It seems that First Second is getting into the webcomics business. First it was E-i-C Mark Siegel’s Sailor Twain Or The Mermaid In The Hudson and now Zahra’s Paradise, a timely comic about the ongoing struggles in Iran. Calvin Reid has more information:

The Web comic will be published simultaneously in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, with other languages to come. Mark Siegel, editorial director of First Second, said the comic is about a blog called Zahra’s Paradise and tells the story of the blogger’s brother, a 19-year-old Iranian political activist who disappears after the political demonstrations in Tehran in June 2009. In their effort to locate the missing activist, the blogger and his mother, Zahra, come face-to-face with the brutality of the Islamic Republic and the fate of other missing Iranian dissidents. While the characters are fictional—the full names of the creators have been left out to protect them—Siegel said the events are real, and he called the comic “a roman à clef of history as it is happening.”