This one came from DEEP in the archive (2016).
It's time for some straight shares with little to no commentary. Usually I call this type of posting LOW POWER MODE but not this time. I am working on prep for an important job interview.
Or rather, I was working on it. I am posting this from the day after the interview, Friday the 19th, as the interview was Thursday the 18th.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/04/madaya-mom-marvel-abc-news-syrian-war
Madaya Mom: Marvel comic reveals Syrian crisis TV cameras can't reach
Comic illustrates a woman’s correspondence with ABC News about her family’s struggle to endure the war: ‘Our bodies are no longer used to eating’
Besieged for more than a year by the Assad regime and its allies, the Syrian town of Madaya has existed in a virtual vacuum. Journalists have been unable to get in, residents have been unable to get out and only sporadic humanitarian aid has been able to reach the tens of thousands of people estimated to live there.
When their cameras couldn’t enter the town, ABC News “had to get creative” to tell the story of those who live there, producer Rym Momtaz said.. The network used their sources in the country to find a woman in the city to chronicle the harsh conditions in a weeklong series of dispatches. But wanting to add a visual element to her story, they decided to create a comic book.
The result is Madaya Mom, a free digital comic created by ABC News and Marvel Comics (both owned by Disney), which was published on Monday. Illustrated by Dalibor Talajić, the comic tells the true story of the anonymous mother of five through illustrated panels and direct quotations from her as she and her family struggle to survive in the city. Her identity has been kept hidden for the family’s safety. ABC also created a companion classroom discussion guide on the comic and the conflict in Syria.
The city of Madaya has been under siege since July 2015, in conditions described as akin to an “open air prison”. In January, images of emaciated children and starved bodies in the city sparked international outrage. Dozens have starved to death since the siege began.
Last week, aid reached Madaya, but most of the UN’s convoys to other cities were blocked or delayed, denying essential supplies to millions. The aid that reached Madaya in September was the first to reach the city in months, according to the BBC.
ABC began publishing dispatches from Madaya Mom in January as a way of letting her tell her story directly. Momtaz, a native Arabic speaker, communicated with her via text message and translated the messages between them, she told the Guardian.
Madaya Mom’s first published post described the family’s one meal of rice and bean soup.
“Our bodies are no longer used to eating, my children are hungry but are getting sick, severe stomach pains from the food because their bodies aren’t able to digest and absorb the food because they were hungry for so long,” she wrote. It became the caption on the first page of the comic.
Momtaz said that Dan Silver, executive producer for ABC News, first came up with the idea of using a comic book to tell the mother’s story. Marvel was “immediately sold” on the idea, Momtaz said, and so was Madaya Mom.
“It was actually really heartening because she told me that she loved Spider-Man and she knew Marvel,” Momtaz said in an interview on Monday. “She could not believe that the people who were behind Spider-Man had any interest in her life and had heard of her.”
Comic books are often used to tell non-fiction or journalistic stories – something Momtaz said she took inspiration from – though Marvel is best known for its superhero stories.
“The fact of the matter is we’re much more than that,” Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Axel Alonso, who was once a journalist, said in a behind-the-scenes video put out by ABC. “We are not a genre, we are a medium. We are a way of storytelling. Marvel comic books span every genre known to man and why not journalism?”
In the video, Alonso, Momtaz and Talajić made the argument that Madaya Mom isn’t so different from the typical Marvel heroes. “Superheroes are not defined by their powers or their physique. Superhero is in the heart. Madaya Mom fits within this category because she finds strength to be human and unhardened,” Talajić said.
Talajić, who grew up in the former Yugoslavia and lived in the country as it was breaking up, was chosen as the artist because he would “bring a level of authenticity to the page because he is a survivor of war himself”, Alonso said. The artist said because of that connection, he “wouldn’t randomly invent endless explosions and everything but really try to capture the depression of it”.
In his drawings, Talajić said he intentionally tried to keep the perspective distant from the subjects to mirror the distance readers have from the situation in Syria. “I was hoping to help people realize that we really don’t care. This might, maybe, get someone to care,” he said.
Madaya Mom hasn’t yet seen the finished comic, as she’s having trouble with her internet, but Momtaz had shared some panels during the nine months of production. She doesn’t read much English, but Momtaz said there are plans to create a version of the comic in Arabic so that Madaya Mom and other Syrians can have access to it.
Momtaz said she spoke with a relative of Madaya Mom who does not live in the city and was able to read the comic. “Her relative told me that it made him sob. He was very touched by it,” Momtaz said.
“To quote him: I didn’t think that people actually cared.”
MADAYA MOM
MADAYA MOM
The joke goes that the difference between consumers in authoritarian states like China and those in the U.S. is that readers in America sometimes like to believe that they are getting impartial truth from the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, or The Guardian. The Chinese have no choice but to believe that it’s all excrement. But that's only because the Chinese government is so abysmal at this game. It took years for their state-owned conglomerates to figure out that they even needed to talk to the press, much less shape its message.
When Marvel-Disney contributes a free war comic to an American audience you can be sure that the propaganda is safe, conservative, and in line with the inclinations of the powers that be.
Surprise. This is not a company known for taking chances.
"Speaking to The National, artist Dalibor Talajić spoke about not sensationalising the comic. "I didn’t want to do a war comic," he told the publication. "I wanted to make a comic with a civilian point of view, where you’re really powerless. You can’t do anything. You’re just waiting for it to pass or for you to die."
When Dalibor Talajić says he didn't want to create a war comic but only wanted to present the "civilian point of view," he is of course spouting nothing less than bullshit. Madaya Mom is clearly a war comic and one with an ironclad version of good vs. evil.
“Marvel's latest hero is Syrian mother trapped in besieged town,” reads the headline. Indeed, the comic’s intentions are painted boldly from the very first. In the introduction, care is given never to suggest that the U.S. is aiding and abetting the Nusra Front (once upon a time the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda), this being the sole province of their extremely naughty allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey who are supporting some vague “Islamist jihadist factions.” As if the border between America's "moderate" Syrian allies and Al-Nusra was not completely porous (with some small efforts to rehabilitate the latter in the American press).
The enemy is consistently the government forces of Bashar al-Assad; and no one else.
On January 24, 2016 the protagonist is told “there is a plan to forcibly displace the people of Madaya and replace them with Shia people who are supporters of the government...” In other words, Madaya is to be “ethnically” cleansed – a code word for increased military intervention as sanctioned by all caring adults.
A few pages on, a man is shot by a “government sniper” because only the forces of Bashar Al-Assad have snipers and are capable of acts of evil.
The comic is presented without commentary and delivered as if it was the authoritative word of God. There is not one word about the complexities of causation. As the comic implies, the government forces are preventing aid from getting through and that is the end of it. But where are we to put reports about aid being confiscated by the rebel forces occupying the town as has been stated in the alternative media. Whose propaganda is the more reliable and who exactly is responsible for this starvation? The creators of Madaya Mom suggest that there is no room for doubt in this instance.
One might also ask, why create a comic about starvation in Syria when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) starving in Yemen; a situation which is altogether more easily remedied by money and doing the unthinkable – stopping the flow of arms. Or is this all a gentle prelude to Hilary Clinton's widely derided Syrian no-fly zone, a move which will entail billions of dollars and boots on the ground in an act of forceful regime change that will mirror the atrocities in Libya.
The comic is workmanlike and designed to cultivate empathy on the part of its readers; a readership coddled into one failed violent intervention after another; a population which has little interest in the affairs of unknown peoples in foreign wars unless some Americans die or the bombs aren't dropped in a timely fashion.
As the study guide which accompanies the comic laments:
Madaya Mom puts a personal face and voice on a story that's all too easy to ignore. Once a personal connection is made, it becomes less easy to consider war as a large issue on the other side of the world... ask them to think of ways to address the issues by making them less impersonal and more connected.
The experience following the events of 9/11 suggest, however, that simply making things more personal does not naturally lead to superior results. If only the American government was as disinterested as the American people seem to be in the affairs of the world. What a wonderful world that would be.
Are people suffering in Madaya? They almost certainly are and in the most awful fashion; as they are in Fuah, Kefraya, Aleppo, Libya, Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen. The forthcoming choice of the next U.S. President will only prove that there will be no let in this suffering – the disastrous military interventions will not cease nor will the refugees be allowed to flow.
The question is why we think it is vital that we intervene (or even kill more people) in Syria. The study guide by Kelly Johnston seems more noble in intent with several sections directing students to discuss the scope for immigration and the admission of Syrian refugees in resolving this crisis. If only this was the limit of the media's ambitions for Syria.
Comics have been used through the ages for propaganda purposes and also periodically targeted by governments of all stripes for dissent (though perhaps no more so than other forms of media). Having said this, the one positive aspect of Madaya Mom is that it will probably be largely ineffectual as a propaganda tool when compared to video and photographic journalism, or even the simple art of the newspaper headline.
The truth about Madaya and Syria will only be known decades hence when no one actually cares. When the dust settles, all that Madaya Mom will prove is that most comics have their lips planted firmly on the asshole of empire.
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