Oliver McTavish-Wisden at work on a comic.
An article on Comics in Transit, our big public art project, is featured on IVOH, and includes an interview with Comics in Transit creator and Cloudscape executive director Oliver McTavish-Wisden:
Founded in 2015, Comics in Transit creates original, poster-sized comics for display in bus shelters and transit stops around Vancouver and its surrounding cities. For its second series, the project is offering a glimpse into the lives of Canada’s refugees, as illustrated by local comic-book artists. Oliver McTavish-Wisden is one of those artists. Long before he started interviewing Jay, he was a loyal customer, frequenting the salon Jay owns in the Vancouver area. That’s how he started to hear bits and pieces of Jay’s story — about how Jay faced police intimidation for simply giving haircuts in his native Tehran.
“He was always happy to talk about that kind of thing with me. And I’ve always been curious,” Wisden said. So the two collaborated to tell Jay’s story in comic form, so that his experiences could help educate Canadian citizens about the ongoing refugee crisis, the largest the world has seen since World War II.
“Everybody knows there are a ton of refugees coming in because of the crisis. But do they know them? Absolutely not. They’re just numbers. They’re just a statistic,” McTavish-Wisden said. “One of our goals is to try and humanize the things people are reading about in the news.”
To read more of the article, visit Cloudscape Comics Depicts Refugee Stories in Vancouver.