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Rafael Kayanan comments on "Looking for Heroes".


Excellent post Budjette.

From my New York citizen's perspective though, many NYCers felt the same as you did about the police and the government on the eve of Sept. 10th. Only the firemen have been held in high regard because we see the skyscrapers and experience daily the problems of dealing with the tall structures. What do we do if caught in an earthquake (which we had on a small scale this morning) or a fire etc.? So these were folks we saw in high regard already. The police and Giuliani had some scars on them due to certain aberrations in the department.

It took a time of great crisis to show the rest of the city what they represented. Their ideal core as protectors of the citizenry.

It took a crisis such as this for NYers to show the country what they were made of.

It took the comic industry a crisis such as this to touch on the very core of what makes a hero. I bet there were many with tears in their eyes as they laid brush to paper those smoke filled nights.

I sent a piece for the book as well, and Marvel will include it inside some of the books. It was a depiction of two firemen about three inches tall on the 11 by 17 inch board. Above them and the rest of the page are the flames and smoke billowing out from a stairway doorway in the distance. The flames daring them to rescue and bet on hope. Barking and taunting them.

Yet they are drawn rushing in with reckless abandon.

Last week in LA I had dinner with the sister of the doomed pilot of the second plane which hit the 2nd WTC tower. The one she said that was shown in all angles, she witnessed her brother perish a thousand times on several angles on the tv. She said that several thousand attended his funeral and that in that small notion she felt that people understood her grief.

There's faces to all these tragedies and I think many artists captured that in the comic.

--Rafael--



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