Yasmine Nachabe Taan interviews Lebanese illustrator and graphic artist Rawand Issa.
They start the conversation discussing her beginnings first as a journalist for the youth section of the leftist Lebanese newspaper Assafir through which she was first introduced to comics, and to some of Beirut's renowned comics artists and illustrators. With experience in both writing and drawing, Rawand describes her process that starts from writing and creating a script, and then drawing the story. Her work focuses on real-life stories and she describes her work as comics journalism.
The conversation moves to more concrete examples from her work. Her first zine, Not From Mars (2016), was experimental in the way it narrated her personal story in snapshots from her daily life, describing her transformations she was going through and the social challenges she was confronted with. Her second zine, The Insubordinate (2017), based on news clippings, documents an incident during the civilian protests in Beirut in 2015, and raises questions about the legal system in Lebanon. Her first graphic novel, Inside the Giant Fish (published in Arabic in 2021, and English in 2022), about the privatizing of the public beach connected to her village and has a string social message raising awareness about the impact that such developments have on the lives of her community living by the beach. The conversation moves to her style of illustration and how she develops the characters in her comics (often characters that resembles her).
The conversation ends with talking about the challenges of finding time to create comics and graphic novels while keeping the integrity of the work, and balancing this with earning a living. They discuss the negative effects and limitations of online publishing platforms and social media on the creative process and the ethics of works produced today.
Rawand Issa is one the visual artists and graphic women featured in the book, Revealing Recording Reflecting: Graphic Women from Southwest Asia and North Africa (Amsterdam: Khatt Books, 2024).
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