We wanted to begin this Veterans Day with an item that was shared with us by someone in our local community.

I would like to draw your attention to this Collaborative Comic Book Project to remember  and honour veterans, done in 2017, in Palo Alto California. The electronic versions of the book are available free of charge on the CASP website. Although the project was held in the Bay Area, the stories are told by people of several countries, and focus on various wars all over the world and over a span of many years. The project was also presented in Montreal, Canada, in May 2018 at the Maison Hurtubise, The Canadian Heritage of Quebec.

The second volume of the artists’ book, Memories, is a collection of personal stories.

I am including a press release and some pictures of the Artists’ book, Thank you for your Service.

Best,

Danièle Archambault, Ph.D.
Linguist and Cartoonist
CASP Artist-in-Residence

In 2017, the traditional CASP Meet the Artists of Cubberley event occurred on November 11, Veterans Day, a public holiday in the US and other parts of the world that celebrates and honors military veterans.  For this occasion, we invited the community to participate in a Collaborative Comic Book Project, as a way to Collectively Remembering and Saying Thanks to our veterans.

The community responded enthusiastically to our invitation. We collected 90 pages of short comic strips, written by adults, students and children, who generously contributed their time, art and personal stories to this project. The original pages, created on a special 8.5×5.5 page of archival paper, have been bound into an artists’ book: a series of three books – Stories, Memories and Imageries. It was edited, printed, and hand-bound by Danièle Archambault, Servane Briand and Paloma Lucas at Cubberley Artist Studios in Palo Alto, California. The pages have also been scanned for digital archives and assembled into an eBook available for all online.

The original book in a special display box was on show at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco October 2018. A copy of the book (housed in an ammo box) was gifted to the City of Palo Alto Library on Veterans Day 2018. We also hosted a book presentation in April 2018 and a workshop on visual storytelling in November 2018.

Direct links to Veterans Day Collaborative Comic Book electronic versions:

PDF: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/64660

eBook: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civica/filebank/blobdload.asp?BlobID=64659