EXTRACTION!

First off, apologies for the big fade this holiday...trust me, ya don't wanna know of the stygian heck that was what I laughingly call 'my holidays'. God-diddly-damn, but I'm glad to be back at work. And back to the bloggin! We'll start the new year with a new post courtesy of Ruth Tait...it's a Comix Jam at the Cameron House to celebrate EXTRACTION! a journo-comic about the mining industry. Read on, gentle blogvisitortypeperson...

-----------------------

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 3, 2008

When Comix and Journalism Collide …



Journalistic graphic novel portrays the dirty business of global
resource extraction in the 21st century.

TORONTO Tuesday, January 29, 2008
COMIX JAM The Cameron House, 408 Queen Street West
LAUNCH 8:00 p.m. info: 416-703-0811

http://www.cumuluspress.com/extraction

Cumulus Press recently released a new title EXTRACTION! Comix Reportage.
This ‘graphic novel’ started with four journalistic stories (by Petr
Cizek, Dawn Paley, Sophie Toupin and Tamara Herman) about the mining
industry. These stories were scripted then handed over to four comix
artists (Ruth Tait, Phil Angers, Stanley Wany, and 2007 Doug Wright
Award winner, Joe Ollmann) to create a multi-styled comic book about
mining that, according to Joe Sacco, “is the perfect idea for a graphic
treatment.”

Cumulus Press will launch this book of comix journalism within the
January edition of the Toronto Comix Jam, whose jammers will create
collective strips of journalism based on articles provided for the
evening. Here the challenge will persist between the ‘give’ of
verifiable facts and the ‘take’ of graphic interpretation, between the
‘push’ of fact-based details and the ‘pull’ of visual narrative. The
craft of comix journalism does not stem from the combination of text and
image, content and structure. It is the added meaning derived from the
interaction between the symbolic and the realistic, the literal and the
figurative that gives it strength.

The extraction of natural resources today is a dirty business. Since
2000, most energy and mineral prices are skyrocketing. Junior mining
prospectors and unscrupulous transnational corporations rush into new
territories to suck what’s hot out of the earth’s lucrative veins. In
today’s gas, oil and mining industries, the pace of exploration,
extraction, transformation and delivery of the world’s resources is mind
boggling. The German magazine Der Spiegel speaks of a Third World War
for the world’s resources. It is more like a blitzkrieg.

EXTRACTION! looks into the exploration, exploitation and extraction
gold, bauxite, uranium and oil, from a common-good social justice
perspective, in Guatemala, India, Québec and Alberta, respectively.

#3#

For special orders, review copies, please contact the publisher, David
Widgington, 514-523-1975, info@cumuluspress.com or Frédéric Dubois,
514-660-0664, frederic@reportero.org

EXTRACTION! Comix Reportage
Edited by Frédéric Dubois, Marc Tessier and David Widgington
ISBN 978-0-9782474-1-6
128 pages