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Click here to read my latest comics experiment, gleaned from a series of interviews I did at the Occupy Oakland protest on Thursday night. Something of a change in how I normally put work together, I skipped thumbnailing and dived straight into transcribing the interviews to let the subjects speak for themselves. I sprinkled in some interactivity too to keep/force readers to engage with it – and added some audio into the mix while I was at it. See what you think – it’s also been posted on this occupy portraits site too.
You’ll also notice that I’ve added a Multimedia page along the top, where you’ll find videos, animations, audio recordings and links to my most recent interactive visual storytelling experiments.
Ok, so it’s been a while since my last update – I can happily report it’s because I’ve been juggling deadlines for the past few weeks. That, and being at San Franciso’s Alternative Press Expo and starting a new semester back at Stanford teaching the graphic novel project. For your aural delight here is the recording from the panel I moderated at APE on “Exploring Comics Journalism”. Thanks to Matt Bors, Susie Cagle and Jen Sorensen for their contributions.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/25001907″]
As ever, the fruits of my recent labours will be posted soon, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for now. What better opportunity could you want for perusing the archived non-fiction comics waiting for you behind the tabs at the top of the screen? Hover over them and then choose a comic to read from the drop-down menu.
In the meantime, above are some panels from my current project in progress on Alcatraz – check out the Alcatraz page for more details and the story behind them.
Pardon the brief hiatus, but I’ve spent the last little while with my head down working through the historical record with Paddy Hirsch, Senior Editor at Marketplace, on ways to make the financial crisis easier to understand and accessible to the general (ie. non-economically-minded) public. The fruits of our labour are now up online at Marketplace to coincide with the 3rd anniversary of Lehman Bros’ collapse – check out the 2 minute animation below and the rest of the comic here.
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.
After a week or two off (imagine that!), allow me to showcase some of the incredible talents from the two classes I taught directly after my knight fellowship ended. For more on the classes, click here to read my previous post. The first featured creators aged 14-17 from Stanford’s EPGY program, which ran for 3 weeks, during which time I crammed as much graphic novel know-how into their porous brains as I could. Like any of the workshops I teach, we covered the creative process (writing, thumbnailing, pencilling, inking, scanning, photoshop, indesign) with the invaluable addition of also critically analysing some stand-out examples of the form. This being me I put a heavy slant on non-fiction visual storytelling, meaning we covered Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Photographer by Guibert/Lefevre, Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, Wordless woodcuts from Franz Masereel, Lynd Ward and Giacomo Patri, as well as Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Douglas Wolk’s How to Read Graphic Novels.
For more samples of the students’ final artwork, scroll down.
At last! Rupert Murdoch and Newcorp’s combined karmic hangover has finally caught up with them, tanking the beloved News of the World and thrusting his entire corporation’s dubious newsgathering ethics into the spotlight. I posted about this a while ago when Murdoch’s bid for BskyB was on the line – though thankfully now UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt isn’t as sure as he once was of his wholesale approval of the venture. Many sources are even claiming that Murdoch’s been forced to drop his bid in light of the recent allegations. Looks like it’s for real – a glimmer of light in the dark tunnel of homogenized media consolidation. More here.
Why does this matter? I hear you thinking. Well, here’s an insight into ol’ Rupert’s business MO, courtesty of a June 2002 FT interview, in which he comments that:
“We start with the written word. Then we get to TV, originally with the idea that it will protect the advertising base and it then progresses into a medium of its own with news, programmes and ideas. You then look at TV and you say: ‘Look, we don’t want to just buy programmes from a Hollywood studio, we’d better have one.’ Then comes the issue of people who are going to deliver your programmes. Cable is consolidating … Instead of having 20 gatekeepers, you are going to have three or four. For content providers, that is very bad news. So, you try to protect yourself in having some distribution power.”
Or else see ol’ Rupe’s comments backing US intervention in Iraq, back in 2003: “I think what’s important is that the world respects us, much more important than they love us … There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months,” he said. Now that the Iraq war has left both UK and US economies in tatters (estimated cost currently totalling $787bn), not to mention the human cost on the ground in Iraqi civilian/US solider casualties and PTSD trauma, can we not start to question the motives of someone with such unchecked access to media control?
As the wheels on the Newscorp bandwagon come increasingly unhinged, more influential figures are willing to put their heads above the parapet, amongst them Eliot Spitzer, former NY Governor. Here’s to hoping the avalanche of criticism appears on the radar of even the most apathetic newsreader.
