Zahra's Paradise: Art & social change - using webcomics for the advancement of Human Rights in Iran

Inspirational and creative ! Utilizing the universal language of art to reach and empower the global collective by bringing awareness to the emerging Iranian narrative and current civil rights movement. The webcomic Zahra's Paradise, allows the reader a window through storytelling of the latest happening in Iran since the 2009 elections ! 

"So a Persian writer, an Arab artist and a Jewish editor walk into a room…

Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Actually, that’s something like the start of this unusual editorial adventure, the first of its kind. Here for your reading pleasure is an online, serial webcomic in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch—with more joining on the horizon. First Second books proudly presents Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil, together with Casterman in French and Dutch, Rizzoli Lizard in Italian, and Norma Editorial in Spanish.

Set in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is the fictional story of the search for Mehdi, a young protestor who has disappeared in the Islamic Republic’s gulags. Mehdi has vanished in an extrajudicial twilight zone where habeas corpus is suspended. What stops his memory from being obliterated is not the law. It is the grit and guts of a mother who refuses to surrender her son to fate and the tenacity of a brother—a blogger—who fuses culture and technology to explore and explode absence: the void in which Mehdi has vanished.

Zahra’s Paradise weaves together a composite of real people and events. As the world witnessed what could no longer be kept from view, through YouTube videos, on Twitter and in blogs, so this story came to be and had to be told.
The author Amir is an Iranian-American human rights activist, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He has lived and worked in the United States, Canada, Europe and Afghanistan. His essays and articles have appeared far and wide in the press.
Khalil’s work as a fine artist has been much praised. He sculpts and creates ceramics and has been cartooning since he was very young. Zahra’s Paradise is his first graphic novel.

Amir and Khalil have long dreamed up projects together, but Zahra’s Paradise draws on their talents as though they’ve been preparing for it all their lives—and through it, they answer the calling of their times.

The authors have chosen anonymity for obvious political reasons."

http://www.zahrasparadise.com/lang/en/about

Snippet from an interview with one of the creators - brilliant !!! :

What do you think is the role and potential of webcomics and comic books to tell stories that matter and create social change and reforms?

Amir: Boundless! The potential of webcomics to generate social change is phenomenal -- limited only by our imagination. And the web. Let's face it, cartoons are a universal language and the web is the universal medium. All the traditional barriers to social change are collapsing -- time, space, language -- just don't separate us any more. We can experience an event in Iran--happy or sad--around the world in a nanosecond. We can read a comic, together, around the world, at once in twelve languages.

Mark, our editor deserves all the credit for marrying Zahra's Paradise to the power and potential of the web. I will promise you one thing -- as far as social change and human rights in Iran is concerned, we will use Zahra's Paradise to explore every possibility and we'll do everything we can to push the limits of language, media and our imagination. Already, Zahra's Paradise is allowing us to create a network among human rights activists and organizations. Each and every one of our readers is participating in this process, and God knows what kind of creativity they will unleash.

found @ http://geek-news.mtv.com/2010/12/10/zahras-paradise-using-webcomics-as-a-force-for-human-rights/)