"Talk to the Taliban" at AWRF 2011

Thank goodness for quote marks -- or maybe not! In my rush to publish this very newsworthy piece contributed by Jo Davidson, our savvy Serials Librarian, I nearly forgot them, meaning the post would have been titled Talk to the Taliban at AWRF 2011. It might have been contested but hey, it would have gotten a lot of attention!
But the "Talk to the Taliban" session at AWRF should interest all of us as well. James Fergusson has a number of thought-provoking things to say on the subject of the Taliban, whom he first encountered fifteen years ago as a foreign correspondent in Pakistan. He has written a book called Taliban: the true story of the world's most feared guerrilla fighters, and after hearing him speak, I have to say that I hope it will be widely read. It won't happen but it would be great if all those people (I am one of them) who read Khaled Hosseini's bestselling novels The Kite Runner and A thousand splendid suns which depicted all members of the Taliban as sexually depraved, drug-addicted,or both, and always monstrously cruel, would read this book.

Here's Jo's summary of the salient points of the session:
 
This packed session on Friday afternoon had James Fergusson, journalist, conflict specialist on Bosnia and, since 1996, Afghanistan, being interviewed by Sean Plunket. Fergusson believes that the West must start up a dialogue with the Taliban if we are to find a way to withdraw from Afghanistan. He asserts that there are no al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan and that the Taliban have no interest in exporting terror. Quite the opposite in fact: they have always been a force for security in the country and helped bring stability in the period of civil war that followed the withdrawal of the former USSR in 1994. He emphasized that the Talibs or religious scholars have deep roots in Afghanistan amongst the majority Pashtuns and are not the foreign soldiers the West often portrays them to be. Fergusson explained that the Taliban never approved of al-Qaeda methods but desperately needed Osama Bin Laden’s money. Later, despite the problems his presence created them, their culture of courtesy to all guests prevented them from betraying him to the West.

In my view the Taliban’s treatment of women was glossed over by Fergusson, although of course that issue is not why the West invaded and is not used as justification for keeping troops in the country.

A question from the floor led Fergusson to opine that the role of our SAS in Afghanistan is dubious, as captive Afghanis are handed over to the National Security Directorate which, Fergusson has been told, still operates with the KGB handbook for which torture is acceptable.

Fergusson hopes that if a climate of trust can develop, both the Taliban and their neighbours in the region should be involved in the talks that lead to Western withdrawal. However as both sides want to have the military advantage before negotiations begin, there is no quick solution in sight.

-- Jo Davidson

Interview with the Sheehan Bros.

Jo Lo from our web team recently interviewed Kelly and Darren Sheehan, authors of The Inhabitants, a superhero/fantasy series about a boy who discovers he has magical powers, and travels to another universe full of hipsters and slackers, pit stops and digressions.  The Inhabitants picked up the Best Writing honour at the 2010 Eric Awards for New Zealand comics in March.


What inspired The Inhabitants?


Kelly: Lots of things. The original idea for The Inhabitants was that everything in it would be ‘stolen’. Samples culled from whatever we thought was cool. It didn't quite work out like that, but a list of inspirational sources would include Zenith (a superhero comic by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell), England’s Dreaming by John Savage, SJD, Dimmer, Wilco, Alan Moore and Alan Davis's Captain Britain, Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series, Philip K Dick, Warren Ellis's brainstorming about comics in various essays and reviews he has written (most of which are online), The Matrix, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, Akira, Joss Whedon's Buffyverse, the sense of place in any novel by Robert Stone, William Gibson's crystalline writing and loads of coffee. Oh, a retrospective inspiration, if I had read it before I started the series, was Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. It's the best book I've read in the last 10 years. It's so digressive that it makes The Inhabitants straightforward and to the point.

Darren: I wanted to tackle a more ambitious project on a wider scope at the time I was reading England’s dreaming by Jon Savage. It's a book stuffed full of ideas and history and it really fuelled the initial charge at The Inhabitants.

How did you get started in the graphic novel world?


Kelly: Darren and I started work on our first comic around 1996. It was a short mini-comic called The Long Man. We went on to complete six Long Man comics before we started The Inhabitants.

Does your job at the libraries help with graphic novel work?


Kelly: It helps in that you work in an environment where you see inspiring things – novels, DVDs, CDs – on a regular basis. However it sometimes works the other way around, in that there is a danger that you become overwhelmed by 'stuff' and part of you begins to think why bother adding to it?

Do you have a writing process or routine?

Kelly: Unfortunately I don't. I'd like to be a disciplined, methodical person, but I'm not. The writing of The Inhabitants was a piecemeal process with time grabbed here and there. That's part of why it took so long to finish. Being a husband and a dad only intensified this personal shortcoming though my wife is very supportive in helping me find time.

What's the history and inpiration behind all the pictures in Inhabitants, Longman, Go Gorillas?

Darren: The Longman was the first comic Kelly and I attempted together so we were finding our style and working out how to tell a story and create a world and populate it with characters. Go Gorillas was a way of doing one-page stories and experimenting with form. I was thinking Spy vs Spy with evolution thrown in the mix as a backbone. Those strips are really inspired by the work of Martin F Edmond. The Inhabitants was Kelly and me taking on a more ambitious scope of storytelling and really rolling up our sleeves and do some hard-out worldbuilding.

Any favourite comic books/series?

Kelly: Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, Zenith, Bible John, JLA-Rock of Ages, Seven Soldiers, All Star Superman and most of Final Crisis. Alan Moore's Captain Britain, From Hell, Promethea, V for Vendetta. Akira and Domo by Katsuhiro Ōtomo. Jamie Hernandez's Locas. Anything by Taiyo Matsumoto, Timothy Kidd or Sophie Mcmillan. Mike Mignola's Hellboy. Jim Woodring’s Frank stories. Tintin. Bone by Jeff Smith. 2000ad. Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun. Jared Lane's Progress.

Darren: Too many, but off the top of my head, anything by Frank Quietly eg All Star Superman, The Authority, Flex Mentello, We 3 etc.  The Invisibles, Zenith, The Biologic Show by Al Columbia, Crickets and Poor Sailor by Sammy Harkhem, Progress by Jared Lane, a New Zealand comics artist based in Christchurch. Anything by Tim Kidd, another great New Zealand artist.

Does winning make you think of making the series into an animated feature/TV series?


Kelly: The thing I like about doing comics is that you can get it done and finished and out there. Filmmaking is such an expensive and complex process that anyone I know who wants to make movies is still waiting to be given the chance. If someone was interested I'd take their cash, but I'd probably stand waaaayyyy back from the production process.
What do you think of the recent spate of comic-based films out there e.g. Iron Man, Watchmen, Batman, Spiderman?
Kelly: Some are good, most are bad. I really like both Hellboy movies and the first two Spiderman movies are almost perfect. I refused to see Watchmen.

Working on anything new at the moment?

Kelly: Yeah, mostly short things and one longer piece. We might put out an anthology next. We have also started on a weird-dreamy-fantasy series.  The idea is that we will work on it slowly over a couple of years, perhaps putting one out each year-as a kind of break from the anthology.

Darren: I’m just finishing work on a set of illustrations for a novel by Mike Johnson called Travesty. It’s being published later in the year by Titus books.

Any pearls of wisdom for the budding comic writer/graphic artist?


Kelly: Just do it! Remember you don't need someone else's permission. Nothing’s going to happen if you sit around waiting for someone to ask you to produce your masterpiece. If you want to approach publishers overseas, you’re better off having something in your hand than just telling them about your really, really good idea.  
 
Darren: Always keep a sketchbook to record those stray thoughts or inspirations.
How does the comic book publishing world work in NZ? Or is self-publishing the norm in NZ?

Kelly: Self-publishing is the norm. There are some exceptions to the rule. Everyone pretty much makes it up as they go along with varying degrees of support from New Zealand’s eccentric comics community.

I see Central City Library in Volume 1. Are there other buildings in the city you've included in The Inhabitants? E.g. I thought I recognised the Carlisle building on Richmond Rd in it? (I could be wrong).


Darren: Yeah, the whole series is really informed by old buildings in Auckland as a backdrop, when I was initially coming up with sketches for the Great old city nothing was really working so I started taking photos of old building and chopping and dropping them in as the street scapes. There are a lot of buildings on Symonds street, the inner city, Mt Eden Road, parts of Albert Park, the Art Gallery interiors and exteriors, a wrought iron fence here, an abandoned staircase there. I think some of it harks back to growing up in Auckland and coming across to the central city on the ferry from Devonport in the weekend  when everything was closed on a Sunday. That deserted empty feeling.

Do you base the characters/character names on people you know? E.g. I know an TV editor called Tibor, and the Tibor character shows up in Volume 3.


Kelly: There are some real people in our cast of thousands (well, actually, more like dozens). The Auckland graffiti artist Deus plays himself in one scene, (and then we kill him), also Auckland band Golden Axe are the inspiration for the mostly robot band in the background of the party scene. There are characters who are sampled from other strips and sources (mostly with permission). Tibor and his crew are taken from MF Joyce and Dominic Correy's 'I Agree 49%'. There are also a couple of Timothy Kidd and Sophie McMillan's characters here and there, and one of Karl Wills's anti-social school girls. And we  also sampled the Jimmy Dynamite character (and in another story the character the Glasgow Pixie) from a couple of Playstation '3rd Place' ads (can be found here and here).

Charlotte says "We're on the edge of something that consumes worlds and suns, whole places and times, whole dimensions" - is this some sort of metaphor?


Kelly: It's as close as I get to a metaphor, but since it’s a superhero comic it’s mostly just a cosmically omnivorous, sentient universe.

-- Jo Lo, Online content editor, Auckland City Libraries

AWRF10 - Friday May 14: Michael Otterman - Erasing Iraq

Jo Davidson's sharp mind stands her in good stead in her job as ACL Serials Librarian. At AWRF 2010 she put it to another good purpose by going to hear Michael Otterman, author of "Erasing Iraq", interviewed by Sean Plunket.  Here's what she took away from this important event.

Otterman's contention is that the American occupation of Iraq has led to conditions approaching ‘sociocide’, that is, the destruction of the Iraqi foundations of society. This conclusion doesn't rest only on civilian loss of life – the total is hotly disputed but may be as many as one million if all those who succumbed as a result of the 12 years of economic sanctions from 1991 to 2003 are included. It is also measured by the number of displaced people which, at over 5 million, is the largest movement of people since the creation of Israel in 1948.

The book also details the cultural loss resulting from the looting of the country’s libraries, museums and archaeological sites while the occupation forces stood by and watched, securing only the Oil and Interior Ministries. Donald Rumsfeld’s comment on this was that “Freedom’s untidy”.

The use of embedded journalists whose output is vetted by the military and the self-censorship of the mainstream media has led to little information being available on the effects of the occupation on the Iraqi people. Interestingly, two-thirds of Americans polled after the first Gulf War of 1991 felt that “military censorship is more important than the media’s ability to report important news”.

Any positives? According to Michael Otterman the proliferation of Iraqi bloggers telling their stories has helped redress the lack of information and he points to the last elections in Iraq which saw a shift away from fundamentalism back to secular parties.

Is there anything concerned individuals can do? Give the message to politicians that we could help by taking more Iraqi refugees. Sweden has 50,000. New Zealand has 86.

The predominantly over-50’s audience listened attentively to Michael Otterman but unfortunately there was little time for questions. Sean Plunket introduced the session with an anecdote relating to a game of golf he played with a stranger in Queenstown in 2001 who turned out to be a former top aide of Richard Nixon. When asked what the American military planned to do after going into Afghanistan in 2001, the aide said go back to Baghdad to finish the job started in 1991, then on to Iran or Syria – they weren’t sure which yet.