Aid and Abet

Peter Kuper in Publisher’s Weekly October 17, 2009

Peter Kuper continues to make news with his recent Diario de Oaxaca. Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week interviewed him earlier in October:

PWCW: One of the most interesting things about the book is this idea of how news is spread and received. You talk about how difficult it can be to find out what’s happening in a distant country, and even around the corner. How closely were you following U.S. reports of the unrest in Oaxaca and how did these reports compare to what you were seeing every day?

PK: A lot of times the news wasn’t accurate to my experience, and that was one of the things that started to drive me to write. Lots of friends were writing and saying, ‘Get the hell out of there, it’s dangerous!’ but based on our experience, it was okay, even if the reports were somewhat accurate. That’s why I started sending out emails describing what I was seeing, and then later started writing essays.

PWCW: What were the discrepancies between the news and what you were seeing?

PK: I mean, if the newspapers show a photograph of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail onto a bus, it just looks like the place is exploding but that’s not the whole picture. That image is sexier for the newspaper. The threshold of interest is really limited with newspapers, especially now, they are not gonna spend a lot of money reporting on what is essentially a dot on the map for their readers. So the reporter would be in Mexico City which is an eight-hour drive from Oaxaca, which meant that they weren’t seeing things first-hand, so a lot of the reports were really government handouts. If the reporter was there, they were really only there for the most extreme moment of the action. Living there, I was capturing a bigger picture.

Read the rest of the interview here! Peter also appeared on the Jeff Farias radio show on October 5 – here’s the link. Look for Peter in Ohio and Michigan at the end of October!