#j → elliot murphy (affections)

[xxj0kerxx]

because my tags are apparently fucked.

[thecomicsnexus]

A Song of Pain and Sorrow!

HEROES AGAINST HUNGER 1986 BY JIM STARLIN, CARY BATES, ELLIOT S. MAGGIN, PAUL LEVITZ, MIKE W. BARR, MICHAEL FLEISHER, BOB ROZAKIS, ROY THOMAS, J. M. DEMATTEIS, ROBERT BLOCH, ROBERT LOREN FLEMING, MARV WOLFMAN, TONY ISABELLA, GERRY CONWAY, BARBARA RANDALL, ANDREW HELFER, DAN MISHKIN, LEN WEIN, ED HANNIGAN, MINDY NEWELL, STEVE ENGLEHART, JOEY CAVALIERI, PAUL KUPPERBERG, DOUG MOENCH...

GEORGE PEREZ, PARIS CULLINS, DENYS COWAN, JAN DUURSEMA, KEITH GIFFEN, ROSS ANDRU, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LOPEZ, CARMINE INFANTINO, MARSHALL ROGERS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, JOE BROZOWSKI, SAL AMENDOLA, CURT SWAN, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, ERNIE COLON, WALT SIMONSON, EDUARDO BARRETO, DAVE GIBBONS, JACK KIRBY, TONY SALMONS, DAN JURGENS, JOE KUBERT, DAVID ROSS, JIM SHERMAN...

KIM DEMULDER, TONY DEZUNIGA, VAL MAYERIK, ALFREDO ALCALA, JOE STATON, KLAUS JANSON, JERRY ORDWAY, MURPHY ANDERSON, KARL KESEL, MIKE KALUTA, GRAY MORROW, JIM APARO, JOHN BYRNE, JEFF JONES, TERRY AUSTIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, ROMEO TANGHAL, BRUCE PATTERSON, AL MILGROM, TOM MANDRAKE, BILL WRAY, JOE RUBINSTEIN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, GREG THEAKSTON, ALAN WEISS...

DAINA GRAZANUS, MICHELE WOLFMAN, GENE D’ANGELO, CARL GAFFORD, ANTHONY TOLLIN, TOM ZIUKO, GEORGE ROBERTS, LIZ BERUBÉ, NANSI HOOLAHAN AND TATJANA WOOD

SYNOPSIS (FROM COMIC VINE)

Superman delivers an acre of top soil to Ethiopia. A sirocco threatens to blow away the top soil, but Superman's quick actions save the majority of it. Lee Ann Layton, a member of the Peace Corps, casts doubt on Superman's ability to truly change Ethiopia for the better. Superman carries out his task to pepper the Ethiopian landscape with acres of top soil. The top soil is blasted out of Superman's hands. Miles away, Batman investigates the crash of an airplane, which was delivering food to Ethiopia. Seeing Superman flying overhead, Batman signals the Man of Steel to join his investigation.

A cursory glance with his microscopic vision reveals that a particle beam brought the plane down. Superman tasks Batman with enlisting the aid of Superman's nemesis, Lex Luthor. Batman tasks Superman with discovering how their unknown foe knows the schedules of the famine relief planes. Superman's investigation brings him into conflict with a trio of androids, which Superman destroys. Superman traces a broadcast signature to an alien craft, buried miles beneath Ethiopia. Superman confronts the Master, an alien that feeds off hopelessness and entropy.

Superman battles the Master, only to find himself teleported away, back to the surface. Batman storms Luthor's island base. Batman confronts Luthor. Batman convinces Luthor to use his plant growth formula to aid Ethiopia. Luthor only consents to prove his superiority over Superman. Batman, and Luthor, rendezvous with Superman. Suddenly their surroundings are plunged into pitch, as the entire planet is encased in a sphere of total darkness. With the Earth completely cut off from the light of the Sun, all life on Earth is in jeopardy.

Luthor locates the Master's ship, just outside of a refugee camp for famine victims. Luthor is visibly shaken by his encounter with the starving children. Luthor tasks Batman with evacuating the camp. Luthor teams up with Superman to confront the Master. The Master teleports Superman into another dimension. Luthor attacks the Master, who grows stronger feeding off Luthor's despair. Layton chastises the Batman for placing the camp in danger. Batman races to the Master's ship to render assistance. Superman flies faster than the speed of light to escape the Master's dimension of abject darkness.

Playing the instrument lodged in his chest, the Master releases four fireballs, each threatening a different city. Superman is forced to abandon Luthor, to deal with the new threat. Superman dissipates the fireballs. Luthor continues his desperate battle against the Master. Batman joins the fight. Luthor projects a force field around the Master's destructive instrument, preventing the Master from playing it. Nonetheless, the Master closes on Luthor, intent on crushing the life from him with his bare hands. Superman intervenes, and beats the Master into submission.

Superman wrenches the instrument from the Master's chest, then hurls the Master into the dimension of darkness. With the threat of the Master ended, Superman works with Luthor to end the famine in Ethiopia. Luthor's plant growth formula, however, fails. What worked on Luthor's world, Lexor, is incompatible with the soil composition of Earth. Layton explains that it took man years to turn Ethiopia into a desert, and a single afternoon of super-heroic efforts was never going to restore it. Layton states that it will take a concerted effort, on the part of the entire world, to save the African continent. As Batman, Luthor, and Superman depart, Layton allows herself to feel hope for the future.

BEHIND THE SCENES

1983-1985 FAMINE IN ETHIOPIA (FROM WIKIPEDIA)

A widespread famine affected Ethiopia from 1983 to 1985. The worst famine to hit the country in a century, in northern Ethiopia it led to more than 400,000 deaths, but, according to Human Rights Watch, more than half its mortality could be attributed to "human rights abuses causing the famine to come earlier, strike harder and extend further than would otherwise have been the case". Other areas of Ethiopia experienced famine for similar reasons, resulting in tens of thousands of additional deaths. The famine as a whole took place a decade into the Ethiopian Civil War.

The famine of 1983–85 is most often ascribed to drought and climatic phenomena. However, Human Rights Watch has alleged that widespread drought occurred only some months after the famine was under way. According to the organisation, and Oxfam UK, the famines that struck Ethiopia between 1961 and 1985, and in particular the one of 1983–85, were in large part created by government policies, specifically a set of so-called counter-insurgency strategies and "social transformation" in non-insurgent areas.

The economy of Ethiopia is based on agriculture: almost half of GDP, 60% of exports, and 80% of total employment come from agriculture.

In 1974, a group of Marxist soldiers known as the Derg overthrew the government. The Derg addressed the Wollo famine by creating the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) to examine the causes of the famine and prevent its recurrence, and then abolishing feudal tenure in March 1975. The RRC initially enjoyed more independence from the Derg than any other ministry, largely due to its close ties to foreign donors and the quality of some its senior staff. As a result, insurgencies began to spread into the country's administrative regions

By late 1976 insurgencies existed in all of the country's fourteen administrative regions. The Red Terror (1977–1978) marked the beginning of a steady deterioration in the economic state of the nation, coupled with extractive policies targeting rural areas. The collapse of the system of State Farms, a large employer of seasonal laborers, resulted in an estimated 500,000 farmers in northern Ethiopia losing a component of their income. Grain wholesaling was declared illegal in much of the country, resulting in the number of grain dealers falling from between 20,000 and 30,000 to 4,942 in the decade after the revolution.

The nature of the RRC changed as the government became increasingly authoritarian. Immediately after its creation, its experienced core of technocrats produced highly regarded analyses of Ethiopian famine and ably carried out famine relief efforts. However, by the 1980s, the Derg had compromised its mission. The RRC began with the innocuous scheme of creating village workforces from the unemployed in state farms, and government agricultural schemes but, as the counter-insurgency intensified, the RRC was given responsibility for a program of forced resettlement and villagization. As the go-between for international aid organizations and foreign donor governments, the RRC redirected food to government militias, in particular in Eritrea and Tigray. It also encouraged international agencies to set up relief programs in regions with surplus grain production, which allowed the AMC to collect the excess food. Finally, the RRC carried out a disinformation campaign during the 1980s famine, in which it portrayed the famine as being solely the result of drought and overpopulation and tried to deny the existence of the armed conflict that was occurring precisely in the famine-affected regions. The RRC also claimed that the aid being given by it and its international agency partners were reaching all of the famine victims.

Four Ethiopian provinces—Gojjam, Hararghe, Tigray and Wollo—all received record low rainfalls in the mid-1980s. In the south, a separate and simultaneous cause was the government's response to Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) insurgency. In 1984, President Mengistu Haile Mariam announced that 46% of the Ethiopian Gross National Product would be allocated to military spending, creating the largest standing army in sub-Saharan Africa; the allocation for health in the government budget fell from 6% in 1973–4 to 3% by 1990–1.

Although a UN estimate of one million deaths is often quoted for the 1983–5 famine, this figure has been challenged by famine scholar Alex de Waal. In a major study, de Waal criticized the United Nations for being "remarkably cavalier" about the numbers of people who died, with the UN's one-million figure having "absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever," a fact which represents "a trivialization and dehumanization of human misery.". De Waal estimates that 400,000 to 500,000 died in the famine.

Nevertheless, the magnitude of the disaster has been well documented: in addition to hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions were made destitute. Media activity in the West, along with the size of the crisis, led to the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" charity single and the July 1985 concert Live Aid, which elevated the international profile of the famine and helped secure international aid. In the early to mid-1980s there were famines in two distinct regions of the country, resulting in several studies of one famine that try to extrapolate to the other or less cautious writers referring to a single widespread famine. The famine in the southeast of the country was brought about by the Derg's counterinsurgency efforts against the OLF. However, most media referring to "the Ethiopian famine" of the 1980s refers to the severe famine in 1983-85 centered on Tigray and northern Wollo, which further affected Eritrea, Begemder and northern Shewa. Living standards had been declining in these government-held regions since 1977, a "direct consequence" of Derg agricultural policies. A further major contributing factor to the famine were the Ethiopian government's enforced resettlement programs, utilized as part of its counter-insurgency campaign.

Despite RRC claims to have predicted the famine, there was little data as late as early 1984 indicating an unusually severe food shortage. Following two major droughts in the late 1970s, 1980 and 1981 were rated by the RRC as "normal" and "above normal". The 1982 harvest was the largest ever, with the exception of central and eastern Tigray. RRC estimates for people "at risk" of famine rose to 3.9 million in 1983 from 2.8 million in 1982, which was less than the 1981 estimate of 4.5 million. In February and March 1983, the first signs of famine were recognized as poverty-stricken farmers began to appear at feeding centers, prompting international aid agencies to appeal for aid and the RRC to revise its famine assessment. The harvest after the main (meher) harvest in 1983 was the third largest on record, with the only serious shortfall again being recorded in Tigray. In response, grain prices in the two northern regions of Begemder and Gojjam fell. However, famine recurred in Tigray. The RRC claimed in May 1984 that the failure of the short rains (belg) constituted a catastrophic drought, while neglecting to state that the belg crops form a fourth of crop yields where the belg falls, but none at all in the majority of Tigray. A quantitative measure of the famine are grain prices, which show high prices in eastern and central Tigray, spreading outward after the 1984 crop failure.

A major drain on Ethiopia's economy was the ongoing civil war, which pitched rebel movements against the Soviet and Cuban backed Derg government. This crippled the country's economy further and contributed to the government's lack of ability to handle the crisis to come.

By mid-1984, it was evident that another drought and resulting famine of major proportions had begun to affect large parts of northern Ethiopia. Just as evident was the government's inability to provide relief. The almost total failure of crops in the north was compounded by fighting in and around Eritrea, which hindered the passage of relief supplies. Although international relief organizations made a major effort to provide food to the affected areas, the persistence of drought and poor security conditions in the north resulted in continuing need as well as hazards for famine relief workers. In late 1985, another year of drought was forecast, and by early 1986 the famine had spread to parts of the southern highlands, with an estimated 5.8 million people dependent on relief food. In 1986, locust plagues exacerbated the problem.

TL;DR

The famine was caused by a series of events, most of them of politic nature (and the cold war didn’t help). But apart from the human causes, the region has been suffering draughts for a long time (and still does), ruining Ethiopia’s main industry.

AID (FROM BBC)

BBC's Michael Buerk achieved something very rare - he not only reported the world, but changed it a little bit.

His vivid on-the-spot coverage of a famine "of biblical proportions" in Tigray in northern Ethiopia pricked the conscience of the richer part of the world.

The money came pouring in. Bob Geldof's Band Aid and Live Aid led the way in galvanizing public attention, raising cash and mobilizing a huge relief effort.

As a result, many thousands of lives were saved - and tens of thousands of those facing starvation received food.

BBC World Service has broadcast an Assignment documentary based on the testimony of key figures on the ground in and around Tigray in the mid-1980s. Presenting evidence, that some of the famine relief donations were diverted by a powerful rebel group to buy weapons.

The documentary has revealed some uncomfortable facts and provoked a strong response. This morning a British newspaper, The Independent, gives over its front page to complaints from Bob Geldof and several leading charities. They accuse the BBC of "disgracefully poor reporting".

This documentary was put together by Martin Plaut, Africa Editor at BBC World Service News. He has a particular expertise in the Horn of Africa, and indeed reported from there on the famine back in the 1980s. He has spent almost a year gathering material and doing research for this documentary - and the BBC stands by his journalism.

As so often is the case, the famine that afflicted northern Ethiopia was compounded by war. Much of Tigray was controlled by a hard left-wing rebel group, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front. They were fighting the Ethiopian army, then the largest in Africa. This was also the era of the cold war - and the Americans were seeking to undermine the Soviet-aligned Ethiopian government.

It is not in dispute that millions of dollars of relief aid was channelled through the Relief Society of Tigray (Rest), which was a part of the TPLF rebel movement. It was the only way of reaching those in desperate need in rebel-held areas. What Martin Plaut's documentary uncovers is the systematic diversion of aid received by Rest to buy arms for the TPLF.

Martin tracked down two key former members of the TPLF who explained how they managed to divert the money.

They are now at odds with the then TPLF leader, Meles Zenawi, who is currently Ethiopia's Prime Minister. But they are credible voices.

One of these former TPLF fighters, the rebel army commander at the time, makes an allegation which has attracted particular controversy - that the organisation made a policy decision that only 5% of the money received by Rest would be spent on relief, with the bulk going directly or indirectly to support their military and political campaigns.

Among the other accounts featured in the World Service programme, Robert Houdek, who was the senior US diplomat in Ethiopia in the late 1980s, states that TPLF members told him at the time that some aid money and supplies was used to buy weapons. A CIA document paints the same picture.

Bob Geldof was given every opportunity to express his point of view while the documentary was being made, but declined to be interviewed.

Some relief agencies - including Christian Aid and Cafod - pointed us towards their staff involved in directing food supplies 25 years ago, and those voices were included.

Two key aid workers active in and around Ethiopia in the 1980s confirm in the BBC World Service programme the way in which relief was channeled through Rest - though they dispute that there was a significant diversion of money for arms buying.

"If we were being conned, I think it was on a very small scale," said Stephen King, then overseeing from Sudan the work of Catholic charities in providing food to the starving.

The documentary did not say that most famine relief money was used to buy weapons - it did not suggest that any relief agencies were complicit in the diversion of funds - it explicitly stated that "whatever the levels of deception, much aid did reach the starving".

But there is a clear public interest in determining whether some money given as famine relief ended up buying guns and bullets.

And that's what the evidence suggests.

REVIEW

So, if you paid attention to the story behind this book, it was done by pretty much the same people that did Heroes for Hope (Marvel’s version). Now, I’ll be very direct here, I think this one works better than Marvel’s.

Marvel’s version is too vague and abstract about the problem (there is one panel explaining how they weren’t responsible enough with trees).

In this book, even with a crazy super-villain involved, there is at least one explanation about the cause and what WE can do from our comfy homes. Which was the whole point of the campaign. Sure, in my quick research I couldn’t find any evidence that peanut crops were involved, but let’s just say that the book doesn’t spend too much time explaining the issues.

In fact neither of the two stories explain the ongoing civil war. There are at least some vague references to conflicts in the area in this book.

Luthor’s involvement was a nice touch. But just like with “Heroes for Hope”, here the heroes involved only make a glorified World’s finest issue.

The villain is there only to give the heroes an excuse to stay longer. I cannot say that story makes much sense, but it is pretty much the same motivation the villain had in Heroes for Hope.

But at least the three characters involved were Batman, Superman and Lex Luthor, and everyone knows these characters. So it is accessible.

The character of Lee Ann Layton... I am not sure if this is an actual real life person or what, but she should calm the fuck down a little!

She starts attacking Superman’s efforts, and pretty much anything they try to do because they are not bringing money. Lady, at least they are trying!

The art feels a bit more uniform in this book than in Marvel’s version. Perhaps because the artists involved were mostly from DC, with experience on these characters.

In the end, it is important to remember that the artists involved did this for free.

How successful was this comic-book? I never found the exact figures and no one recovered the comic book sales charts of the eighties yet. Maybe some day someone will tell us. In any case, if only 5% went to help the people, and the rest to keep them hungry, maybe it is best not to know.

I give this special a score of 6