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Extraction!: Comix Reportage #1
Extraction!: A Comix Reportage
Featuring comix artists: Joe Ollmann, Phil Angers, Ruth Tait & Stanley Wany. With reportages by Dawn Paley, Petr Cizek, Sophie Toupin & Tamara Herman. With added artwork: front cover by Alain Reno, back cover and inside chapter intro images by Jeff Lemire & inside cover and spot images by Carlos Santos. With a foreword by David Widgington, an introduction by Frédéric Dubois and an epilogue by Marc Tessier.
- GenresComicsGraphic Novels
128 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2016
15 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 7, 2022
Comics/comix have been becoming more diverse as media and form for quite some time, shaking off the image of a medium for kids and frivolity. A recent manifestation of this has been the rise of comix reportage as seen for instance in the profile of people such as Joe Sacco. As a form of reportage, they take on some intriguing characteristics – narrative tends to be stronger, stories more personalised, with the image heavy texts (they are, after all, comics) evocative and emotionally engaging.
This reissue of a collection of pieces originally published in the mid-2000s encapsulates all of those aspects, while aiming to reach out to new audiences. Focusing on four Canadian-linked cases of extractivism, there is a strong focus on multinational aspects of the mining and extraction industries. Two of the cases focus Canadian-based companies in gold mining in Guatemala and bauxite mining in Orissa province in India. In both cases there are strong narratives of resistance by poor and Indigenous communities alongside state-based corporate oppression and corruption. A third case looks at the drive to tar sands old extraction in Alberta, while the forth takes a more conjunctural approach to Canada’s long standing place in uranium mining.
The different forms of the four cases gives them a different feel: Dawn Paley and Joe Ollmann’s Guatemalan gold mining case and Tamara Herman and Stanley Wany’s story of Dalit and Adivasi struggles around bauxite mines have a strong narrative sense (I preferred Ollmann’s cleaning visual style). In their Alberta tar sands case, Petr Cizek, Phil Angers and Marc Tessier weave together a diverse set of strands built around a narrative figure of a ‘soap box’ orator, playing with visual styles with a great sense of nuance (the Guatemala and Orissan cases rely on the journalist as narrative figure). Sophie Toupin and Ruth Tait’s uranium piece also works with the journalist as narrator, but covers a much wider historical span and geographic reach than the other cases (hence, more conjunctural): I found Tait’s use of shading a little jarring – but that’s nothing more than aesthetic taste and it didn’t distract from the narrative.
The collection looks like it would work with audiences who might not usually engage with these issues, more because of the media journalism often relies on. There is also a sense of nuance and subtlety in each case – not in the sense of ‘balance’ so often drawn on in journalism as the presence of competing voices, but in the sense that in each case there is a degree of complexity, often linked to employment (so often falsely conflated with benefit and development by industry boosters).
Comix reportage is a growing field – this is a useful early example of the medium, and although the cases anything up to 20 years old (as I read it in 2022) some have not gone away and the state-corporate approach of repression, co-option, oppression and corruption continues, as it has for decades…. All in all a welcome collection for Ad Astra Comix.
This reissue of a collection of pieces originally published in the mid-2000s encapsulates all of those aspects, while aiming to reach out to new audiences. Focusing on four Canadian-linked cases of extractivism, there is a strong focus on multinational aspects of the mining and extraction industries. Two of the cases focus Canadian-based companies in gold mining in Guatemala and bauxite mining in Orissa province in India. In both cases there are strong narratives of resistance by poor and Indigenous communities alongside state-based corporate oppression and corruption. A third case looks at the drive to tar sands old extraction in Alberta, while the forth takes a more conjunctural approach to Canada’s long standing place in uranium mining.
The different forms of the four cases gives them a different feel: Dawn Paley and Joe Ollmann’s Guatemalan gold mining case and Tamara Herman and Stanley Wany’s story of Dalit and Adivasi struggles around bauxite mines have a strong narrative sense (I preferred Ollmann’s cleaning visual style). In their Alberta tar sands case, Petr Cizek, Phil Angers and Marc Tessier weave together a diverse set of strands built around a narrative figure of a ‘soap box’ orator, playing with visual styles with a great sense of nuance (the Guatemala and Orissan cases rely on the journalist as narrative figure). Sophie Toupin and Ruth Tait’s uranium piece also works with the journalist as narrator, but covers a much wider historical span and geographic reach than the other cases (hence, more conjunctural): I found Tait’s use of shading a little jarring – but that’s nothing more than aesthetic taste and it didn’t distract from the narrative.
The collection looks like it would work with audiences who might not usually engage with these issues, more because of the media journalism often relies on. There is also a sense of nuance and subtlety in each case – not in the sense of ‘balance’ so often drawn on in journalism as the presence of competing voices, but in the sense that in each case there is a degree of complexity, often linked to employment (so often falsely conflated with benefit and development by industry boosters).
Comix reportage is a growing field – this is a useful early example of the medium, and although the cases anything up to 20 years old (as I read it in 2022) some have not gone away and the state-corporate approach of repression, co-option, oppression and corruption continues, as it has for decades…. All in all a welcome collection for Ad Astra Comix.
April 21, 2011
I've only recently gotten into graphic comics, and I did enjoy this one. The only problem I had with it was that I found the layouts hard to follow sometimes, and the scenes jumped around which could be confusing. Really powerful stories, though, and I loved the stark feel of the black and white graphics.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews