Here’s another sneak peek from the exhibition “Finally Got The News: The Printed Legacy of the U.S Radical Left, 1970-1979” which opens Thursday, January 26th from 7 to 10pm at Interference Archive in Brooklyn!

Written in German, published in German and English (translated by Iain Reynolds) in the printed issue of form 273, Sep/Oct 2017.

The purpose of an archive is to document past events and provide access to knowledge. After all, anyone wanting to understand themselves and their community – and to have a say in its future – needs to be familiar with the past. Archives that collect material from protest movements, though, are not just of benefit to the activist community. Besides preserving objects, political ideas or aesthetic trends, they also serve to address broader questions: How do communities acquire and pass on knowledge? How do they design collectively while still promoting individuality? And what alternative means of making things exist outside of established businesses and markets?

The Struggle for Nairobi

The Struggle for Nairobi was donated to Interference Archive by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici. The artist, Terry Hirst, is a friend of theirs, and this might be one of the first full-length graphic novels produced in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a history of Kenya (and in broader strokes the history of colonialism in Africa) told in text-heavy panels and through a Marxist lens. It’s a tough read, doesn’t exactly work as a “novel,” but the almost 200 dense pages mixing text, art, and photo collage are a pretty impressive piece of work. Published in 1994 by the Mazingira Institute, it’s sadly out of print, and very difficult to find. You can always read it at Interference Archive!

Jon de Jong

This is another European find, a novel without words I found in a $1 bin in Copenhagen! It’s Dutch, and narrates a physical struggle between a riot cop and militant squatter/protestor in 40 so crisp line drawings. The artist is Jon de Jong, and the book was published in an edition of 1000 copies by Apedoorn in 1975. I haven’t been able to find anything else out about it.

Oka Crisis

The “Oka Crisis” is one of a half dozen 4-page Indigenous history comics written and drawn by Native artist and militant Gord Hill, writing under the pseudonym Zig-Zag. Not only do I love the simplicity of the art, but also that they were consciously designed to tell essential, yet sadly mostly suppressed, histories on a double-sided 11”x17” sheet of paper. This makes them extremely easy for anyone to reproduce—just take your copy, through it on a copy machine, and make dozens more. These comics (and a lot of other Zig-Zag material) were reproduced in book form as The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (http://www.arsenalpulp.com/bookinfo.php?index=317).

Atom Komix

I found Atom Komix at the awesome anarchist book shop Het Fort Van Sjakoo in Amsterdam. It was in a bin of cheap 1-2 euro books, clearly stuff that had been kicking around for ages and no one wanted. I’ve found some of the coolest stuff in bins just like this! At first I thought it was a comic produced by the German anti-nuclear movement, but it turns out it’s a translation of a comic originally produced in the U.S. in 1976 under the title All-Atomic Comics. The art is by Leonard Rifas, and is largely left untouched here, but all the text has been changed and translated to German, the publishing attributed to Widerstad (Resistance). Both English and German versions are in the collection at Interference Archive.