Plays and Protests and Such

May 16

Yesterday I went to a play at AUC with a friend, who introduced me to someone who said “You’re the one who’s writing a comic book about Cairo.” That’s always fun. Granted, the English-language lit crowd in the city is not large, but it’s still a nice ego boost when people you don’t know have heard tales of your escapades.

On another note, the wave of strikes by Egyptian factory workers denied fair compensation continues in the Delta. One in particular deserves notice: women at the Kafr al Dawar textile factory have been holding a sit-in for 22 days, and refuse to leave before they are given their promised yearly bonuses and are compensated for the factory’s impending closure. In Egypt, where strikes are more or less illegal and unions are run by the government (let that contradiction sink in for a moment), what these ladies are doing takes tremendous courage. You can find out more about the strike and about how to support the strikers by contacting the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights or The Bussy Project at thebussyproject at yahoo dot com.

In other news, Neil Gaiman has posted some fabulous pictures from the wedding of subcultural luminary Alan Moore. 

Live from Tariq i’Suez

May 13

First off, I’d like to say thanks to the talented Shazia for rehauling the site; it’s almost embarrassingly good-looking. To everyone else, welcome to gwillowwilson.com version 2.0. The blog portion of the site is likely to be eclectic—there will be news (about me and about other things) for people who like news, comics stuff for people who like stuff about comics, the Islamosphere for people who follow the Islamosphere, and probably a lot of crossover between all-of-the-above that one wouldn’t immediately assume was possible.

“I got most of that, but what’s the Islamosphere?”

It’s a term that’s emerged within the last couple of years to describe the loose collective of blogs, news feeds and sites dedicated to the big discussions taking place within modern Islam. Most of these sites are run by Muslims themselves, but some are run by non-Muslims. Since new media is much harder to censor than print or television, the internet has become a popular place for debate and networking between Muslims who live under authoritarian or religiously repressive regimes (as well as those who don’t). One such debate is in full swing right now between this popular writer/activist and a traditionalist colleague.

I’ve been on a comics-writing (and revising) bender recently, and have discovered that a lettered comic and a finished comic are not the same thing. When you’re editing a prose piece, identifying and fixing the parts that don’t work is usually a straightforward process. (Usually.) When editing a comic, however, a lot of the problem areas don’t seem to ‘pop’ until you see the text physically laid out on the page with the art. I’m sure the process becomes more intuitive the more comics you write, but for me, a newcomer, it’s been a learning experience. More on that later.