August 1, 2008 |
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Abu Uchuu
By Omar Khoury
Abu Uchuu is an attempt to transport the grounded mainstream Lebanese imagination into outerspace using a very familiar vehicle: the Service (communal taxi). Our Arabic fiction is often based in reality and any sort of commentary is very direct. Abu Uchuu is an experiment in giving the reader one step of distance from the subject, or a step closer to objectivity, in order to make social or political commentary easier to swallow; like having a glass of water with your medicine. For this reason, Abu Uchuu (the driver/main character) is set a thousand years in the future, in our solar system where people live in satellite cities, or space stations, that orbit the major planets and their moons. The strip is designed to be a daily newspaper cartoon.
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Omar Khouri was born in London, England, in 1978, but grew up in Lebanon. He studied illustration in Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. After acquiring a Bachelor of Fine Art, he moved to Los Angeles for a year, and worked as a storyboard artist for various projects including The Final Cut, a feature length film by Omar Naim, starring Robin Williams. In 2003, He returned to Beirut where he has since worked on a variety of projects that span many mediums and art forms, including print, theatre, film, and music. He has also had three exhibitions of his paintings in Beirut, as well as two in New York. Despite the wide variety of application, his work is always grounded in the pursuit of the Portrait through the manipulation of the nuances and subtleties of Time in sequential imagery. Recently, Omar has come back to comics, the medium that first sparked his artistic curiosity over fifteen years ago. His latest projects include Salon Tarek il Khurafi, a serialized comic that features regularly in Samandal comics magazine, of which he is a co-founder. |
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