Welcome

Banner image: Cartoon by Doaa el-Adl, Egypt, 2020

This is the companion website to a book project by Cherian George & Sonny Liew. Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship, to be published by The MIT Press in 2021, explores the motives and methods of the political censorship of cartoons around the world. It will be rendered entirely as in graphic documentary form.

Cartoonists as the guerrillas of the news media

What makes satirical cartooning such a potentially radical and powerful medium is that you don’t need much to do it. You don’t need a lot of capital or an organization behind you. That makes cartoonists the guerrillas of the media — but it also makes them more vulnerable. – Read the Center for Media@Risk interview with Cherian George.

Articles

Banner image: Interviewing artist Prudencio Miel. More than 60 cartoonists were interviewed for the book. Some of these interviews have been written up as articles for this website.

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About

This is the companion website to a book project by Cherian George & Sonny Liew. Rendered entirely in graphic documentary form, the book studies the motives and methods of the political censorship of cartoons around the world.

Cherian George is professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University’s journalism department, where he researches media and power, including press freedom, censorship and hate propaganda. He is the author of five books, including Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press, 2016). Before turning to academia, he was a journalist, including three years heading the art department of the Straits Times. > More

Sonny Liew is a cartoonist best known for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Epigram, 2015 & Pantheon, 2016), which won three Eisner Awards including Best Writer/Artist. His other works include The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), Doctor Fate (with Paul Levitz) and Malinky Robot, as well as titles for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, DC Vertigo, First Second Books, Boom Studios, Disney Press and Image Comics. > More

Contact us via our respective personal websites.

MEDIA QUERIES

You are welcome to contact us directly, but if you need a review copy do e-mail Zoe Kopp-Weber (zkoppweb) at the MIT Press (@mit.edu).