B.P.-C.I.A. Expose as IPad Spy Comic
Best-selling author Stephen Kinzer's Secret-History Thriller makes the Leap from Page to Tablet.
Online, January 19, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Picture the scenario: Winston Churchill. Teddy Roosevelt's nerdy grandson Kermit. A circus wrestler named Shaban the Brainless. And oil giant BP.
All co-conspirators in a secret C.I.A. plot to overthrow Iran.
Sound like a mad mash-up of The Bourne Identity and Monty Python? Think Again. Operation Ajax is the iPad retelling of the facts behind Stephen Kinzer's best-seller All the Shah's Men. The new interactive comics app from Cognito Comics, which premiered last night in New York, tells the hard-to-believe story of the U.S.'s secret coup against the democracy of Iran in 1953, and does so with impressive historical rigor and depth.
Prizewinning author Stephen Kinzer was a stickler for keeping Operation Ajax's story line true to the facts in this retelling of his book (a work already well known to students of history, Mideast politics and Big Oil). And Emmy-nominated writer-director Mike de Seve applied 15-year's worth of experience in film and television animation to a sharp pulse-racing pace. So what you get in the breakthrough "motion graphic novel" for the iPad is not just a wild ride - but an education in clandestine action that's richer than any prior medium has been able to present.
de Seve noted, "The Cognito approach is a whole new animal - for me it's like a proving ground, the place where a regular flat comic can start to be turned into a real film to see how it works. And still be every bit as fun as a comic book."
Named for the actual C.I.A. operation, Operation Ajax is the first-ever interactive animated graphic novel built specifically for the iPad and is a forerunner in form and content. It's a harbinger of how mobile platform technology will be used in the future, integrating first-person storytelling with deep factual content, bringing the user/reader into a (literally) moving story.
As your touch unlocks the cinematic story before you, you glean fact after startling fact, via tech developer Tall Chair's breakthrough interface. Here you discover the compromised motives of C.I.A. heads; underground business alliances with Nazis and oil giants; even the actual, leaked "black" documents that were used in the execution of the mission itself. It's all set in a richly exotic design combining the distinct flavors of ancient Persia and cold-war spy culture.
THE TEAM

For story development, Cognito's CEO Daniel Burwen (EA, Activision) harnessed top-shelf talent, including Dreamworks alum Mike de Seve as writer. Master story artist Sergio Paez, veteran of Pixar and Lucasfilm, keeps the action coming straight at the reader. Marvel's Steve Ellis (X-Men, Fantastic Four) delivers deliciously noir pencils and inks. Tech pioneers Tall Chair and Flickerlab tie the art into an innovative motion-graphic novel that's both an epic adventure and a college course on covert action.
"Ajax is the ultimate page-turner on the device that redefines the page," added Burwen.
THE EVENT
Kinzer and team unveiled Operation Ajax to a standing-room-only crowd at an all-star event in New York yesterday. That event was timed to reexamine the infamous Iran Hostage Crisis, whose 1981 resolution reaches its 30th anniversary this week, and which is considered to have been provoked in part-and for some, in large measure-by the 1953 events portrayed in Operation Ajax.
"It's simply impossible to understand the Hostage Crisis, our relationship to Iran today, or the roots of Mideast terror in general without knowing about the 1953 coup," added Kinzer. "It's an amazing story, and the Cognito guys have figured out a hell of an exciting way to tell it."
Another way that pop technology is being used to bring modern audiences, young and old, into Iran-US history was also presented at the event. The director of the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise, Iran-born Navid Khonsari, announced his new game last night, "1979 Revolution," in which multiple players can simultaneously take roles as hostages, Iranian militants or soldiers.
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CONTACT INFO:
Mike de Seve mike@flickerlab.com (646) 221-4142
Dan Burwen dabu@cognitocomics.com
Stephen Kinzer skinzer@bu.edu
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