Lost City Comics

A few years ago Cloudscape did a second round of Comics in Transit (the program that puts comics in bus shelter ad spaces around Vancouver). This time the plan was to connect people who had arrived in Canada as refugees with local cartoonists who would tell their stories in comics form. I teamed up with Mohammed Alsaleh and we collaborated on how he wanted his story told. I was able to use actual photos for some of these things, including the footage of the Arab Spring protests he filmed himself. Some of what he told me about his time in Syrian prisons I could only allude to in a comic for a public bus shelter, but in any case he wanted the focus to be more on his experience once he arrived in Canada, and how he’s been able to rebuild his life here. He has since been able to reunite with his family, he has continued campaigning for refugees worldwide, and we both appeared on an episode of PBS Newshour about the comic we made together.

Since the comic was designed to be big enough for a bus shelter, it barely fits on my website. Here’s a bigger version if you want an easier reading experience.