“Almost any issue, idea or fact can be expressed in a comic. This kind of visual storytelling is flexible, attention-grabbing and relatively inexpensive.”

World Comics is a non-profit organization in Finland and India that promotes the use of local comics as a means for social change. Grassroots Comics: A Development Communication Tool (PDF) is a free, downloadable manual for other non-governmental organizations about developing comics with community activists for use in their campaigns. See examples of grassroots comics in India and Africa, as well as videos and posters from grassroots comics workshops.

While the New York Times generally doesn’t publish pictures of U.S. casualties in its own reporting, it can publish them when the photos themselves are the story (particularly on a Saturday.) The commander of the U.S. Marines in Iraq is seeking to bar photographer Zoriah Miller from all U.S. military facilities around the world for publishing photos on his web site of U.S. Marines (oh, and Iraqi civilians) killed in a June 26, 2008 suicide attack in Garma, Iraq. “Disembedding” journalists and otherwise “managing” them for publishing unfavorable coverage is nothing new. The Committee to Protect Journalists has chronicled ongoing harassment and deaths of journalists in Iraq and BAGnewsNotes has done an excellent job of unpacking the photographs that do make it out.

Looking into Miller’s own portfolio site this image caught my attention:

It has a Banksy-like irony to it: juxtaposing tools of authoritarian force with the values they are rhetorically professed to deliver — and with a faint whiff of commercialism. The vehicle above is a Iraqi Soviet-model MT-LB multi-purpose armored personnel carrier, most likely tagged, I suspect, by a U.S. soldier. But paint that slogan on an U.S. Abrams, and it makes a good stencil idea. Click below to download a PDF.

Rendered in the style of the children’s classic Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Bush is a wonderfully detailed satire of the Bush administration published in time to put our long national nightmare to bed.

The pages are full of illustrated references and visual gags:

It’s not hard to imagine Chrisopher Walken reading this version aloud. The hardcover book is available for purchase online at Amazon, Powell's and Barnes & Noble.

Two friends have self-financed a book themselves, from design to printing, and are now scraping together cash to fund a second print run. The publisher has been of little help, providing some distribution and order fulfillment, but not much else. Given that the first printing has mostly sold out, I asked why they don’t find a more invested publisher to help fund the second run. The response: the ISBN number, a book’s unique commercial identifier, can not transfer from one publisher to another. Publishers purchase blocks of ISBN numbers, and the number includes a segment that identifies that publisher.

Sure, you can always get a new ISBN number, and are encouraged to do so, if the book has significant changes. But given the multi-year struggle to get the first edition out, significant changes are unlikely soon. You can also get an ISBN number yourself, but this may preclude working with an existing publisher. And before you ask, this specific book doesn’t make sense as a PDF download. It’s a large-format art book.

Because much of my casual reading is on the internet, a large degree of data portability seems normal and natural to me. I suppose publishers should have some protection of their investment in a book to prevent others from poaching a successful product. But it seems to me like this should be a contractual obligation not something baked into the standard book identification system!

Update, 9/13/08: Morris Rosenthal, whose site I link to about obtaining an ISBN, sends this clarification:

“You’re correct that the ISBN ties an edition to a publisher, that’s baked into the system. But if your friends own the rights to the book, they don’t need to make any changes to release a new edition with a new ISBN, it will simply be a different edition from a different publisher, even if the publisher is them. There aren’t any laws about how ISBN’s must be used (even though the ISBN agency, Bowker, is a government granted monopoly in the US), some small publishers even release totally new edition WITHOUT changing the ISBN, so they don’t risk losing the built-up position on Amazon.

If you’re curious, here’s a recent piece I wrote on revised editions.”