Images Of Liberation: Comics, Cartoons & Graphics

Last Friday we received an email from Mr. Richard De Angelis informing us of an article which he has produced based on a presentation he gave in New York City last year at the Grassroots Animal Rights Conference.

The article is about the use of art, particularly comic strips and comic books, to convey animal liberation philosophy. Comic series mentioned in the piece include Animalman, WE3, Bloom County and our very own Wild Girl.
We are very proud indeed to have been cited in such a fascinating and thought provoking article and Mr. De Angelis has very kindly granted us permission to link to a dowloadable PDF of the piece:
http://homepage.mac.com/vicnrich/FileSharing1.html

The piece totally blew us away so we emailed back to let Richard know and ask him more about how he got into doing all of this.

"I was asked to give the presentation in the first place because of my work for the Doris Day Animal Foundation as director of its Comics for Compassion program, which produces superhero comics that promote the humane treatment of animals in the hopes of inspiring young readers to adopt an ethic of compassion toward all beings.
We produced Superman for the Animals through DC Comics in 2000 and worked with Marvel Comics on the story "Can They Suffer?" in 2003, which appeared in X-Men Unlimited #44. If you would like to learn more about this program, please visit www.ddaf.org/comicsforcompassion

While "Images of Liberation" was my attempt to educate animal rights activists about the artistic merits of comic books, I had previously tried to educate comic book scholars about the merits of animal rights philosophy through a paper I wrote for the Spring 2005 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) entitled "Of Mice and Vermin: Animals as Absent Referent in Art Spiegelman's Maus." If you are interested, you can read it at http://homepage.mac.com/vicnrich/FileSharing2.html"

Who would have thunk it eh? Intelligent people reading comics, What's the world coming to?

Thank you very, very much for all of your work Richard and we'll definitley be looking into the whole comics for compassion thing ourselves.

J&L