Opposite: Dan Archer (British, b. 1980). “What Is Comics Journalism?” (detail). 2014. Digital comic
See It Now: Comics Journalism and the Graphic Truth Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
The Art of the News Every medium creates unique conditions of possibility for “news.” In the 1920s, radio upended the monopoly of the press with its capacity for liveness; in the late 1940s, this liveness was made visual with the popularization of television. Today, the apotheoses of the “new,” our networked digital platforms, provide instant updates measured through page views and clicks. While this recent trend of journalism via search engine optimization seems to portend the evisceration of accurate, responsible reporting, the internet has also radically democratized the production and consumption of “news.” No longer passive recipients, anyone with a connection can become an agent in creating, selecting, and distributing the news of the world. For all you know, the author of this piece is a Russian bot. Although you, dear reader, may now question the source of these words, you know that Paying the Land was authored with stippled and cross-hatched care by Joe Sacco. Likewise, you know that Victoria Lomasko rendered each of the Belarussian protestors and their cries in “A Trip to Minsk.” You know that Jesús Cossio recorded in black ink the countless human rights abuses in Barbarie. It is this presence of the human reporter meticulously traced in every ink stain and pixel of a comics story that conditions the news of this art. By the time they reach you, many of these stories are no longer new—but the way they reach you is. What comics journalism may lack in
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alacrity and objectivity is, in fact, its point. In formal terms, the works in this show thematize the frames through which the news is defined and observed. Comics panels not only confront a reader with the information contained therein; they force the reader to encounter another subjectivity, that of the reporter whose documentary words and images are framed, and framed for ethical and political purposes. As a medium in which artists painstakingly report through drawn and handwritten means, comics creates a condition of possibility for the news which is, in the words of artist Ben Passmore, “the closest thing to looking through someone else’s eyes.”
What Is Comics Journalism? As Dan Archer defines it “comics or graphic journalism is an umbrella term that covers any approach to reporting using both words and images together.” Sarah Mirk further specifies that comics journalism includes any “reported story in comics”: “reported means you interview somebody, you collect facts, you try to do accurate, real-life storytelling in comics.” As these artists attest, there is a great variety in both the techniques and the topics that fall under the umbrella of comics journalism. Sacco considers his methods “oldschool” and works with ink, paper, and white-out, redrawing sequences when needed. Omar Khouri’s fine-arts training makes him as adept with pencils as with oil paints. Sarah Glidden adds watercolors to her pages after drawing each by hand. Andy Warner works digitally from start to finish, sketching and layering with a stylus. Passmore and Gerardo Alba work between analog and digital, often starting with pencil sketches before digitally “inking” their lines.
