How The Hell do you Draw Comics in a War Zone?

A Palestinian-Syrian Muslim on the difficult, dangerous job of cartooning against extremism.

By Hani Abbas

I love drawing, and have ever since I was a kid — even before I started school. I draw about everything: Life, for me, is a lot of lines and complex colors.

When I turned 20, I started to draw cartoons in a small magazine, and then I started to participate in exhibitions. As time went on, I got better. Then, after the revolution in Syria began, I started to draw in a more powerful way, and with much deeper meaning. When you’re in the middle of the storm, you have to be stronger; the difficulties are greater, the suppression is increasing, the personal and public danger are growing, too. Everything became insane.

So we fled from one place to another, being shelled, living under security observation for months. You may lose your freedom anytime, you may lose your life. We lost a lot of friends — killed, arrested, fled, and also a lot simply disappeared. It is a war now, a war where you have only a small pen and a big idea. A war that takes you like a tornado from one place to another. A war that may kill you a thousand times without a single bullet penetrating your body.

I think this job is one of the most dangerous in the world. Cartooning, by its nature, is a free, sarcastic, critical art; drawing a cartoon exposes a lot of issues, that’s why cartoonists are targeted. But the cartoon should be strong enough to deliver its message, and to fight the wrongs, and the bad actions: That’s the cartoonist’s mission.

So I criticize extremists from all religions and ideologies, even the extremists that wear suits and ties, or the dictatorships that wear military uniforms. Extremism has no religion: I am against all its types, and always against it with no fear.

Extremists are everywhere, not just the Middle East. Shelling using warplanes against civilians is extremism, one of the ugliest types, and it happens in all the wars, the ones in the past and the ones happening today. That’s why when we talk about defending human rights and protecting them — we have to defend humanity as much as we can.

People around the world don’t want more killing, everyone is seeking peace. The solidarity with Charlie Hebdo is evidence that people want to stop all these threats.

I’ve been threatened many times — it happens to anyone who thinks freely, because people have problems understanding ideas. Shallowness is killing everything. But you have to sacrifice if you want to say the truth.

—As told to Emma Beals