A little over a year ago, xanadu* published Issue 0 of Samandal Comics Magazine. We have been building a slow, but steady audience in Lebanon and have now branched to Europe and the States. Within the past year we have successfully launched issues 1 & 2 and are now getting ready to release #3.

Samandal was founded by a group of artists and writers in Beirut and is a multilingual (English, Arabic, French) magazine borne out of a long time love for comic books and a desire to see more of them in the Middle East. It is targeted at teenage and adult readers with serialized as well as one-off stories. Samandal founding members are: the fdz, Hatem imam, Omar Khouri, Lena Merhej and Tarek Nabaa.

Samandal's mission is to promote the medium of comics as a legitimate, high quality art form by publishing, holding seminars, workshops and exhibitions, networking writers and illustrators online and exploring the extension of the field though the internet. The primary vehicle for this cause is the production of a quarterly, multilingual comics magazine open to submissions that aims at providing a platform for the alternative expression of cultural and social issues for the youth and adults by publishing reading material that mixes stories from their own environment and international ones.

We are happy to say that Samandal is now available in most book stores in Lebanon (samandal.org for more info) and now in London (Gosh Comics, opposite the British Museum) and New York City (Forbidden Planet on Union Square). Translations of the previous issues are free for download from the Samandal website as well.

If you are interested in submitting work, please follow the guidelines on the website: http://samandal.org/submissions.html

Also, if you are interested in bringing Samandal to your bookshop, university, library, café, etc.. in your part of the world, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us!

Contact the fdz on: info (at) samandal.org <http://samandal.org>


PRESS RELEASE for Issue 0
PRESS RELEASE for Issue 1