Comics Today: Bridging Cultures; A Conversation Between Paul Gravett and George Khoury (Jad)

Join Goerge Khoury (Jad) and Paul Gravett for a conversation about comics and culture. 

George Khoury (JAD) is an artist, author, critic and educator based in Beirut, Lebanon. 

Considered as a pioneer of the art of comics in the Arab world, he publishes the first graphic novels for adult readers in the region (‘Carnaval’ and ‘Freud’, 1981/82). His work is soon discovered by the ‘International Festival of Comics’ in France and acquired as part of the collection of the Comics Museum in Angoulême (Musée de la Bande Dessinée).

Jad’s art and animations have earned him several awards and honors including the ‘Gracia’ award for lifetime achievement from Lucca Comics&Animation Festival (Italy, 2014) and more recently the Mahmoud Kahil award for lifetime achievement (Lebanon, 2019).

He acts as director of the animation department at the Future Television Network for over 27 years and lectures in various institutions including the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Jad is also co-founder of the ‘Lebanese Syndicate of Professional Graphic Designers, Illustrators and Animators’. He is the author of the ‘History of Arabic Comics’ in addition to several essays and articles related to comics and animation. 

Paul Gravett is a London-based writer, curator, critic and lecturer specialising in international comics. He co-published with Peter Stanbury the ground-breaking British anthology ESCAPE (1982-1989) and was Project Director of the National Museum of Cartoon Art (1992-2001). He was also director/co-director of Comica, The London International Comics Festival, initially at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from 2003 to 2010. His books include Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (2004), Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life (2005), Great British Comics (2006), Incredibly Strange Comics (2008), Comics Art (2013), Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics (2017) and The Illustrators: Posy Simmonds (2019). He edited The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics (2008) and 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (2011). He has curated numerous exhibitions of comics art in Britain and abroad, including retrospectives of Charles Schulz, Jack Kirby, Tove Jansson and Posy Simmonds.  In 2014 with John Harris Dunning, he co-curated Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, the first exhibition of British comics at The British Library in London, and co-wrote the accompanying book. In 2017, he curated Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics, an exhibition based on his book for The Barbican Centre, London, which is touring worldwide, starting in Rome, Monza and Nantes. In 2018, he curated Global Webtoons: Invention and Innovation for The Busan Global Webtoon Center, South Korea. His latest projects are a monograph about Tove Jansson, a retrospective about Posy Simmonds for The Cartoon Museum in Basel, Switzerland, and continuing to teach his summer course on Japanese manga and art for The Council for International Educational Exchange in Kyoto. He writes for the Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, Independent, Bookseller, ArtReview, ArtReview Asia, Varoom, The Journal of Comics and Culture, and many others. Visit his website www.paulgravett.com