Tag: comic
Hierarchy of racism
Debates over Dianne Abbotts letter to the Observer newspaper and her subsequent sacking from labour party.
As far as I understand her letter, shes argues a hierachy of racism exists, yet cites example of prejudice against red headed men as a less serious prejudice than anti black racism.
In my drawing I show a police stop and search of red headed men, an unlikely event, and would be surprising to see. An almost fantastical situation – surreal. It’s nearly always black males.
Based on my own childhood experience, prejudice against red headed men is severe, can be constant, and is serious abuse.
Is flying over?
This artwork was a response to an essay by Richard Murphy, political economist, entitled “Is flying over?”:
He argues that the airline industry will never raise enough funding to make themselves carbon neutral and so cannot survive. I found the essay thought-provoking, and it made me question my own actions, and what sort of future world will we see. Will most people stop flying? Will rich people simply carry on as they do now? Will governments simply bail out the airlines, and ignore the environmental impacts? I could see the UK government doing that.
I felt this was a powerful and shocking argument, and I was moved to do something with it. I wanted to communicate it more widely and make the information more accessible. Instinctively I felt an info comic would be right. The essay consisted of 15 main points, and I felt it suited a graphic novel or comic format, as a series of 15 panels.
So my first version was a one page comic, hand drawn, and shaded with 2B pencil. Sometimes I prefer hand drawn, as quicker to make, is more expressive, and more fun to make.
I was fairly pleased with the work, powerful in its simplicity – though it is rather limited, and repetitive. Does it have much impact? I have a habit of jumping in to make info comics, maybe out of familiarity with the format. Does it communicate? Does it get the message across?
Trying another angle, I used the same material, but took an interactive media approach: http://davemiller.uk/projects/day13/ with a goal of communicating the information in more interesting and eye catching ways.
This work presents each of the main 15 points about the future of the airline industry, and randomises their presentation. Various things change at random – drawings of dirty planes, backgrounds, and the text for each of the 15 points. The work could be taken further, given more time.
Michelle Mone
Narrative composition, graphic novel style, summarising visually the Michelle Mone PPE scandal.
Who is Baroness Mone?
The 51-year-old is a businesswoman and the founder of lingerie company Ultimo.
Born in Glasgow, she left school with no qualifications at 15 and went on to launch ventures in diet pills, fake tan and cryptocurrency. She became a Conservative life peer in 2015.
What is the PPE controversy?
The row around PPE Medpro started back in 2020, when reporters first began asking questions about Baroness Mone’s apparent links to the company.
In 2021, the government revealed that she had referred PPE Medpro via the VIP lane system, with the company awarded two contracts worth £200m.
Last month, Lady Mone faced allegations that she had profited from the business, a claim she denies.
How did the PPE contract system work?
The VIP lane system saw a separate mailbox set up for MPs to send on offers from firms, but led to the government being criticised for giving preferential treatment to companies with political contacts.
What investigations are under way?
Lady Mone is currently under investigation by the House of Lords commissioner for standards, with parliament’s website saying the probe is over “alleged involvement in procuring contracts for PPE Medpro leading to potential breaches…of the House of Lords code of conduct”.
PPE Medpro has also become the subject of a potential fraud investigation by the National Crime Agency.
What does Baroness Mone say?
Baroness Mone has consistently denied any “role or function” in the company, with lawyers previously saying she is “not connected to PPE Medpro in any capacity”.
(From Sky News: https://news.sky.com/story/michelle-mone-who-is-she-and-what-is-the-ppe-controversy-swirling-around-the-tory-peer-12762756)
Pandemic: A Year of Mistakes
For a book of essays covering politics, media, medicine and more, I researched, complied and drew a series of cartoon strips covering key moments of the Covid Pandemic and the bungling government …
The full comic is published in the book ‘The Pandemic – A Year of Mistakes’ available on Amazon:
From the Amazon description: “Dave Miller has been providing a simply stunning visual guide to the pattern of the UK pandemic in previous volumes. He is the visual Boswell of this modern plague. Here, he tracks the big ups and downs (and there were plenty of those) in the last twelve months in Cartoons. It is a unique record.”
Broken Brexit
A colouring and activity book for grown-ups
Looking back over the past three years, Brexit has proved more gripping than any TV drama or Zombie movie; glueing the UK public to their seats while the EU and rest of the world look on in amazement and horror as a once great nation spirals into terminal decline.
Buy the book online (Etsy): https://etsy.me/2M74948
This colouring and activity book captures the excitement and craziness of the period – the characters, the locations, the slogans, the lies, scheming and nail-biting political crises in dot-to-dot scenes and colouring pages. Character trivia, cool anecdotes and Brexit facts are mixed in along the way, so you can re-live the intensity of those memorable Brexit moments.
This is a 100 page colour book, A4 format, for sale in selected bookshops in London. £ 11.50.
Buy the book online (Etsy): https://etsy.me/2M74948
Newscomic
Newscomic (2008) recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it. It takes live news feeds, chops them up, reworks them and places the text into speech bubbles in a comic. The result is a disjointed reading experience, where the words and pictures don’t quite match but create their own meaning from the network.
Newscomic has been described as a generative satire, that takes RSS feeds from major newspapers, uses PHP and databases to chop them up and generate interesting strings, based on the feed content and user input, then puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a 3-panel comic format.
The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don’t quite fit but instead make their own story, blurring fact and fiction. Sometimes the story makes sense, and readers/ users always found it fun to experiment with the stories. Possibly, this early experimental idea seems to be part of what is now referred to as “Conditional Text” in recent interactive story works (Ambient Literature).
Often the stories generated are quite surreal, and can even be revealing.
Link to Flickr stream
Please note: sadly newscomic isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated and I need to re-work the code