Did you ever draw a cartoon of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad or his son Bashar?
In Syria, drawing the president is forbidden, be it to criticize or to compliment. This tradition is stronger than any law. Yet no enforcer can limit my imagination. I have drawings depicting all Syrian officials, but nobody will publish them. Is this why you started using codes and symbols? At the beginning there was a real need for that; it was a necessity. Taboos abound, starting with the president, and ending with the party or the government officials. To avoid trouble and reach the people, I started using specific characters with clearly identifiable traits. The character with torn clothes, hunger-stricken, with a long beard, is the miserable Arab citizen. As for the Arab official; he’s the one wearing sunglasses, gold jewelry, fancy clothes, smoking a cigar, with a heavy build. The intelligence agent is the one with a gun dangling from his clothes and whose eyes dart every which way. This is the formula that I came up with to trick the censors. There is a project which aims to tr
