On Thursday June 19 at 7 pm Join us for the release of World War 3 Illustrated 1979-2014 anthology! Release Party at Blue Stockings Bookstore, 172 Allen St New York. Presentations by: Seth Tobocman, Peter Kuper, Nicole Shulman, Mac McGill, James Romberger, Sandy Jimenez, Eric Blitz, Andy Laties, Steve Wishnia, Breeze, On Davis and Mat Metzgar. Facebook event here.
World War 3 Illustrated official website
World War 3 Illustrated On Facebook
Founded in 1979 by Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, World War 3 Illustrated is a labor of love run by a collective of artists (both first-timers and established professionals) and political activists working with the unified goal of creating a home for political comics, graphics, and stirring personal stories. Their confrontational comics shine a little reality on the fantasy world of the American kleptocracy, and have inspired the developing popularity and recognition of comics as a respected art form.
This full-color retrospective exhibition is arranged thematically, including housing rights, feminism, environmental issues, religion, police brutality, globalization, and depictions of conflicts from the Middle East to the Midwest. World War 3 Illustrated isn’t about a war that may happen; it’s about the ongoing wars being waged around the world and on our very own doorsteps. World War 3 Illustrated also illuminates the war we wage on each other—and sometimes the one taking place in our own minds. World War 3 artists have been covering the topics that matter for over 30 years, and they’re just getting warmed up.
Contributors include Sue Coe, Eric Drooker, Fly, Sandy Jimenez, Sabrina Jones, Peter Kuper, Mac McGill, Kevin Pyle, Spain Rodriguez, Nicole Schulman, Seth Tobocman, Susan Willmarth, and dozens more.
Praise:
“World War 3 Illustrated is the real thing. . . . As always it mixes newcomers and veterans, emphasizes content over style (but has plenty of style), keeps that content accessible and critical, and pays its printers and distributors but no one else. If it had nothing more than that kind of dedication to recommend it, it would be invaluable. But it has much, much more.“
—New York Times
“Reading WW3 is both a cleansing and an enraging experience. The graphics remind us how very serious the problems and how vile the institutions that cause them really are.“
—Utne Reader
“Powerful graphic art and comic strips from the engaged and enraged pens of urban artists. The subjects include poverty, war, homelessness and drugs; it’s a poke in the eye from the dark side of America, tempered by what the artists describe as their ’oppositional optimism.’“
—Whole Earth Review
“This is art—not marketing—on the newsstand. It represents the sort of creativity too rarely given an outlet in comics. It’s the best and longest running alternative comics anthology around.“
—Comics Journal
“The artists of World War 3 have forged a space by turns harsh and exciting, honest and rowdy, boisterous and straight-forward, always powered by the wild and unruly harmonies of love. It’s a space where hope and history rhyme, where joy and justice meet. Their voices provoke and soothe and energize. I want to hear more.“
—Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground
About the Editors:
Peter Kuper is the cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated. His illustrations and comics have been featured in Time, The New York Times, and MAD Magazine, for which he has written and illustrated SPY vs SPY since 1997. He has produced over 20 books including The System, a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominee, Drawn to New York: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Decades in New York City, and Diario De Oaxaca, a visual journal of two years in Mexico. He was the 2009 gold medal recipient at the Society of Illustrators for sequential art.
Seth Tobocman is the cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated. He is the author and illustrator of five graphic books, including You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians, and Understanding the Crash. He has participated in exhibitions at ABC No Rio, Exit Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His illustrations have appeared in the The New York Times among many other publications.
About Bill Ayers:
Bill Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is vice president of the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association, and a member of the executive committee of the UIC Faculty Senate. He lives in Hyde Park, Chicago with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn.
From an interview at comicbookresources.com:
Talk a little about this anniversary collection. What did you want to do and how did you end up at PM Press?
Kuper: We wanted to put together a collection that showed off great examples of what we’ve been doing over the years — work that demonstrated the possibilities of comics as a medium for political and personal expression. Hopefully we’ve created a book that winds up in schools and libraries so we reach a whole new audience into the future. We first assembled the book back in 2008 — Abrams had expressed ongoing interest and we hoped to have it out to coincide with a thirtieth anniversary retrospective that we mounted at a gallery in New York called “Exit Art.” With the crash the publishing industry was in a shambles and the idea of a 320 page full-color book of political comics was next to impossible. (Actually a French publisher stepped up with interest and will do it next year.) I had begun working with PM in 2009 and they not only said they wanted to do the book, but that it could be hardcover. When they saw the bill for the collection though, they realize it was over their heads, so we agreed to do a Kickstarter campaign to help them with the costs, which happily exceeded expectations.
Tobocman: I’m glad that there is an anniversary anthology, but I’m even more glad that there is an anniversary. For me, the magazine is what matters. I am glad it’s still coming out.
An answer to a question you really didn’t ask, “What matters to me about this?” — it isn’t the anthology or even the magazine or any of my own artwork. What matters is that I see a lot of young cartoonists now using comics in a way that was very rare thirty years ago. To talk about social change in a very practical and direct way. So this is a new language, now spoken by many people but once spoken only by a few. So I think this magazine has been part of bringing that language into existence. I think we did that. I hope it has a positive effect.
