Note: A full color PDF of this poster may be downloaded here
Artists' Statement:
As to the story of that image: The story is not that interesting. I was taking Peter Kuper's class "Comics Outside the Box" at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC. Each week he would give assignments that were meant to stretch our creative perspective in some way (a comic done entirely in a single setting, a comic composed entirely out of self-portraits, etc.)
One week while he was away Seth Tobocman came in as a guest lecturer and gave a great presentation on comics as advocacy, and asked [us] to create for our assignments that week a comic that asked someone to take action. I had been active already for some time with the NYC BDS movement and had created a number of comics for that movement, but I really wanted to create a powerful single-page comic that could reach people.
That black-and-white version is what I came up with. I didn't get a lot of reaction to it, other than students saying it was good, powerful, moving. Many of the students at SVA were not very political (other topics covered, I recall, by that assignment, included recycling and visiting your local food co-op) so they didn't quite know what to make of it, I gather. No pushback, tho, which is fair enough.
Adalah-NY has used it on their flyers for several years now, and had a non-comic flyer listing 10 products we were urging people to boycott in NYC.
Recently we decided to combine the two, and since Adalah-NY was paying for color printing, I got the chance to color the comic, something I've only started doing recently. We printed out a couple hundred of them, and take them to conferences and actions wherever we go to distribute. They are pretty effective, I think.