By Edward Nawotka
Today’s lead story looks at the emergence of comics and graphic novels in the Middle East. Different cultures have different relationships to graphic novels: the French and Belgians are passionate about their bande dessinée, the Japanese are mad for manga, while Americans are still best known for their superhero comics.
Word pictures date back to the cave paintings of our earliest ancestors. So to what extent are comics (and by extension other forms of pictorial art) a truly universal medium?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Mark Siegel
1 year ago
Great conversation starter! To throw an interesting case-in-point into it: please visit http://www.zahrasparadise.com — this webcomic is serializing for free, in a dozen languages simultaneously, with more coming online. The work of Iranian dissidents, it covers life in present-day Iran in a way that is groundbreaking. When you look at the pages in English, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, Portuguese (and more coming) it certainly does make the argument that comics can be a universal medium.
Daniel K
1 year ago
There were practically no comics in the USSR strangely enough given the predominance of visual propaganda and poster-strips showing you what to do in case of a nuclear war, and post 1991 attempts to establish a comics tradition in Russia haven’t worked well. One exception is the phenomenal graphic novel Siberia, published by Soft Skull a few years back.