But things are getting worse. Trump's meeting the Bahraini king in may of 2017 gave the green light for more repression. Two days later, Bahraini security forcefully attack a peaceful sit-in, killing five people, injuring more than 100, and arresting almost 300 people. This is the deadliest attack. But what they don't realize is Bahrainis will continue to protest. It's not going to stop, not at all, not until they get their rights.
[INAUDIBLE] a comic by [INAUDIBLE]. Well, I was also in Beirut for the Kahil Awards. I gave a talk on nonfiction comic, not unlike how I'm doing now, and put out a call for Lebanese [INAUDIBLE] to pitch The Nib. I convinced the person who'd brought me there, Lina Ghaibeh, to do a comic for us, which I got to edit. Lina is in Syrian-Danish and grew up in Yemen, Syria, Denmark, and Lebanon. Her comment was about the Syrian school system under Assad the father's regime. It was certainly a really good comic.
Lina also. runs the comic program at AUB, organizes the Kahil award, and is generally amazing. Mu'taz Sawaff funds the Kahil Award in her department at AUB. Sawaff is a Lebanese construction magnate who got rich in Saudi, then poured money into the Arab comics scene. He actually is like a-- he'd wanted to be a cartoonist, when he was younger, and then became an architect, instead, with the Binladin Group. He built parts of Mecca.
He's wildly wealth. I've only seen him as a giant floating head on a screen. He also funded early issues of Samandal, before the collective got into a fight with him over rights ownership. Because, as you might recall, Samandal is all about copyleft dissemination, and he wanted to own all of the things they produced. They were not OK with that.
Cartoonists working for The Nib are not only writing about their own countries for American audiences, but also writing about the American experience, as well. This is an example of a comic I edited, by Virginie Le Borgne, the French journalist who lives and works in Beirut and [INAUDIBLE], comparing abortion law in the US and Lebanon and framing a transnational struggle for bodily autonomy against theocratic law.
At the same time all of these amazing comics are being published First Look Media decides The Nib should function as a profit-making enterprise in the media company umbrella, unlike our FLM sister company, The Intercept, which is allowed to function as a nonprofit. This means that there is a lot of merchandising.
It doesn't stop at merchandising. First Look Media commissions The Nib Animated Series, which lasts for two seasons on the internet, as it's pitched around. Netflix passes. We even make "Nibmoji" during a brief, weird period when it's possible to replace your emoji set with a personal one. [LAUGHS] I don't even know what was going on, at this point. The marketing departments for startups are unreal.
As all this monetization is being attempted, what is really happening is that The Nib is paying a ton of cartoonists a lot of money to make nonfiction comics that creators own the rights to on a regular basis. It is also paying them in U.S. Dollars at the same rate as any American cartoonist, no matter where they live. Because, though they are blocked by a border, these cartoons are part of a transnational information and art delivery network.
So what is going on here? First Look Media is trying to build itself up as publisher of political material. It wants to bring The Nib's existing audience which, is active and consumes that content, to the platform, then find a way to monetize it, monetize what The Nib brings to their brand and, if successful, use that to fund its nonprofit projects. So, basically, we were supposed to fund Glenn Greenwald's salary, in terms of [? big ?] money. [LAUGHS] We [INAUDIBLE] very public. He ran The Intercept, at the time.
As part of the deal to acquire The Nib, First Look buys The Nib name, unlike the agreement with Medium. Again, Bors as negotiated a creator contract with First Look in which creators own intellectual property they generate for the site, and First Look licenses the comics that Bors and his staff commission for a short period of exclusivity. This brings me back to where that work being been published, which is the platform. If you're in control of the platform, you should be mindful and intentional of who your readership is and who you bring to them. Bringing voices to that platform that would not have been there otherwise makes you useful to those voices and also makes the platform a more interesting place.
Out of all the ways that marketing tried to monetize it, the only one that we ever really cared about was the pipeline on our website and establishing a print quarterly magazine, which would give us an independent subscriber base that would make our bottom line not depend on First Look's funding. The magazine could use the physical object that periodically reminds subscribers why they like The Nib and give them early access to comics in a physical form that we wouldn't have to paywall online.
If they want to, in the spirit of [INAUDIBLE], and all these other guys get our comics out there as much as possible. But [INAUDIBLE] comics [INAUDIBLE] on the internet sucks, people like to read free comics. So if you give them those comics as a prestigious object that comes out and then nobody else sees those comics for a month, and then they start publishing online-- there's a reason to subscribe.
Gradually, over three years, a thriving ecosystem built up around non-fiction and comics journalism. There are conferences. Other media publications set their own competing comics journalism publications. Everyone is getting paid. It's like an amazing golden era. The FLM fires all of us, and a bunch of other people [INAUDIBLE] a way to get out the fire.
So to retain the rights of The Nib, [INAUDIBLE] get exit packages for employees and secure the IP Bors, Eleri, Shay, Mattie had personally generated for The Nib. All direct employees signed a non-disparagement clause. This means that you can't actually say what happened. But since I was a contractor, because I was always part-time working on books, I didn't have to sign an NDC, which is why I'm the only editor that can talk to you about this stuff.
And I'm going to tell you the real story of what happened. What happened-- this is a real story, is that Elon Musk's sister, Tosca Musk, convinced somebody at First Look Media to buy her project, "Passionflix," which was described as, Netflix for romance novel adaptation. The budget for the buying of Passionflix was roughly The Nib's yearly operating budget, which was slashed accordingly, which is amazing. We're using this money to pay people all over the place. I'm sure Tosca did great things with that.
Agreeing to the NDC also gave Bors access to The Inkwell membership program, which became the only operating revenue source for The Nib because they basically slashed all other funding. We've got a listserv and people's recurring credit card payments that got them their books. Way less money, which means that we can commission way less stuff- about a third of what we were doing when we were funded by [INAUDIBLE]. But it's stable, and now we don't serve at the whim of morally questionable oligarchs anymore.
The main perk of the membership program is the print quarterly, which is where most of my Nib work is these days. The Nib's platform has withstood its loss of funding, and the scene created has been resilient.
The State Department and tech oligarchs that fund the blooming of an art community rarely align with what's best for that community. I think it's important-- if you ever encounter something like this in your life-- to figure out what you can get out of the relationship and then bite the hand that feeds you. Basically use their money to build something that outlasts their interests.
Trump will get elected. The people you know at State will get fired. The tech oligarchs will decide they're not interested in politics anymore. And you want to have something that outlasts when the eye of Sauron moves away.
So I've been talking about editing other people for a while now, and I really love working as an editor. But I actually spend almost all of my time set up in my attic room doing my own comics. So now I'm going to talk about Spring Rain, which is the memoir that I wrote about the political violence uprising in Lebanon between 2005 and 2011.
Spring Rain began life as that minicomic that I made at CCS for a class assignment while pursuing my MFA. I self-published it and sold it at conventions through small-press distribution. I was also developing the material that would become the book in an indie comics anthology I was co-editing called Irene. Irene was founded by dw, Dakota McFadzean, and I we were all in our last year at the Center for [INAUDIBLE] Studies based on my experience with Samandal, working under Omar Khouri and learning how to basically run a Comics Collective.
The first issue was us and our CCS classmates. But by the second issue, we were trying to publish [INAUDIBLE] as many places as possible-- again, in the spirit of Samandal. Irene was also an opportunity for me, prior to The Nib, to publish Lebanese cartoonists that was friends with like Omar Khouri and Barrack Rima. I have some early Irene issues right there. You can see some of the early times when people from Samandal were getting published in the American media [INAUDIBLE].
Irene read gave me a personal space where I could experiment with work not tied to my freelance career as a comics journalist and create fiction and memoir. So I started writing pieces that were more personal. I put together the pitch for the book as I was finishing up Brief Histories of Everyday Objects in 2016, and then I pitched the book in 2017.
With the material that I developed in Irene and The Man who Built Beirut, I had readymade visuals and blocks of my story to work into a pitch. [INAUDIBLE] book, an introduction, story outline, [INAUDIBLE] format, marketing promotion, and [INAUDIBLE]. My process was-- I had a lot of materials. I had two diaries. I had a ton of reference pictures. I had interviewed a friend, whose name I changed, who was there, at the time, in 2005 to make sure that my memories were aligning with hers. And I'd interviewed another friend during the 2011 time.
I then moved into scripting, thumbnailing, and editing. I really had a lot of personal material, including letters, two journals, a public-facing blog, as well as a bunch of weird ephemera [INAUDIBLE]. The book tracks a mental breakdown, which becomes very apparent in my-- in my journals when I stopped writing dates and my handwriting changed, which is a problem when you're trying to write a narrative. So to actually figured out what things happened when and how I would translate them into memoir, I had to create a spreadsheet cross-referencing my blog posts and diaries and then planning out the narrative work and turning them to nonfiction and the editing.
To give you a little insight to my process, I always print copies of my things and then go through with, basically, a highlighter. And often, have one highlighter color that says, write better, and one [INAUDIBLE] that says, draw better, and that's how I edit.
I also sometimes make 3D models of places if I'm going to draw them a lot. This is a 3D model of the apartment I lived in in Hamra that I made. I'll use other people's 3D models as well. I work entirely digitally and have since 2007. So it's very easy to integrate the set of stuff into my workflow.
And this is what it looks like as a finished piece [? of this. ?] I worked with two gray tones and a heavy spot black that wouldn't necessarily correspond to where shadows were really falling, but with some more [INAUDIBLE] as a design element that I was using to whip the reader's eye around. And I had to draw a lot of crowd scenes for this work, which-- then-- the next book was about animals. I didn't have to draw crowds into that. And then the following book was about plants, and I realized that drawing enormous fields of wheat is almost as bad as drawing crowds.
But I do like to draw buildings, so that was really nice-- especially Beirut is a very, very pretty city, in this strange way that's-- there's interesting graffiti everywhere and different pockmarks from different conflicts and gorgeous architecture. And it's a lovely place to stroll around in. And so I got to draw a lot for the book, which was nice.
I did, however, learn that-- if you're making a book about having a really hard time for two years-- comics take a really long time to make. This book took me two years to make, and it definitely made me depressed again. So that was part of why I, then, veered into YA after that, instead of making books about animal domestication to make myself happy, and it worked. What you work on affects your mood.
So the world of nonfiction comics isn't a awash in start-up cash anymore. But there's still a lot that's been going on lately. Since the '80s and '90s, non-fiction has been a mainstay of comics publishing. Think of the success of Maus and Fun Home that's not only grown-- that's only grown, and new publishers are beginning to appear that they're choosing to specialize in nonfiction.
One example is a publisher called Graphic Mundi, which is an imprint of Penn State University, which is soliciting and publishing nonfiction comics, some of which began life on The Nib. Again, that goes back to the creators and the stuff that they produced for The Nib, and it does not seek rent. So we're always really psyched when people take their books to other places.
Another [INAUDIBLE] imprint-- YA imprint of Little, Brown. I actually am putting out books for them right now. I've put out one. I'm putting out another next year, and then contract another out in two years-- all nonfiction. They have a real non-fiction focus.
I'm also still working with everyone that I've mentioned so far, but especially Yazan al-Saadi because he's amazing, on new comics. This is what I did with Omar Khouri, my old friend-- the Samandal co-founder. I'm not going to read this one because I've already read a few comics, but it's about the Beirut blast. This comic is about the horrors of the Beirut blast in 2020-- one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.
And again, editing and working with material like this allows me to maintain a connection to the city, even as I haven't lived there in years, because I'm in a dialogue with journalists and artists and writers that are producing work that is coming out of Beirut. And I actually was able to go back.
Yazan al-Saadi I also worked with Lina Mounzer, Bernadette Daou and five really cool Lebanese women's cartoonist to Where to, Marie? [INAUDIBLE], which an anthology of women's stories telling the history of Lebanon from its founding through the 2019 Beirut uprisings and the [INAUDIBLE] protests. Beirut has lost a lot of [INAUDIBLE].
One of the artists featured in Where to, Marie? is Tracy Chahwan, who I haven't mentioned yet, but is also key to the scene. Tracy is from Beirut and now lives in Pittsburgh. She's been part of Samandal Editorial Collective, and I first met her in Beirut in 2017 when she was still an art student in college. She still is considerably younger than Omar, Lena, Fidz, and [? Hatern, ?] who are older than me, and it was part of a generational handoff that includes other cartoonists like Joseph Kai and [INAUDIBLE] and many, many others.
Tracy has collaborated extensively with Yazan, as well as me and Shay Mirk with the other editors at The Nib. This comic of hers, written by Yazan, was featured in a symposium and exhibition put on by the University of Oregon in 2021 called Art of the News. Art of the News also featured Yazan al-Saadi, Omar Khouri, Shay Mirk, Joe Sacco, and many other amazing nonfiction, plus journalists, cartoons, and me.
It was organized by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins who's associate director and assistant professor of Comic Studies at the University of Oregon. It's interesting because it's-- watching the scene that I've basically always been a part of my entire professional life begin to be looked at by academia and exhibited. We had grad students present papers on our own comics in front of us, which is not an experience I treasure [INAUDIBLE].
In 2020, Guantanamo Voices was published by Abrams Books. It's an anthology, again, of comics written by Shay Mirk, my longtime co-editor and friend, who reported in person on Guantanamo-- still open, by the way-- drawn by a crew of artists including Tracy Chahwan and Omar Khouri. And I actually, now, assign this book in the Nonfiction Comics Classes that I teach at Stanford and CCa to bring the circle of influences around, full circle.
I'm also editing comics right now by Yazan al-Saadi, Ghadi Ghosn, and Omar Khouri, amongst others this one is about MBS and NEOM. Creating comics about MBS makes everyone very nervous. [INAUDIBLE]
As a way to begin to close this out, I want-- [INAUDIBLE]. So people that I work with in Egypt often work under pseudonyms, and we're very careful to protect them. The same thing goes with people creating work about Saudi. We have, so far, been unable to get [? ex-Saudi ?] [INAUDIBLE] to create work about Saudi, for obvious reasons, and actually, [INAUDIBLE] create that work for what they're doing.
As a way to begin to close this out, I want to begin to point out that I'm really only tangentially related to the scene of comics figures in the Arab world, through my early connections with Samandal I remember really getting them published in the US media markets related to nonfiction. I only really deal with work in English. Sorry [INAUDIBLE]. Or that I can help translate into English, mostly, so that's a narrow lens.
The amazing art that thriving community is creating has found its way, through many separate channels, into the US and also into European, especially French markets. The scene is way bigger and more interesting than who just got published in The Nib. This is an example from [FRENCH]-- highlighting the scene that grew up around Samandal and then [NON-ENGLISH] and then went supernova across the region.
There's a through-line here that I'd like to point out, which is the role of the comics medium as a way to work with a transnational identity. Nerd culture and culture blossomed in online spaces, like social media forums and public portfolio sites like Tumblr, Behance, and DeviantArt. The internet allowed kids to connect no matter where they were and develop a common language and set of interests and cultural references, like Dungeons and Dragons, or giant robot anime.
Comics, brushing up against these very passionate and often very young communities, creates a space that not only transcends borders but resents borders sometimes, creating art to push against or destroy them. Comics are also really easy to make by yourself, which makes them very difficult to kill. Cartoonists often say that their mascot is the roach.
So now, after talking about what I do for a long time, I'll explain how I do it and why. A lot of my career is based on being fascinated by things and finding a way to communicate that fascination to others. This is the introduction to my first book, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, in which I'm [INAUDIBLE] about where showerheads come from. Actually, it's a boring origin. But I got me started on a whole thing about toothbrushes, but then became my first book. And then [INAUDIBLE] bought that book [INAUDIBLE].
"Everyday Objects" is a constraint that I place to myself to generate stories for a project. It's funny because it's making boring things interesting. Stories are everywhere around us. They are the air we breathe. And the key to non-fiction is to catch them. A simple way to generate stories is to place a constraint on yourself that narrows the kind of stories that you are looking for.
As you keep lists of ideas, look for ways that they're connected. Are they pieces of a bigger story that you're putting together? [? Where ?] are their narratives? Sometimes amazingly weird stories just fall into your lap. This story-- I got to think of this one. This is very fun. So there's actually a real guy that dressed up in a bunny suit and threatened teenagers with an ax in Virginia in the 1970s. It sounds like an urban myth, because it then became an urban myth, but it's really a thing that happened. And this librarian found the story [INAUDIBLE] as a child, and I did a whole comic about how [INAUDIBLE].
My process is all digital. I write the script in Google Docs or Slides. I thumbnail while editing text down and then get reference imagery. I digitally ink a layer and edit text further and color the finals. And I draw [INAUDIBLE] usually a computer right here and an iPad right here, with referencing images showing windowed web browsing and 3D modeling, and that I'm drawing directly onto the iPad screen using Photoshop [INAUDIBLE] [? Procreate ?] and working with keyboard shortcuts to manipulate the programs.
If you're curious, my most viral comic ever was about the caretaker of the local mortuary's columbarium in San Francisco. I don't know why. That's just the internet. Happened on Tumblr. People still see it.
And lastly, I think it's good to consider why comics are a good medium for telling nonfiction stories, particularly. One is accessibility. So if you split these two things, the block of text becomes a big blur, and you can still see the action of the comic. There's this idea of the immediate experience. Comics are a grabby, hot media. And a lot of that has to do with the visuals and the fact that, even if the text were to become incomprehensible, there's a way for the reader to find their way through the force of the story.
Comics also demand brevity. So if you have, basically, more than half of a dialogue-- of a panel filled with words, the reader turns off. It's this weird form of magic where you can have a book of prose. You can have a texture. You can even have a book of prose with a spot illustration. But once you reach the halfway point, the brain starts hating it. And so readers like a good balance of words and pictures. This makes cartoonists become good at summarizing information. Brevity, of course, is due to focus on what is important and how to communicate it.
Comics also break up ideas into panels with their units of narrative storytelling. This forces you to think about your information in digestible chunks. There's also the aspect of visual learning. This is pretty important. Information in a comic will stick with the reader in a different and often stronger way than if they read it in prose because it becomes associated with the pictures in the reader's mind. It's why science textbooks have diagrams.
People come to me and they tell me that they remember stuff from my comics in a way that they don't remember stuff from other histories. That's the visual learning aspect. That's not because I'm a more talented storyteller. It's because I draw cartoons.
There's also the visual explanation aspect, which is basically the toolkit of a graphic designer. Cartoonists have access to things like timelines and set panels, where you can have narratives run concurrently. They can use maps. They can use charts and data visualization. They can use infographics. They can use schematics and cutaways and have all these things coexist in a narrative space that's also moving the reader carefully through a story. You can give them a spot like this that-- unlike in, say, a documentary [INAUDIBLE] showed this-- time is ever moving forward, there's only so much time that the viewer can pause and look at that schematic. With a comic, they can actually sit with that page, and you can encourage them to do that as a creator.
Finally, and this is the last time I'm saying-- a word of advice if you want to make a career in the arts, too. You should. It's really fun. I love it. The most important thing is to finish and then get them out into the world. Everything that I've done has come back to me because of something that I've gotten on to the world-- often several years later. My first book was a mini comic that a editor picked up at a store two years after it had ended up at the store shelf on consignment, and that became my first book. So you never know what'll come back to you.
The spirit with Samandal and all I'm getting works out, copyleft-- distribution is more important than gatekeeping-- that spirit has gotten me a long way in my career, and I encourage you, if this is something that interests you, to be similarly inspired. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Better? I don't want to yell into it. Hi, everyone. I'm Danielle. I'm just going to start off with a question or two. And then if anybody has questions in the audience or on Zoom, feel free to ask away, and I'll bring the microphone. So sorry.
So you started to get into it with your last few slides. But I was curious-- in your memoir, Spring Rain, you implied that your non-fiction comics allowed you to sort through both the psychological and the political events that you were living through in the early 2000s in Lebanon. So I guess more of a general question that I was hoping you could elaborate on is, how do you think our society could further utilize artistic tools as a means of understanding current events?
ANDY WARNER: Sure, a lot of my career is based on that interpretive work. When I function as a journalist-- even when I function as an advocate-- I've done work for UN agencies and the Center for Constitutional Rights and NGOs like that. It's using comics to basically do interpretive work to-- that's why they work so well for science as well.
And politics are a similarly thorny thing to explain, that benefits from visual diagrams, often. It's that graphic designer's toolkit, where you can draw out political parties. You can draw out maps of influence. You can draw out timelines to process the information. I, myself, process information in-- I will hear something and then add it to the file cabinet, like memory palace it. And I'm always looking for connections to other aspects of things that I have previously digested.
A nice aspect of my career is that, as I draw, I can actually listen to media. I can listen to podcasts or news or things like that. And so I take in non-fiction that way and have a constant aural input that I'm categorizing in different places, which is soothing. It's nice.
AUDIENCE: Oh, sorry. I'm also a bit curious about your personal art practice? Do you have a personal art practice? And if so, what ways is it different from, and which ways does it intersect with your professional work?
ANDY WARNER: It's the same. I have full control over my books that I publish. And I also have control over my pitching process. What I pitch pretty much gets picked up because of my relationships with the publications that I work with. So I work on what I am interested in, and what I really love is nonfiction. I think about it all the time, anyway-- about different ways of thinking about the world and fitting the world together and explaining parts of the world. And so it comes very naturally to me.
It's work. it's my career, but it started off as a hobby, and I was making zines and some things, and it's become a career. So it is my practice. My partner, Kathy, has always had a 9 to 5 job since we both graduated. And ever since I've been a cartoonist-- you can have vampire hours for that or work on weekends or whatever. But it was always important to maintain personal relationships as well. And so I've structured my life of having a 9 to 5 job. I start working on comics at 8:00 or 9:00 when I drop my kids off and then pick them up and I'm done. And I don't-- there's no urge to then retreat to a studio and paint something. But I do have too many projects. I'm contracted to do three books and several personal projects at work. So I'm always ping-ponging between stuff based on interest.
AUDIENCE: Gotcha. Awesome, all right, does anybody in the audience have any questions? Bring you the microphone for the sake of the people on Zoom.
AUDIENCE: Really great to see you again Andy, but I'm going to try to ask you two real questions. So one of them is more of an academic question because I was thinking about other traditions of comics, like the French one, which you know well, or even manga. I'm wondering what your sense of how, historically, the American tradition is. I just don't really have a good sense of it. It's Marvel. Or I just wonder how this kind of work emerges from the tradition, so that's the academic question.
And then I'm also curious about things that you have-- projects that are in front of you or in process-- maybe you don't want to talk about them. But I'm curious, partly because you mentioned-- which was actually rather moving-- and the difficulty, also, of doing this really courageous work and delving into very painful unjust situations. So I just wondered how you balance having done things that don't demand that from you-- do you have other works of that sort that you're planning for the future, or how do you think about that?
And then third is just a comment, which is-- this is so interesting and so incredibly informative and just, really, very stimulating. But it also makes me think how important this medium is in the midst of the kind of saturation of images where we-- because they're--
ANDY WARNER: Well, also, it creates fetish objects.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, but the [? Iraq one ?] was incredibly powerful in the way that-- of course, we've all seen it, and the pictures are recycled through a million different formats and all that. So it reminds me how, really, powerful this is, so that's it.
ANDY WARNER: Absolutely. Thank you. So the first part was the other influences. So American comics-- just a quick 90-second survey of the way that American comics differs from the other-- there are three main comics traditions in the world. There's Japanese manga, Franco-Belgian, [FRENCH], and North American comics. North American comics come out of newspaper comics and then become big, serialized-- all three of those big markets, independently-- they come into their own independently. They influence each other.
But they all have both a kids focus and an adult focus. And only in North America, there's a moral panic in the '50s-- we're great at those-- it's called the $0.10 plague. There was actually a congressional hearing where they dragged the publisher of DC Comics who were-- the people that put out Mad Magazine and The Tomb of Horror and all the horror comics-- they dragged him in front of Congress and made him admit to corrupting of the youth.
And the industry, out of fear that it would be essentially blackballed, self-censored, like the film industry did as well-- and neutered-- that's actually the reason why American comics are known for superheroes is because the only genre that survived that, really, was-- in a viable form, is superheroes, and Archie Comics was the other one. Archie Comics was the-- only one of the romance comics. In the 1950s, the biggest buyer, consumer of comics were actually teenage and preteen girls because the romance comic market was enormous. And the $0.10 plague killed all of that because they were considered moral turpitude.
So in a place like Lebanon, you wouldn't have many serious American comics. You have a lot of superhero influence coming in. You have very serious comics, though, being produced and coming in from the Franco-Belgian tradition. And those actually make their way, in a serious way, to Lebanon for obvious reasons-- former French colony, et cetera.
And so that tradition is very present in Lebanon and very influential on Lebanese comics. The way that the Japanese tradition affects it is actually through public television licensing. So kids in the '80s and '90s grew up watching stuff that was licensed on TV. And a lot of it would be these big robot, mech anime-- Grendizer is one that I remember specifically you would see name checked a lot, and people would do big murals in Beirut about it, and he would pop up in comics and stuff like that. And so people would be-- they weren't necessarily reading manga. The actual physical form wouldn't make itself into a Beirut bookshop, but it would be absorbed into the aesthetic through the TV presentation.
What am I working on now? I'm contracted to do three books. So I have another book that I finished that's coming out next year, called People and Plants, that-- after all my work being happy about making a book about animals, this one was about plant domestication and how plants are commodities. And then it became about how people treat each other like commodities, and then it became about imperialism and potatoes. Somehow I made it depressing. But it's YA, so it can only be so depressing. There's A lot of dumb jokes in it.
And the book after that, that I'm just starting to write is about materials. It's the third in a trilogy. The first one would be animals. The second one-- vegetables. And the third one minerals. So it's steel and gold and things like that. And they're very different history books for kids, trying to get them to rethink the way they're taught and consume history by doing object [INAUDIBLE].
I'm also working on a book about the Southern coast of Hawaii called Volcano Coast, that's been partially grant funded by the National Park Arts Foundation. And it'll probably come out next year or the year after. The Southern coast of the Big Island is a really interesting place. It's the most volcanically active part. And you can buy land there for $5,000, set up a water catchment system, set up the solar panels, and let it live. And so there are very weird people there.
And it's also a landscape that has been generationally marked by a cataclysm because of the volcanoes, but also tsunamis, earthquakes. Periodically, the water will just suddenly get poisoned because it comes through lava tubes and it [INAUDIBLE] seawater instead of fresh water. And so it's this place where, for about 300 years of recorded history, they've been dealing with periodic cataclysm in a way that we're starting to, so it's a study of that.
And then the last thing I'm working on is a book with a physicist from UC Irvine about whether or not we can do Carl Sagan's idea of using physics to talk to aliens. I'm not writing it. That's an example of a book that I'm illustrating and editing it to make it funny. But he's writing it.
He's done three other books before. He's a very good writer, including his work with [INAUDIBLE]. So he's quite fun to work with. He could be making up everything, and I wouldn't have [INAUDIBLE]. The hazards of working outside of your [INAUDIBLE]. That's that. And then [INAUDIBLE] always coming out with new [INAUDIBLE]. The next one is-- the "Colors" issue she just came out, and the "Futures" issue is the one that I'm editing a piece about MBS and NEOM.
AUDIENCE: And back to the Zoom question.
SPEAKER 4: I have two different questions on Zoom. So if there's somebody else, we can interleaf with someone live and in person. So on Zoom, Lisa [? Stratford ?] has asked, do you receive pressure from people with political agendas? And if so, what does this consist of? And perhaps I would say to extend it to-- you were talking a little bit about the pressure that some folks feel coming about self-censorship.
ANDY WARNER: I think there's a broad way to look at this. One is that comics exist in-- people don't care about them enough, which-- they are allowed to fly under the radar in a certain way, until suddenly they aren't. A Syrian cartoonist famously had his hands broken at the outset of the civil war there. And cartoonists were-- had their doors kicked in and were shot. That was my [INAUDIBLE]. That was in 2011.
But it happens periodically. With this sort of stuff, there's two angles of pressure because there's an international thing to consider, and there's also the domestic landscape. The Nib was very active in 2016 during the presidential campaign. And what has been called in retrospect, waggishly, the meme wars, which are-- when, basically, people were fighting each other on social media with comics and memes, which are often repurposed comics.
Pepe the Frog is actually drawn by a cartoonist that I know. I know his brother, and my boss knows him. And so during the height of that, we commissioned him to draw a response to the way that Pepe had been taken by Nazis-- American Nazis-- in that campaign. And with that comes a public-facing pressure. I was front paged by Breitbart, personally, in 2016, and that sucked.
But I'm also a straight-presenting white guy, so I can take it, in a way. The blowback from that is a lot less than it would have been for-- some of my other editors had it happen to them. So yeah, it happens, and it sucks when it happens. And that made me retreat from social media a little bit because that's less of a battleground there.
The international thing is a whole different kettle of fish. That is where you're working with people who are setting the limits of their own personal safety in a way that I don't yet deal with here in this media market-- emphasis on the, yet. But there are best practices, and we adhere to them. And also, people really self-police-- like, we're working on the piece about MBS. The cartoonist is careful what he draws, and the writer is careful what he writes. And that's a fact of life. And if you're publishing anything about Egypt, you're doing it under a pseudonym.
Yeah, I don't know. It's worth it to provide a space that isn't beholden to an outlet. I know who funds The Nib very directly. It's literally funded by [INAUDIBLE]. We used to be funded by an oligarch that I hated. And it's worthwhile for me to take the heat to provide a potential outlet that, otherwise, I wouldn't know-- I know that I can trust this organization that I work with. And I feel good about platforming the people there, basically.
I don't know. It's a long, roundabout way, but yeah, pressure happens. It's not great, but it happens less to me than others because of what I look like and what my name is. So that's my privilege.
AUDIENCE: [? Do ?] [? you ?] [? have ?] any other questions from Zoom here? I know there's another questions.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
DEBORAH STARR: I have a long intro here to a question from [? Swati ?] [? Subarna ?] about climate change-- cartooning and climate change. They write, hi, Andy, thank you for your inspiring talk. [? Swati ?] is a city planning grad student, whose exit project is research titled "Cartooning for Climate Change" based on a workshop series. I'll just read it [? in Swati's ?] voice.
I've been conducting over the past year-- I first conducted it in collaboration with the Karam Foundation for Syrian refugee students to talk about climate justice issues. I'm exploring cartooning as an alternative medium for engaging in participatory planning processes and to talk about pressing issues such as the climate. And here comes the question. I'm curious to know about the reactions or critiques you've received for your comments on climate change, and how receptive or not people are when it comes to engaging with those issues through a cartoon medium.
ANDY WARNER: Great question. You were talking about pressure. Actually, the biggest blowback I've ever received was about doing pieces about controlled burns in California. It's wildly controversial, and people will yell at you about it on the internet if you platform the scientists who think that it should happen.
But outside of that, one very specific example-- it's a great medium for it-- again, because of the heavy lifting that comics can do for scientific interpretation, and has been used that way a lot. And I would totally encourage you to explore that. There's great examples out there-- I think, probably, by big NGOs.
I personally worked on a guidebook for the UN to talk about marine-protected areas. It was an interesting project because it was an advocacy project, but it wasn't focused at people outside of the organization. It was to teach government technocrats about marine-protected areas in a little booklet, infocomic. So it's really a fantastic way of delivering information.
And the classic example of this is the airport exit card in the front of your-- that's a comic, and everybody sees one every time you take an airplane, and how to get off the plane. So comics are a very easy way of explaining things, and climate change is one of the big doom, depressing things. So a lot of people have already used the medium to that end, myself included.
Pushback-- the wildfires. The actual people seeing it love it. I've worked, multiple times, with the UN because they recommend to another branch of that enormous agency. I've work multiple times with-- with labs at universities doing interpretive work with their scientific papers because, again, it's a really good medium for that. And people-- the scientists or the policymakers that are creating the material that I'm basically interpreting-- love it. It's fun to see yourself in a comic, even if it's about the world burning. I don't know. It's just like-- comics are fun, even when they're soul-crushing.
AUDIENCE: Any questions? I guess, if that's it, we'll conclude.
Comics journalism and non-fiction comics, which employ visual storytelling to cover news or nonfiction events, have become more popular over the last three decades. In a lecture on Tues., March 28, Andy Warner ’06, an author of nonfiction comics, explored the power of graphic media to tell true stories. This lecture was sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
