Egypt's Cartoonists Are Drawing a Lost Revolution

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“It's a hard time to tell the truth in Egypt,” says Magdy El Shafee, cartoonist and co-founder of the annual Cairo Comix Festival. “And it's getting harder.”

For four days in September, in a courtyard on the old campus of American University in Cairo, El Shafee’s festival brings together a thriving creative community of artists using comics as a bastion of personal and political expression. In the cartoons and illustrations on display at the festival there are common threads and urgencies. Again and again, you find small figures adrift in dense environments, overwhelmed by huge foes, straining in the cramped confines