Above: a Matt Bors cartoon about the trip
Ted Rall, along with fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, begin their month in Afghanistan.
First thing this morning, I read this Tweet from Matt Bors:
Greetings from Moscow! Waiting for dubai flight w/ @boasas [Steven Cloud] and drawing a comic.
Ted's already there. You can follow him via his Afghan Notebook site.
Michael Cavna's Washington Post column Comics Riffs has the background.
Above: Ted's Afghanistan plan/map that is then colored and posted by Ted's colleague and friend Stephanie McMillan.
The trip, financed by 211 fans and friends, will produce a series of reports from the three cartoonists and, if they return alive, subsequent graphic novels next year.
That "if they return alive" phrase is a very real consideration.
I admire what they are doing and was surprised that Ted is able to keep feeding us pages of what's going on day to day. Fascinating!
I hope they are safe and manage to return home all right.
May the wind be at your back, my friends!
Yeah, I followed Ted's preparation for this trip and wish him well. But geez, after seeing that itinerary, I'm genuinely concerned for their safety. Those aid workers killed a few days ago were reportedly shot as spies, and I can only imagine what an Afghan would make of three Americans packing notebooks full of maps and drawings of the people and terrain. Emmanuel Guibert's "The Photographer" gives a taste of what they could be in for, and it's potentially very harrowing.
ReplyDeleteTed's been there before, and I can only trust he knows what he's doing. Not sure that's true of Bors and Cloud, and hope they gave it more thought than indicated in Bors's comic. This isn't a lark. They're going to meet people whose regard for free speech and press, not to mention Americans, is much less than they're used to.
Everyone's got their own line where "brave" crosses over into "foolhardy." This crosses mine. Good luck to them.