The comic book will be based on Manning’s trial, produced live from the courtroom.
Reportedly, the book will be published in October by New York-based independent publisher OR Books. The publisher will assemble Stoeckley's graphic spreads at the end of the trial and produce the book as a print-on-demand paperback and ebook.
Stoeckley, who drives a truck sporting the WikiLeaks logo to court in Fort Meade each day,
said:
"It [the truck] definitely turns heads. My feeling is that if they allow the Fox News truck on base they have to allow me here too, right?"
Manning was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq, allegedly for passing classified material to WikiLeaks. Later he was charged with
22 offenses, which included passing national defence information to an unauthorized source and aiding the enemy.
Manning justified the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to WikiLeaks as an act of conscience. According to him, it was the urgent need to reveal to the world the atrocities committed by the US military in the name of freedom and that Americans had a right to know the “
true costs of war.”
Ever since the trial of Manning began on 3 June, in Fort Meade, Stoeckley has been recording every detail of Manning's trial from inside the courtroom, drawing and writing down events as they happen.
The comic book, titled,
The United States vs PFC Bradley Manning: A Graphic Account from Inside the Courtroom, will feature sketches of events from the courtroom, in addition to description of events such as the war in Afghanistan and a text from the trial transcript, according to the
Guardian.
Referring to the Manning Trial, Stoeckley
said:
"No other sketch artists are coming to the trial here in Fort Meade regularly. I'm here all the time. I want to record every single witness and create a visual record of what's going on so that people can put faces to transcripts. I'm trying to capture the atmosphere in the courtroom and the characters who are part of the story … I'm doing this in a style that's never been used in courtroom sketch art."
Stoeckley further points out the reasons why he wanted to publish the book
saying:
"I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralised, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare … As I hoped, others were just as troubled, if not more troubled, than me by what they saw."
