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My latest interactive comic is now live at Poynter.org – click here to read it in all of its interactive glory.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will also notice that my latest comic on the Hard Hat Riots of 1970 is now available for pre-order via the widget on the right-hand sidebar.
Here’s a link to another of my forrays into interactive flash design, featuring background info and interviews with Bhutanese refugees in Oakland. Madhu Acharya and I put the series of videos and audio together towards the tail end of the Knight fellowship, and the story went live this week on the Penipress website, which also feeds SFGate and the Bay Citizen. The above sketches were done in situ as I was wrestling with the idea of combining direct reporting with post-production work, sort of like the Bo Seremsky piece I posted a few weeks back.
As I mentioned in this previous post, about a month ago I spent a week in the woods outside LA (near Palm Springs), 6000 feet up a mountain, teaching a course on graphic novel writing. The adult students were amazingly dedicated and came on leaps and bounds in their visual storytelling skills, as you can see from the above tiers by Claudia Bear. Click here to visit her new site and read the rest of her comic. More from the other students to come.
In other news: The first mini-review of Yiddishkeit, featuring the 55 page comic I did with Harvey Pekar, is up online here. I’ll post more about it in the Non-fiction page (click on the above tab to access it normally). Here’s the official book page at Abrams if you’re interested in reading about the other collaborators, amongst them the mighty Peter Kuper and Spain Rodriguez.
Comics journalism is in the headlines more than ever these days: check out these two articles, one from The Atlantic (with a list of must-read titles), the other, from Truthout by Adam Bessie, features myself, Ted Rall, Sarah Glidden, Matt Bors and of course Joe Sacco in a round-up of the form’s movers and shakers.
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.
