The new issue of Scoop! Is out, the second international extra comic, with reports and inquiries from all over the world. You can buy it at newsstands, on the website and on the Internazionale app.
In 1927, the French novelist André Gide replied to readers who wrote to him that he did not understand why he was so interested in the news. They did not consider it a good basis for creating quality works and criticized the choice of giving it so much space in his column in the Nouvelle Revue Française. Gide admitted that in order to appeal to the public, journalists and writers often dealt with it by letting emphasis and “badly controlled information” prevail. But the news was not only the realm of “the picturesque, the macabre, the sensational”, he explained. “The news story that interests me is the one that undermines certain notions that are too easily accepted and forces us to reflect”.
Those who do journalism using the language of comics usually have the ability to find this kind of facts; to look at what is happening around him without being guided by “notions accepted too easily”; to marvel at the details of a story; to intrigue the public by telling reality through unexpected perspectives. Authors and comic book authors retain a freedom and curiosity that allow them to find the voices and stories of others in stimulating and new ways. The pages of the second issue of Scoop are full of this kind of encounters and surprises.
French author Hippolyte comes to terms with the obstacles preventing humanitarian ships from rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. When he finally gets on board the Ocean Viking, something unexpected happens to him that it pushes him to give up the camera and notebook filters, and invite the reader to marvel with him. Seth Tobocman returns to tell about racial discrimination in the United States by making the second episode of Iconoclasm, the story in the first issue of Scoop. The words of an activist allow him to meet the voice of those who every day fight against police violence and the cultural heritage that celebrates a racist and segregationist past.
Cartoonist Madeline Miyun says, “I write stories about people’s messed up lives, and I’d like to keep doing it for as long as possible.” The extract that we publish is the testimony of another encounter, the one that veers more towards fiction, but that thanks to the tones and colors of the fairy tales manages to tell in an original way a path of change and transition.
Valentina Principe collects the voices of the inhabitants of the ancient village of Gurnah, in Egypt, expelled because they hindered the development of mass tourism. Marcello Quintanil has those of those who lived in Cabeço, Brazil, and had to abandon their home because according to the authorities, his life was worth less than a dam.
The lives of migrant workers who leave Vietnam for Taiwan are worth little, if any, in the hope of saving money and helping families. The Taiwanese cartoonist Tseng Yao-Ching asks us to listen to them in dramatic pages, but devoid of any sensationalism. Leila Marzocchi manages to do a similar operation: to tell one of the most painful events of the twentieth century with an unforgettable black and white, never emphatic. It is one of the tasks of art, remembers Sarah Glidden on a visit to Madrid’s museums: dealing with violence, building bridges between past and present.
In all these stories, “certain notions accepted too easily” go into crisis, pushing us to reflect in new ways on the world around us.
.