Two years ago comic creator Karrie Fransman’s short comic Over Under Sideways Down won the 2014 Broken Frontier Award for Best One-Shot. Published by the Red Cross for Refugee Week, and distributed for free in print and online, it told the true story of Ebrahim and his escape from persecution in Iran at the age of just 15. You can read it online here.
Fransman has recently followed up on that comics offering with two new visual narratives ‘Game of Life’ and ‘Escape from Kunduz’ bringing accounts from refugees Sharif (animation below) and Hamed (sample art above) to wider audiences. Please take a little time today to absorb these incredibly moving stories and to share them with your own networks. They need to be seen.
Karrie talks about both projects below:
“The animation was created for the The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) by myself (illustrations and story), Adam Zygadlo at Jarbrain (animation), Richard Hughes (sound engineer) and Kristin Atherton (narrator voice-over). The story is the true tale of Sharif – an Afghani teenager who is currently stuck in Greece along with thousands of other refugees. His story is incredible – the stuff of Hollywood movies. Yet so often these amazing stories are not heard. I wanted to create empathy so that Sharif did not become another face in the crowd on a UKIP poster, but a brave and inspiring young man who had survived tragic adversities.
“I also drew some illustrations for another story from Hamed which you can read here. Having drawn my last comic for the British Red Cross I wanted to try a different approach to documenting these stories. But I do love comics, so hopefully I’ll return to the form soon! I also want to give a massive thank you to Broken Frontier and Andy Oliver’s support for the last comic I did documenting Ebrahim’s story. It meant a lot to us all! Please share: http://www.mtvvoices.com/en/video/game-life-story-sharif/ ”
For more on Karrie Fransman’s work visit her website here. You can also follow her on Twitter here. Her last book Death of the Artist was reviewed at Broken Frontier here and you can read an interview at BF with Karrie here.
