Cry for Help: 36 Scam E-Mails from Africa

The tone is carefully chosen: subservient, condescending, solicitous, disdainful. That’s the way the now ubiquitous ‘African Scam Mail’ has descended upon us and that’s the way German illustrator and author Henning Wagenbreth applies his own distinct style and wit to depict them. Using just a few bright colors and an amazing command of typography, A Cry For Help is a series of brilliant vignettes illustrating 36 of Wagenbreth’s favorite scam emails from Africa. Styles utlized include woodblock, linocut prints and computerized images, and all visualize in tragicomic manner just how easily a weapon of globalization (the internet) can be turned against its creators. Henning Wagenbreth is an award-winning illustrator and professor of Visual Communication at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (Berlin Academy of Arts).