Extract from my latest comic on the wrongful conviction of Ray Krone, who spent several years on death row for murder before being acquitted. To read the whole preview in page by page format, sign up for the latest Archcomix newsletter.
Kudos to Matt Bors, Tjeerd Royards and Caroline Bins over at Cartoon Movement for their excellent comics journalism work on Haiti and the ongoing plight of the thousands of disenfranchised people there, now that the mainstream media circus has predictably gotten bored and rolled out of town. What’s especially impressive is that CM has turned the mic over to Haitian journalists and creators to give them a chance to tell the story in their own voice, as opposed to the traditional 3rd person reporting we’re used to seeing. Here’s the first instalment of a comic by Chevelin Pierre & Pharès Jerome, “Tents Beyond Tents” that you should check out.
As if that wasn’t groundbreaking enough, there’s also an innovative mash up of comic art, audio and video in another related piece, this time focusing on the LGBT community in Haiti and the precarious nature of their survival in the tent cities:
A brief video intermission from the wishful thinking dept today – something to keep you sated until I can officially point you towards some of the myriad projects that have kept me busy for the past months. By busy, I mean manacled to my drawing board. This is from my upcoming comic on Alcatraz and will give you an idea of the new noir-ish style I’ve moved towards. Drybrush aplenty. Now if only I could speed up my inking process this easily…
As promised above, here is a link to the Yiddishkeit slideshow detailing my process of turning a comics script into finished pages, including using visual references, digital colouring in photoshop, thumbnailing, all that good stuff. Here is the Kickstarter campaign to erect a statue in Harvey’s native Cleveland.
Many thanks to Sterling Warner at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose for inviting me to talk about my work and comics journalism in general on Wednesday. It was great talking to the next generation of visual storytellers afterwards and I hope that some of them have made it here to the Archcomix online HQ – if so, welcome! Be sure to browse comics using the drop-down menus at the top of the page.
Meanwhile this week Alcatraz continues to rumble ahead, with the finish line now finally in sight; a new animation-based project involving Vietnam is in the works; I’m building another interactive piece, this time on the history of the International Criminal Court; pencilling some pages on a potential legal academic graphic novel; working on the follow-up to my crisis comix for Marketplace; AND laying the groundwork for my follow-up to last year’s Borderland, which will tell the story of trafficking in the US. Oh and the Stanford Graphic Novel Project! More about that on the soon to be re-launched”teaching” page – stay tuned for updates.
First, a test video for your viewing delectation and feedback: is the speed too fast? Is the text legible enough? Talk about your low-fi setups…
Below is a transcript of a recent email conversation I had with a fellow multimedia storyteller, Bo Soremsky, who put together this awesome interactive piece about a trial in his native Germany. Bo’s Qs are in bold.
People often ask me why i’m drawing pictures instead of taking photos. I’m sure you are familiar with that question. What’s your take on this?
People often forget that photos can be editorialized just as much as drawn images. Personally, I think a drawing is all the more sincere in explicitly revealing that the object depicted has been run through a subjective filter. All too often do readers forget that even a photographer has to crop in/out the elements they don’t want in a frame, and that’s before the editor has their say. Not to mention the possibility of it being tampered with in photoshop. To me, drawn images are the most accurate way of translating what’s in our heads onto paper – crystallizing our subjective experience. Provided a journalist is up front about that, I don’t see what the problem is, beyond the traditional aversion to what’s innovative versus something that’s been traditionally accepted. [Perfect example: Newsweek’s cropping of a Dick Cheney photo in 2009, prompting the longest comment thread ever on the NYTimes Lens blog - http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/essay-9/]
Without doubt drawings provide a very subjective view of the subject. So, how do you create authenticity? One answer to that question can be found in your hypercomic: By clicking on a panel the reader gets access to supporting documents. Thats a great way to prove your assertions. But are there other possibilities to convince the reader that you are telling the truth?
Sources are always going to be the key to authenticity, and linking is certainly one of the best ways around that. Incorporating more multimedia, housing multiple, corroborative views together could be another. I don’t think one single “truth” exists – even if you and I experienced the same event next to each other, we’d record and report it differently.
What do you think are the advantages of a digital reportage over a printed one? Does interactivity really help to tell good and authentic stories? Couldn’t it be to complicated and confusing?
I think interactivity is one of the few ways of demanding a reader’s engagement and involvement – readers/viewers get let off too easily these days in the era of clicking off youtube videos or channel surfing. Only by forcing the reader to drive the story can we be sure they are fully committed to the narrative – much like the way agency works in between comics panels to make sequential images seem like they’re part of the same story. It could well be complicated – the key is marrying a compelling story with an intuitive interface – no mean feat! (Not to mention being paid well enough to make it in the first place).
As promised, see below for a brief sampler of the anthology produced by students in my recent graphic novel course at EPGY. This preview features work from Beiatrix Pedrasa and Heywood Ye – all the more impressive considering they only had 12 days to put their stories together. More previews will be posted shortly, so support this new generation of visual storytellers and come back/share the link/tweet/shout it from the rooftops etc.
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