We recently published 'The Waiting Room', a 20-page piece of comics journalism about Iraqi refugees living in Syria, by Sarah Glidden and the Common Language Project. Now our partner site, VJ Movement, has a new piece by Alex Stonehill and the CLP focusing on two Iraqi refugees, Momo and Odissa, who fled Iraq in 2003 and have lived as refugees in Syria ever since.

Victor Ndula's latest for Cartoon Movement has been written up over at the Comic Strip Of The Day blog.

But the western media has virtually ignored the politics of oil in West Africa, where the kleptocracies have allied with the oil companies to create a system that is essentially an extension of colonialism: There is little environmental oversight, so that the leakage and pollution that is possible in the Arctic is a widespread, unaddressed reality in Africa, and, while the profits for this extraction go to Africans rather than to European colonial masters, they go to a small elite rather than to the greater population of the nations whose oil is fueling our need for fossil fuel. Read the rest here.

See more of Ndula's work here.

Kais al-Hilali, a thirty-four-year-old Libyan cartoonist, was shot and killed late last month while painting one of the political street murals for which he was locally famous. New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly writes that the international cartoonists community was quick to respond. She has put together a collection of the tribute cartoons.

On Cartoon Movement, we published a tribute cartoon to al-Hilali by Saúl Cabanillas Hernández.

 Khalid is a Romanian born Sudanese political cartoonist based in Doha, Qatar. Currently working in the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, Khalid considers himself a virtual revolutionist, publishing his political cartoons about life in the Arab world on various blogs and websites. You can see one of his first pitches for Cartoon Movement below, and his full portfolio here.

As the U.S. continues its drawndown in Iraq, our attention has been shifted to Afghanistan and the uprisings throughout the Middle East. But one of the lasting legacies of the 2003 invasion is the massive exodus of Iraqis who fled the fighting to become refugees languishing in neighboring countries.

Sarah Glidden, author of How To Understand Israel In 60 Days Or Less, gives us a look into the lives of displaced Iraqis living in Syria, who now make up the largest urban refugee population in history, in this 20 page comic for Cartoon Movement.

Glidden recently traveled through Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon with reporters from the Common Language Project to research her next graphic novel. In Syria, Iraqi refugees are prohibited from joining the workforce, navigating countless bureaucratic hurdles as they are stuck for years in limbo with no place to call home. With contributing reporting from CLP, Glidden brings to life a some of the refugees with her vivid watercolors in "The Waiting Room."

This summer, Cartoon Movement's editorial team, Matt Bors and Tjeerd Royaards, will travel to Haiti in search of a talented comic artist/journalist. The purpose of the project: find someone whose work would otherwise go unnoticed and give them a global platform to create a long-running comic that will give an inside perspective on living in Haiti. Well over a year after the devastating earthquake, Haiti is still in shambles. Unfortunately, the attention span of global media is chronically short; with this project, we hope to show that disasters do not end when the camera crews leave. The project is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mike Peterson has a thoughtful rumination on a Bernard Bouton comic we published last week at his Comic Strip of the Day blog:

International cartoons tend to be a good deal more metaphorical than narrative, and this one can be seen in at least two lights, both valid.

There is, of course, the outwardly "free election" that is a fraud, as seen in Cote d'Ivoire, where the incumbent simply refuses to accept the results, or in Iran, where the Supreme Council invalidates the candidacies of potential reform legislators (and where, even with the deck stacked, it was recently necessary to suppress the results of the elections that followed). Given the general tenor of the cartoons on this website, I suspect this is Bouton's intent.

But there is also a flawed "free election" where voters don't really understand the concept and tend to vote "Yes" out of some sense of identity rather than one of contentment... Read the rest of his post here.