Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir and Nonfiction

Randy Duncan, Michael Ray Taylor, David Stoddard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317913184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides student journalists, artists, designers, creative writers and web producers with the tools and techniques they need to tell nonfiction stories visually and graphically. Weaving together history, theory, and practical advice, seasoned nonfiction comics professors and scholars Randy Duncan, Michael Ray Taylor and David Stoddard present a hands-on approach to teach readers from a range of backgrounds how to develop and create a graphic nonfiction story from start to finish. The book offers guidance on:

-how to find stories and make use of appropriate facts and visuals;

-nonfiction narrative techniques;

-artist's tools and techniques;

-print, digital, and multimedia production;

-legal and ethical considerations.

Interviews with well-known nonfiction comics creators and editors discuss best practices and offer readers inspiration to begin creating their own work, and exercises at the end of each chapter encourage students to hone their skills.

CHAPTER 1 Nonfiction Comics

DOI: 10.4324/9781315850603-1

Telling true stories with art is as old as humanity itself. Over 17,000 years ago, Paleolithic hunters depicted the animals they pursued in exquisite detail on the walls of Lascaux Cave in France. The Bayeux Tapestry, a visual history of events leading to the Norman conquest of England, stretches over 70 meters long and was woven in the 1070s. Despite the many ancient traditions of using art to share true stories, the widespread popularity of nonfiction comics is a new phenomenon. Until the turn of the 21st century, most nonfiction in comics form was published in graphic novels and traditional comic books. Many were obscure, although a few, like Art Spiegelman’s 1986 memoir Maus, became highly praised bestsellers. But recently the genre has found space within increasingly mainstream print and digital publications.

Joe Sacco’s comics journalism appears in such popular venues as Time, The New York Times Magazine, Details, Harper’s and Foreign Policy. Unilever, a multinational consumer goods company, used a comic book as part of its 2014 global Handwashing Behavior Change Programme to educate children about the five occasions they should wash their hands with soap each day. The company printed twenty million copies of its School of 5 comic book, distributing them in twenty-three countries (Unilever 2014). All nine articles in the Summer 2012 issue of the academic journal Visual Arts Research were written in comics form. Symbolia, launched in 2012 and formatted for the iPad, showcases nonfiction comics. Although one issue incorporated traditional fictional comics, it remained primarily a digital platform for nonfiction in comics form until it suspended publication in 2015.

Also in 2012, the U.S. Department of Defense, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began Phase 1 of a Graphic Novel Art Therapy (GNAT) initiative. The objective of the program is “to help Service Members express combat-related experiences through personal narratives in a graphic novel/sequential art format that will enable them to process their memories and emotions through healthy, constructive activities” (DARPA).

In short, comics published as journalism, memoir, and nonfiction have become an increasingly popular art form, available to anyone with a nonfiction story to tell. The three sidebars included with this chapter introduce three professionals working in the field, who answer some of the same questions about what they do in different ways. This book was created to help would-be creators tell such stories. But before anyone can start to draw a nonfiction comic, they must first define “nonfiction.”

Figure 1.1 The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has created nonfiction comics authoring tools for soldiers to use as a therapy for post-traumatic stress

Paul Hoppe

Paul Hoppe is a New York-based illustrator, designer, and author who enjoys venturing into a variety of fields. He has worked in Editorial Illustration, Children’s Books, Comics, Advertising, Graphic Design, and in the summers he teaches in the Illustration Summer Residency at the School of Visual Arts. Born in Poland and raised in Germany, he now works out of studio 515 in the Pencil Factory, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Randy Duncan asked Hoppe (and the other two comics journalists interviewed in this chapter) the same set of questions about what they do for a panel discussion in 2010.

Duncan:Have you done other work you consider to be comics journalism?

Hoppe:I have worked on a couple projects about neighborhoods of Brooklyn and other location inspired short stories. There is a story “Walking through Red Hook” that I did in 2000 that is both about the atmosphere and the changes/gentrification in that neighborhood. I put it together as a self-published little book.

Also I did several panorama drawings that are sort of a sequence in itself, read from left to right, about the Parade for the Greek Independence in Manhattan, again Red Hook, and a diner in the city, and in the new Syncopated, I did a story about Coney Island.

Duncan:Beyond the usual suspects (Sacco, Rall, Kuper, Burford, Russell), do you know of other cartoonists who have done journalism in comics form?

Hoppe:My friend Chris Butzer, with whom I started Rabid Rabbit Magazine a couple years ago, is doing quite a bit of nonfiction work. His Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel has been doing well. Josh Neufeld is also a very good example of nonfiction comics and reportage work.

Duncan:What do you think can be gained from creating a comic about an event rather than just writing about the event?

Hoppe:Obviously the visuals offer additional benefits, and you create a different form of communication. Writing is one way of telling a story, doing a story with word and text is a different one. The dynamics between picture and words create different kinds of narratives, different ways of storytelling. You see part of what the author saw, but also you’re filling in the gaps of what is not depicted and only written in words.

For the artist, it is great to capture the look and feel of a place, communicating it to others via their drawings. You can bring the experience to life, somewhere between a written story and a film.

For the reader, drawings add an additional dimension of information, just like they do with fiction books that are illustrated, or children’s books. Rather than “just” the written word, they see some of the things the artist saw, with their eyes. It’s an additional sensation, experiencing part of the atmosphere. And also seeing the “hand,” the personality.

A great drawing can fascinate and capture the reader not necessarily in a better way than a written word, but in a different way. Looking at Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics in this respect is just as relevant as it is to fiction comics.

Duncan:Snapping pictures of an event takes only seconds, but drawing a number of panels depicting the event can be quite laborious. Why is creating a comic worth the extra time? What does the comics form offer that photography does not?

Hoppe:It feels more personal. In a weird way it can feel more real and believable. And just visually there are some possibilities that photos don’t have. You can emphasize things, utilize perspective in interesting ways, leave unimportant stuff out. You can incorporate type and image into each other.

Duncan:Why do you choose to do first-person comics reportage, injecting yourself into the story?

Hoppe:The decision for me is not really about injecting myself into the story. Some stories don’t have anything to do with me personally, whether they are fictional or not fictional. Others are connected to me and/or my life, the very idea of the story has to do with me, with my life, or with the experience of me going to a place and exploring it. It just depends what kind of story or project I’m working on.

Some of these stories are like diary entries to begin with. Instead of creating a story, the experience of going to that particular place is the story. And then I arrange, streamline, rearrange until I have a narrative. But the very essence of the story is that I myself went to, e.g., Red Hook, and how I reacted to it, and what experiences I had. Of course these two kinds of stories can mix. As with any kind of storytelling, including writing, there are varying degrees of realism and fictionalizing.

Defining Nonfiction: What is Truth?

This question has dogged philosophers for thousands of years. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” Socrates famously said—a statement that appears borne out by 21st century life in fields as varied as politics, digital communication and quantum physics. As the writer Oscar Wilde put it, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” All anyone can say with certainty is that the person claiming to know the full truth of any subject is likely to be misguided or lying.

Yet most cultures and individuals hold strong convictions, if not of what constitutes absolute truth and absolute falsehood, at least of what is meant by the word “truth.” Likewise, literary conventions have settled on common definitions of “fiction” and “nonfiction.” As the terms are used in the world’s libraries and bookstores, if not in heady philosophical arguments, “fiction” is always a made-up story, and “nonfiction” is always a depiction of reality, to the best of an author’s ability to discover that reality. Fiction writers can invent characters, events, places or a combination of all three, while nonfiction authors—at least, the ethical ones—are constrained to make the people, places, and events in their stories as accurate as possible.

The complication in this simple literary convention: that phrase “accurate as possible” allows a lot of wiggle room. Have the events in a story been verified by multiple sources? Are the facts attributed to reliable authorities? Does an eye-witness account of a bank robbery accurately reflect what happened? Can one person’s experience of an Italian village while on a short vacation count as a true rendering of the place? Can another’s memory of a traumatic childhood event be verified by any living person or physical evidence? Can a narrative or artistic style change the meaning of a story that is otherwise verifiable? These are the kinds of questions asked by critics of nonfiction. Thus, those who want to create nonfiction comics should have some idea of how to answer such questions about their chosen stories before they begin.

Peter Bagge

While enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1977, Peter Bagge discovered underground comics, and the work of R. Crumb in particular, turning “what had been a vague interest in cartooning into a passion.” He became managing editor of Crumb’s Weirdo magazine and created several series of his own, such as Comical Funnies, Neat Stuff, and Hate. His work has appeared in periodicals ranging from Mad Magazine and Weekly World News to Details and Discover. Born in Peekskill, New York, he has lived in Seattle since 1984.

Duncan:I know you have been doing a feature for Reason for nearly a decade and last year began a strip for Discover. Have you done other work you consider to be comics journalism?

Bagge:The first time I attempted it was in the late ’90s. Under Art Spiegleman’s suggestion and supervision, Details magazine sent me to Aspen to cover that year’s HBO Comedy Festival. I was to make a four-page comic reporting on the event, which was part of a short lived series Details was running at the time. That format served as the basis and inspiration for the work I did later for Reason. Also prior to Reason, I briefly did reporter/journalist type work for a website called Suck.com, though for them I wrote essays that I also illustrated.

Duncan:Beyond the usual suspects (Sacco, Rall, Kuper, Burford, Russell), do you know of other cartoonists who have done journalism in comics form?

Bagge:I recall Harvey Kurtzman doing something like this for Help! Magazine in the early ’60s. He sent Jack Davis to cover the newly formed Mets baseball team, and a very young Robert Crumb to do the same in Harlem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword by Josh Neufeld
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Nonfiction Comics
• CHAPTER 2 The History of Nonfiction Comics
• CHAPTER 3 Creative Approaches to Finding Stories
• CHAPTER 4 Using the Comics Form for Nonfiction
• CHAPTER 5 Finding Facts
• CHAPTER 6 Finding Visuals
• CHAPTER 7 Nonfiction Narrative Techniques
• CHAPTER 8 The Artist’s Tools and Techniques
• CHAPTER 9 Publication and the Production Process
• CHAPTER 10 Legal and Ethical Considerations
• Bibliography
• Index