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 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.

Above: Writer: Sarah Mirk (American, b. 1986). Artist: Alexandra Beguez (Cuban-American, b. 1984). Pages from Guantanamo Voices, 2020. Digital comic

Opposite: Joe Sacco (Maltese-American, b. 1960). Pages from Paying the Land, 2020. Ink on paper

A self-consciously subjective endeavor, comics journalism is also consciously collaborative. Mirk stipulates that whether the collaboration is between a writer and an artist, or an artist and an editor, collaborative work gives power to the stories told. In creating her book Guantanamo Voices (2020), Mirk conducted interviews and research with prisoners, government officials, and human rights agents at Guantanamo Bay before gathering ten artists to draw her reportage. The ten artistic styles mirror the heterogeneity of the interview subjects in each section of the book. Yazan al-Saadi, who writes scripts for artists based on his own investigative journalism, describes collaboration as a form of “idealism” embodied in the process of “working together as a team to produce something.” The shared labor becomes a method of accounting for individual privilege and distributing power to use “against those who are more powerful.” A synthesis of verbal and visual streams of information, comics is, even at a cognitive level, a tool whose power lies in bringing together multiple sides of a reader’s brain to challenge dominant perspectives. Since Sacco first drew his series Palestine (1993-5), comics journalism has become one of the most provocative forms of creative nonfiction and an essential field of comics art. A University of Oregon alum, Sacco received his BA in journalism in 1981 and effectively founded contemporary comics journalism through his graphic reportage in Safe Area Goražde (2000), Palestine (2001), The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (2003), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), and Paying the Land (2020). Sacco’s journalistic art entails both conscientious dedication to the visual components of testimony and documentation, as well as an ethical imperative. As Sacco asserts, “I mean to signal to the reader that journalism is a process with seams and imperfections practiced by a human being” (Journalism xiii). For Sacco and its other practitioners, comics journalism presents the opportunity to escape “the confines of traditional journalism” (xii) and to furnish a visual report beyond the camera lens. Eschewing the impossible “view from nowhere” offered by objective reporting, comics journalism is a grounded practice, oriented by human rights. Comics journalists not only document world events, they give voices to the voiceless, faces to the faceless, and names to the nameless. The images collected in this exhibit are always views from somewhere, created by the hand of someone who cared about the place and its people.

All the News That’s Fit to Draw

The Art of the News: Comics Journalism is the first major retrospective of the field. This groundbreaking show brings together the founders and the future of graphic reportage, drawing together—literally and figuratively—work that spans the globe in its scope. Glidden’s stunning watercolors depict her journalistic trek talking to refugees through Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Passmore chronicles Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests across the U.S., while Lomasko depicts anti-government resistance in Russia and Belarus. Mirk and a number of artists record the remaining prisoners of Guantanamo Bay in Guantanamo Voices. Alba draws migrants and immigration crises at the U.S.-Mexico border, while Tracy Chahwan illustrates al-Saadi’s investigation on the abuse of

Opposite: Artist:Victoria Lomasko (Russian, b. 1978). Publisher: n+1. A part of “A Chronicle of Resistance,” from the book Other Russias, 2012. Digital comic

right: Artist: Tracy Chahwan (Lebanese, b. 1992). Writer: Yazan al-Saadi (Syrian-Canadian, b. 1984). “My Heart Burns,” 2020. Digital comic

Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Warner exposes the educational failures caused by mass displacement of peoples, while Archer looks at survivors of human trafficking in Nepal and refugees lost in Europe. Warner, Mirk and Thi Bui, as well as al-Saadi and Khouri, report on the race- and class-based iniquities in the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cossio documents agricultural devastation from mining in Perú; Archer uses immersive media to confront the viewer with political violence in Colombia.

As a tactical practice, comics journalism provides ways of circumventing state surveillance, as exemplified by Lomasko’s sketches of closed trials of anti-Putin dissidents in Russia for her work Other Russias (2017). As an affective medium, drawing establishes indeterminate and complex relations between artist and subject, such that Archer was able to draw survivors of human trafficking in Nepal as a means of documenting them without retraumatizing them through photography, the medium through which their agency was stripped when they were forced into pornography. Recognizing that the hands that draw the news are not separate from the news, comics journalists lean into their own point of view. As Passmore recounts of his graphic report depicting the four times police have drawn weapons on him, “Any one of those times, I could go from someone writing about someone being killed by the cops to being the story. That’s not lost on me.” Mirk explicitly aligns “objectivity” with white supremacy and its belief that “‘There is only one story to tell and it’s mine, a white guy who’s 55 years old.’” Mirk avers, “I always think what’s much more important as a journalist is to be clear about who you are, try and understand your own biases, and be clear about your own identity.” AlSaadi further repudiates the obscurantist power of objectivity, declaring, I’m not objective, and I don’t think I should be objective. There is this constant

philosophical discussion especially in the American educational system about the primacy of objectivity. But objectivity is a privilege and it is the position of power. It is very easy to be objective when you’re not being affected, and I think objectivity allows for a lot of problems. . . The narrative that I want to pursue—and I’m not objective—is the narrative that I pursued where I talked about people versus power. I’m not diplomatic in terms of the wrongs that I see. In turn, Khouri explores the distinction between the photojournalist and the comics journalist by noting the misplaced faith in the objectivity of a photograph. This faith in the camera’s objectivity is instinctual, yet Khouri insists, “I feel like comics can be more truthful about the fact that nothing’s really objective. This is all just somebody’s perspective on whatever it is that we’re talking about, and I think that’s the power of comics journalism.”

Joe Sacco (Maltese-American, b. 1960). Pages from “The Unwanted,” 2010. Ink on paper

The Power of the Panel and the Page

By highlighting the subjective nature of all reporting, comics journalism signals, as Sacco contends, that “journalists are not flies on the wall that are neither seen nor heard” (Journalism xiii). Every encounter, every interviewee, every location is shaped by the comics journalist’s own hand. Sacco’s reportage could never be mistaken for photojournalism. But it is precisely the ontological difference at the site of representation and representability, one that refers back not to the absent presence of the referent, but rather to the labor of the reporter whose witnessing practice is inseparable from the body that shaped it, that directly links the precarity of both witness and witnessed together in the comics form. In Sacco’s reporting on African refugees in Malta, “The Unwanted,” Sacco uses mise en page to stage an impossible yet direct visual encounter between migrant interviewees such as John from Eritrea, and the viewer who is confronted with John’s gaze. Sacco’s paginal composition is arranged so that each panel meets the gaze of the reader synchronically, whilst simultaneously alerting the reader to the panel’s linear and tabular relationships of unequal position, place, and scale. John’s boat shrinks across panels depicting his journey as the frames themselves become increasingly skewed to show the discombobulation of the passengers. Sacco’s text boxes cascade like waves beating against the migrants’ boat and amplifying the repetitive, grueling nature of the voyage.

Sarah Glidden (American, b. 1980). Sketchbook pages documenting Rolling Blackouts, 2016. Various media on paper.

The juxtaposition of panels engenders scalar resonance and reconsideration of how the local concerns in Malta are situated relative to global events and movements. Page 24 symmetrically opposes the migrants in their boat with the Maltese beach full of critical onlookers. We, the readers, are positioned first according to the perspective of the migrants as they look for land, and then from the vantage of the Maltese as they watch John and his fellow travelers walk out of the sea. The transnational encounter draws together—literally and figuratively—geopolitical flows and personal narratives, crises and contexts. The relationality articulated by “The Unwanted” reminds us of Susan Sontag’s entreaty that a viewer “set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others” (Regarding 102-3). The works collected in this show document acts of witnessing that go beyond sympathy. These pencil-and-ink drafts, digital prints, and computerized and virtual-reality applications alternately theorize precarity and affect in order to remind viewers of their complicity in these crises. Repudiating the sound-bite quality of the 24-hour news cycle as well as the valorization of journalistic objectivity, the comics journalism on display here doesn’t ask you to sympathize and move on, it forces you to grapple with the power dynamics involved in reporting. From displaced persons in refugee camps (Sacco 2013; Glidden 2016; Archer 2020) to frontline workers in a pandemic (Mirk and Bui 2020; Warner 2021; al-Saadi and Khouri 2021), the humans who drive comics journalism are likewise rendered by the work of human hands, which draw and record their stories. In the age of fake news, comics journalism reasserts the need for artists willing to risk everything to render the truths of human experience. It visually forces us to encounter so many human subjects we will never meet, and to question why.

About the Catalog

The University of Oregon is committed to cultivating research and to translating that research into models and methods that directly improve peoples’ lives. In keeping with this mission, The Art of the News brought together a group of insightful and talented Comics Studies students to interview the artists and analyze the artwork included in the exhibition. These interviews and close-reading essays are collected in this catalog and reflect the impact and development of comics journalism as well as the training of our students. Given Joe Sacco’s own history as a UO graduate, it is fitting that the students who have studied his work at his alma mater carry on his commitment to “clawing your way to the truth” through their probing interviews and critical analyses. As an educator, I am grateful to work with so many curious, motivated, talented, and ethical people. The questions they pose, the observations they make, and their shared conviction for creating a just and equitable world allow us to see how the comics medium conditions the news not only as a mode of information, but as an emergent future. The voices collected in this catalog are not content to take a selfie and move on. In their thoughtful dialogues with comics journalists, they pose urgent inquiries, they challenge easy answers, and they forge a path for us to follow into the new.

Cited work:

Sacco, Joe. Journalism. Metropolitan Books, 2012. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003.