To Top
Check out the cover to Hard Hats, covering the 1970 riots of the same name in downtown manhattan, here: www.archcomix.com
The past few weeks have been a veritable mini-golden age for comics journalism, as the slumbering behemoth that is the mainstream media slowly but surely wakes up to the storytelling potential that illustrated reportage affords. First up is the editorial cartoonist machine that is Matt Bors, who in addition to being the comics journalism editor over at Cartoon Movement, cranks out an inordinate number of editorial cartoons for the syndicates every week. This week he was honoured as a finalist for the Pullitzer, hot on the heels of his Herb Lock Prize. Next is another comics journalism standard bearer, Erin Polgreen, who in addition to being a keystone at the Media Consortium has recently been awarded a Women Entrepreneurs in Digital News Frontier Grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation to kick off her latest project, Symbolia – a soon-to-be-launched tablet magazine focusing on showcasing illustrated journalism. Susie Cagle, another member of the Graphic Journos collective, was honoured by the Society of Professional Journalists for her coverage of Occupy Oakland, and Josh Neufeld got a well-deserved Eisner nomination for his piece on the protests in Bahrain, Lines in the Sand. Editors, take note!
Two (and a bit) semesters in the making, I’m pleased to announce that the new stanford graphic novel project is almost here. The story is based on an SF Chronicle piece, “Diary of a Sex Slave” that ran in 2005, highlighting the plight of a trafficking victim who was tricked into coming to the US from Korea, ending up in brothels masquerading as massage parlours in LA and San Francisco.
The course, now in its third year, offers 20 students the chance to write and produce a graphic novel from scratch over two (fast-paced) semesters. We split them into a team of writers, thumbnailers and artists, then switch some of them into scanning/colouring and eventually layout in indesign. You can check out previous years’ graphic novels here. This year’s book weighs in at 160 pages and relies on extensive picture reference and documentation passed on to us from the original reporter, Meredith May, at the Chronicle. It’s a big evolution from Pika Don, the previous graphic novel, which only featured single tone spot colour. As you can see from the sample page below, this year we went for 3-tone gradations of colour to fill out the line work more. More soon.
Sample page showing the US/Mexico border crossing
2012 is already looking to be a busy year for me, I’m pleased to say. From May 24-28 I’ll be in Phoenix, Arizona for the International Communication Association’s Conference, talking about comics journalism, followed a month later by the Woodstock Digital Media Festival, where I’ll be discussing visual storytelling on digital platforms. Straight after that I’ll be reprising my comics course at EPGY, Stanford’s Summer program in late June, followed immediately by my second stint at Idyllwild Arts College, near Palm Springs, California (that’s about 1.5 hours east of LA, non-yanks). Click here to find out more about the 1 week adult class I’m giving at Idyllwild, and here for 2-week youth (14-18) class.
I know it’s a long way off, but I’m also delighted to say that this December there will be an Archcomix exhbition at Studio Unfiltered in Pleasanton, where I’ll be displaying select pages from my latest comics journalism projects. The reason I chose to work with SU was because of their “art for social change” ethos, realized in the fact that one third of all sales will be donated to an anti-trafficking NGO. But of course if you can’t wait for the festive season, you could always head over to the Archcomix online comic art repository and order a page directly through this site.
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.
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.
