2024

What happens when people make art together? Community? Catharsis? Social transformation?

In 2019, cartoonist Rod R. Driver was traveling the world, studying comics. A stray email led him to Indonesia, where he became infatuated with the many street art collectives that had grown out of the zine culture of Indonesia’s turbulent 1990s. Through interviews with artists, academics, and organizers, Driver depicts a cultural renaissance of cartoonists, zinesters, and artists of all kinds.

From punk collectives to classrooms, archives to superhero stage shows, Komik-Komik Sama-Sama (Comics Together) is an affectionate chronicle of one artist’s introduction to Indonesian indie comics.

This book was my big, post-college, pandemic project. I had the good fortune to do research in Indonesia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 2019, and I spent the next five years researching and writing a comic book about what I’d learned about graphic artist communities there. I returned to Indonesia on tour in Fall 2024, where I did readings and events with the Jakarta Arts Institute, Yogyakarta Komik Weeks, Krack! Studio, Blooks, and Cahyati Press.

I did this project at a formative time in my life. It seriously informed the way I think about community and relationships, both personally and politically. I’m grateful for all the friends and colleagues who helped bring Komik-Komik to life.

You can buy it on my kofi or through my distributors: emerald comics and radiator comics.

There’s also loads of excerpts on my instagram.