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COSI Archive (Conversations on Social Issues)

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About Leonard Rifas
Since the 1970s, underground comix artist, publisher of EduComics, and comics historian, Leonard Rifas, has doggedly been involved in “visualizing our global predicament.” In 1976, he made All-Atomic Comics, which examined the hazards and problems of nuclear energy, and in 1980 he was the first to republish Japanese manga in American comic book format with Keiji Nakazawa’s stories about surviving the Hiroshima bomb.
 
His comics include Corporate Crime Comics, Tobacco Comics, Food First Comics, AIDS News, and The Big Picture: Visualizing the Global Economy (a comic created in 1999 to support the WTO protests). In 2009, he organized an art exhibit of Seattle cartoonists on the subject of global climate change.
 
Rifas teaches cartooning and comics history at Seattle Central Community College and the University of Washington in Bothell. As a comics scholar, he has focused on the ant-comics movement of the 1950s, the underground comix movement, representations of race, and Korean War comic books.

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