In connection with the 2009 Comica Festival in London, I wrote and drew a wordless six-page story called “Take Two” for the Comica-exclusive Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption anthology. Edited by Paul Gravett, the anthology is described as “a limited edition comic book which aims to highlight corruption as both the cause of poverty and a barrier to overcoming it, featuring original work from leading comic artists and creative figures from around the world.”

And as with Paul Gravett’s Comica, there’s some truly wonderful talent involved; frankly the prospect of being published alongside masters like Bryan Talbot and Pat Mills has got me all wiggly in the knees. My contribution “Take Two” deals with injustice and manipulation here in the States, dressed as lifestyle; I describe it over at Comica’s site (in typically long sentences) as:

…a piece about the insidious and pervasive tango of the pharmaceutical/food industry and the media that sells it all to us as reality, how it affects/controls and even shapes culture, and the alternatives being kids quitting their meds, unplugging from media that dulls them, going outside, eating real food. I’m thinking more of a tone/image poem 6 pages in length, where we see these chains of manufactured consumer-reality from the point-of-view of a young man doubting who he is, where he comes from, and the possibilities inherent in breaking free of them.

Here’s the whole thing for you to see: