Director’s Foreword The Art of the News – Comics Journalism is the first museum exhibition and catalogue devoted to the remarkable international emergence of comics journalism in the two decades since Joe Sacco first published Palestine in 1993. Fittingly, this project and the scholarship it represents emerge from Sacco’s alma mater, the University of Oregon, where he first studied journalism. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the university is proud to present the exhibition and publish the catalogue, featuring not only Sacco’s work, but that of the other comics journalists whose work is also presented here, including Gerardo Alba, Dan Archer, Tracy Chahwan, Jesús Cossio, Sarah Glidden, Omar Khouri, Victoria Lomasko, Sarah Mirk, Ben Passmore, Yazan al-Saadi, and Andy Warner. Hailing from eight countries, their work demonstrates the truly global nature of this literary and artistic medium. We are grateful to Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the Comics Studies Program, for curating the show and overseeing work
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on the essays and interviews in the catalogue, and serving as its co-editor. The Art of the News builds on her foundational scholarship in comics journalism, and we are delighted to collaborate with her on this important and fascinating project. I also thank her colleague, Ben Saunders, Professor of English and Director of the Comics Studies Program, for consulting on this project and working with Kelp-Stebbins to bring it to the museum’s attention. We thank the comics journalists for their commitment and the powerful testimonies so evident in their work, and we thank the UO Comics Studies students whose essays and interviews have added so much to this project. A special thanks, too, to Audra McNamee for her superb portraits of the comics journalists; they constitute a uniquely fitting contribution to this project. As Kelp-Stebbins notes in her excellent introductory essay for this catalogue, comics journalists seek to present truths that may elude and in fact be precluded by the traditional practice of “objective” reporting. Both through their drawings and in their words, the comics journalists relate deeply personal stories from the real world, recounted in equally personal ways, whether by hand or on a computer, or a combination of both. This publication and the exhibition itself aim to
