The excellent Rob Davis travelled to Russia last year and out of part of his visit he was asked to take part in a discussion as part of the Respect project, which involved talking about comics and human rights in Russia, resulting in him being asked to create a comic work that might help raise awareness of human rights problems and intolerance for kids in Russia. Rob focussed on the prevalent prejudices to Gypsies, a problem in Russia as it is pretty much everywhere else, and he’s posted up the resulting work on his blog (which you should have bookmarked already as he often posts up some cracking art and thoughts about creating that art there).
He comments modestly “I’m not great at black and white politicking, my writing is usually a bit surreal, I think. For this I just wanted to do something simple that left all the thinking with the reader. If any Russian kid changes their mind after reading this it will be their thinking that has achieved that, no instruction from me.” It’s lovely work, nice and deceptively simple techniques so the emphasis is on the common conceptions (or misconceptions) held widely about Gypsies rather than any involved storytelling technique. Nice work.
Mon, Feb 20, 2012
Comics and cartoons