26 minute read
An Interview with Dan Archer
Dan Archer by Audra McNamee
Dan Archer
Dan Archer has been working as a graphic journalist for over a decade. He focuses on human rights-related topics in his work, and is accustomed to respecting the sensitivities associated with telling the stories of survivors of human trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors, domestic violence, mental health, homelessness, incarceration and state-sponsored violence. His work has been supported by the BBC, Vice, the US State Department, Associated Press, the Colombian government, Open Society, and European Journalism Centre; he has a Maynard Institute Award for mental health reporting. In 2015 Archer founded Empathetic Media, a mixed reality production studio, to expand his interactive journalism into the immersive space. Since then EM has produced dozens of virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences from 360 videos to room-scale pieces for a wide range of clients, including the Washington Post, Pfizer Foundation, Gilead Life Sciences and the NHS. He’s also working on a doctoral thesis at UCL focused on measuring the impact of pro-social behavioral interventions inside immersive experiences using biosignals.
Interview with Dan Archer
By Audra McNamee and Lauren Allen
https://jsma.uoregon.edu/DanArcher
Lauren Allen: As somebody who has been working in comics journalism for over a decade, how did you first get involved in the field, and what has changed during the course of your career? Dan Archer: I first got into it, frankly, from seeing a Spanish version of Palestine, Palestina, by Joe Sacco in a bookstore in Madrid, during my undergrad when I was actually doing languages, French and Spanish. And it sort of blew my mind. I had got into alternative comics through a series of used bookstores in Camden in North London, where I grew up: things like Hup and, obviously, I was a huge fan of R. Crumb. And he’d done a couple of adaptations, like Nausea and things like that. I always just loved the approach of using comics to explore other fields that weren’t necessarily appropriate, as some of his detractors might have said. And as I was tentatively exploring that, I started a comic at university, at Cambridge where I did my undergrad, and have always been sort of involved in the indie press, but I guess it was formalized when I moved to the states in 2007 to get an MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies.
And that was largely because Joe Sacco is affiliated with the institution, and James Sturm was there, and a huge list of incredible artists. That was kind of like my Karate Kid moment of just going there and really hunkering down and learning the craft.
In terms of how it’s changed, I remember when soon after finishing up CCS, I moved to the Bay Area. And the Bay Area became this sort of weird enclave for comics journalism; Andy Warner was there, and Susie Cagle, myself. I remember obviously Sarah Glidden was on the East Coast, but there was what felt like a small unified group of us putting work together. And that was incredible, but since then, because of The Nib and Matt Bors’s incredibly indefatigable work and support for it, it’s really exploded, and now it’s one step closer to being more broadly accepted by editors both in print and online. And I think we’ve seen that; I lately, for example, have done work for larger outfits like National Geographic or the Associated Press. It’s not such a big deal that you’re a comics artist, you’re just considered another journalist with a different set of tools. So, I think that’s representative of where it’s going. Audra McNamee: You just mentioned some of your major influences like Crumb and Sacco, but are there particular graphic journalists or specific works of graphic journalism that pushed you towards graphic journalism? DA: I would say Joe Sacco (his name probably ricocheted around your series of interviews, time and time again, as it rightly deserves to). I’ve always found Safe Area Goražde my real touch point. And then, to an extent, Footnotes in Gaza, largely because I think it was building on such a huge legacy that Joe created of previous work. His style and approach, I think, was always really inspirational. At the same time, I liked that he was the lone wolf—he was doing it in the early to mid 90s, and obviously pre-digital. Also, I was always inspired by the World War Three Illustrated crew as well: Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper. And some of the more politically active artists; you know Molly Crabapple as well does incredible work that’s extremely sensitive to the issues of the interviewees. Wendy MacNaughton is someone who just consistently knocks it out of the park in terms of both the level of artistry in her watercolors and how dynamic and vibrant they feel, but also just the tone. It just feels so rich whether she’s doing a cookery book or a behind-the-scenes San Francisco Library, which is one of my favorite pieces of hers. And it was kind of an inspiration for the live series of reports and portraits and interviews that I did at Ferguson. When I was in Spain, I was also inspired by a group of cartoonists who have the magazine El Jueves, which translates as “Thursday” because it comes out on a Wednesday, which is hilarious, and not necessarily graphic journalism, but like a satirical take on politics similar to what was Viz here in the UK.
Also people like Manu Larcenet—Ordinary Victories and Blast— whilst not necessarily what you might call graphic journalism, Ordinary Victories and his examination of dock workers, I think was just an incredibly humane, sensitive treatment. So I’m always looking to try and integrate more influences like that. Last but not least, I’ll say The Photographer—Guibert—I was also particularly interested in a sort of a hybrid approach,
kind of like what Submarine Channel does with some of their interactive work out of the Netherlands. They got me first thinking about Flash and interactive comics, but as they’ve moved into transmedia, they do a lot of mobile and immersive experiences. There was one piece, it was around pho and an artist’s obsession with noodles.
So there’s a hodgepodge of influences I guess. LA: What is your method for approaching a work of comics journalism, and how has the digital impacted that approach to work?
DA: Largely depends on the nature of the piece, obviously, whether it’s like a one off, whether it will be alive, what the turnaround is. In a longer piece say for The Nib, you get a handful of weeks to be able to draft reports, draft sketch, have it edited, revised, inked, scanned, colored, etc. These days, I tend to do more live sketching in the fields—I, like everybody, especially in the wake of COVID, spend way too long in front of a screen, so I’m drawn to the analog more and more nowadays. And I just finished my graphic novel around my experience of investigating human trafficking in Nepal, called Things Are Like That, and I did that all by hand and had a watercolor day. I lettered it digitally because, you know, life is too short. That was a huge undertaking, and that was always in the background whilst I finished other pieces and projects. And I do like working digitally, like when I was at the Winter Olympics in South Korea for the AP, I would do live sketches both on a Cintiq that I schlepped around, as well as in a sketchbook.
I like to take those live sketches and then work them up digitally, overlay them with other pieces (you see that on my Instagram). I always find it’s a good way of trying to bring the audience into the process, moving away from what I see as more of an arcane model where you get a brief, you work on it for X amount of time, and then you publish it, and then that’s it. I think the process is actually much more interesting, and it’s the part I most enjoy, the actual reporting and the drawing in situ, because more and more—most recently this National Geographic project—I had to draw people live, because number one: as soon as anyone saw any cameras, they immediately turned their back and neglected to do an interview, which was slightly challenging for the photojournalist who was with us. Also because people wouldn’t really understand what it is we were trying to do. I said “I’m a graphic journalist, we’re trying to chronicle your stories and turn these interviews into a final finished piece.” They were like, “What do you mean draw us?” Then I would start drawing, and then that’s how the conversation would ensue, and so that was really critical to earning trust and showing people what it was that we would do. AM: Why do you think that comics and interactive media are effective tools for telling nonfiction stories? DA: The golden question! Biologically speaking, our visual cortex occupies such a huge space in our mind and in our brains, and it’s, by and large, the main way that we process information, so I think there is something particularly seductive and appealing to a visual, particularly when you can distill a level of information down into a single static image. I also think it’s a universal language that can transcend different national and linguistic barriers. But, fundamentally, I also think there’s kind of a magic where we see the two images together, like Scott McCloud says, the agency lying in the gutters and bringing sequential forms together. Being able to make sense of that and watch people starting to come to life is extremely powerful, and I also think it’s very disarming, much like a lot of the revolutionary propaganda or poster art. People wrongly underestimate its power for conveying important subject matter or transporting a reader to a place the cameras couldn’t get to, or anonymizing a source, who wouldn’t have given an interview otherwise. There have been countless times where I have told people I’m a graphic journalist, whether it was law enforcement, or whoever, and they’ve just completely discarded my worries, like, “Oh, well that’s fine. You’re not worth anything; you’re not even worth bothering with.” Which is fantastic; we still occupy this sort of bizarre territory, and I think it’s also very unique, particularly in the journalistic context, because you are able to explore and express a very subjective side of yourself. No one draws or writes in the same way; we all have our sort of orthographic or creative signatures. Yet at the same time, as long as you’re honest and candid about the way that you’re exploring a situation, that can give you a more direct route to your own individual truth of a situation than writing up a text article where everyone’s words would visually appear the same, and the structures—the editorial and sensorial structures—that encroach on that keyboard-typed truth are less visible. When I draw a sketch of 30 Ukrainian protesters at Maidan, I obviously have to be very deliberate about who I’m drawing and why I’m drawing them, and either rely heavily on reference photos or actually be there. And it’s very different to someone saying “30 people were there.” There’s more of an honesty and candor to that than the written truth. There’s an argument we originally had with photoshop, and now the argument’s even more pressing with deepfakes, of what is the absolute truth of visual media, and what happens when we can’t trust what we’ve seen? And who is curating this visual media? That’s really where I see a very interesting potential point for graphic journalists, and journalists at large, to explore: How can they give the reader more of a sense of agency in terms of making up their own minds of a situation? AM: How did you personally make that shift from comics journalism to this more interactive media style of storytelling, and what advantages and shortcomings do each possess in nonfiction storytelling? DA: Shortcomings, I can tell you, it’s banging your head against a desk because the code doesn’t work, which is something I’ve [done on] countless desks and countless screens. But less facetiously, I’ll say the first experiment I did that opened my eyes to the power of the digital was in 2009, which feels like a lifetime ago, with the Honduran coup. Where I drew a comic, and whilst its creation was very
much referring back to that original process of handdrawn and inked and then colored in photoshop but then published online. It went online on boingboing, and it sort of opened my eyes to the power of an online audience and the international reach that it could have because I got tons of people on the ground in Tegucigalpa. We did a print run to make hard copies available in Spanish, as well as English, made an app, etc. So I saw how versatile it could be. We cut the panels up, and then put them into a swiping app, which got a certain amount of traction.
But it was actually when I did an interactive version of the Nisoor Square shootings, where essentially it was a sort of a flash-based experience that broke down a timeline of the incident involving Blackwater troops, who were later found guilty of murdering 24 Iraqi civilians and then exonerated by your beloved ex-President. What I wanted to do was condense and layer a huge amount of information into a single visual, and I thought the digital was the perfect way to do that in a way that the analog page couldn’t.
Joe Sacco’s splash pages in a way were kind of like immersive analog pages because there’s so much detail and your eyes can just from black spotting they can just move around and constantly just be lost. I would just sit and just drink in the same way that I would with Gilbert Shelton’s crazy line work and Crumb’s. So I just got thinking: What if we put pop up windows, or what if we had links to sources? Because I remember Joe saying to me that he’d always tried to convince Noam Chomsky of the worth of comics, and he said, “So how do you cite sources?” I always thought that was a cool challenge, putting in visual footnotes, because so few people actually scroll to the bottom of an article. So that’s what I did—made it clickable so you could click on certain windows, and they would pop up, or you could juxtapose different perspectives, and that’s where I got thinking about how the medium, the vessel for information, could also dictate to a certain extent, some of the inherent problems. Trying to juxtapose contrasting versions of the same story and refer back to them is one of the challenges that we fundamentally face, which is: How do you tell the truth visually? LA: In the VR project that you put together with Empathetic Media called Ferguson Firsthand, the viewer is able to embody multiple different perspectives, and you mentioned earlier the agency that you want to give the viewer when confronted with multiple perspectives. Have comics journalism and interactive media challenged your own approach to subjectivity and truth?
DA: For sure, I was gonna bring up Ferguson Firsthand as an influence from Nisoor Square where I used time as the sort of device for mapping narratives, and in Ferguson I was using space, because it was a 3D explorable environment. That has been my personal interest or at least focal area in terms of journalism: How do we reconcile these contradictory approaches? Because people have different amazing domains, and there was a lot of great comics journalism which is almost like a historical synopsis of an issue, but for me, I was always more interested in a direct like a sort of beat reporter. But how do you then translate that back without it just being a he said/she said kind of deal?
And I always thought that was particularly true lately, for example, in some of the refugee stories we’ve been talking about. Where you talk to law enforcement, and they’d say certain things, or you talk to a lot of these asylum seekers, and they’d be completely at odds. And so, rather than listing them one by one, you want to—I’m borrowing as well from Joe’s approach—insert yourself as a kind of not comical figure, but as the vessel through which people are speaking, but highlighting that role. I think comics journalism inherently brings that question into focus in a way that maybe other journalism doesn’t. So that’s something that I always like to tap into unless it’s much more cut and dry, for example with Associated Press, when I was covering sporting events there wasn’t really room for that sort of questioning. I’m always trying to think, why use a comic? Why use a visual mode to tell a story? I don’t think we should do it just for the sake of it; some stories are inherently suited to visual approaches and some might not be. AM: You’ve written for a lot of different outlets and been featured in a number of different programs around the world. How do those different spaces impact the different messages that you’re portraying, and who are you trying to reach? DA: I’m always trying to get people to consider things in a way that they maybe haven’t. I was using visuals much like that sort of seductive power; I was just trying to get an audience to think.
For example, in the question of refugees or human trafficking, to not shy away from a story that might be either considered too disturbing or too like stories that they might be desensitized to. Because in text we read about these stories, even with the refugee crisis, you hear tens of thousands of people make crossings or attempting crossings, and hundreds tragically perish, and so they become statistics. By presenting them in these much more sort of handcrafted, personalized ways, we can emphasize and highlight the humanity of the story. I think it’s always good to subvert people’s expectations when it comes to the news, particularly younger demographics. In a way, it’s a more even playing field, because there’s no loyalty anymore, in terms of new sources, you know. Formerly people might always be like, “Oh, I’m a New York Times subscriber,” or “Oh, I get the x and y.” But nowadays a lot of it is determined by a search engine algorithm or whichever app you’re most used to, or maybe the one that you pay $2 a month for. It’s always good to engage with different audiences through different means and to try and surprise them. One thing I also really try and do is to ensure that we don’t just stick to this solipsistic, Western, predominantly white—and I say this as
obviously a white cis-male...and that’s one thing that I’ll say as well, the comics journalism scene seems extremely inclusive, or at least impressively inclusive. The Nib is doing great work and really channeling and forwarding a lot of these diverse, heterogeneous voices. Obviously more can always be done, but that’s something that should definitely be celebrated, and I think the technology also speaks to that. We’ve gone through a point where it’s like, “Are comics actually appropriate?” Yes, obviously, clearly they are and have been for decades from you know [Rodolphe] Töpffer in the late [18]20s all the way through till now, you know [Frans] Masereel as well.
And we’ve also seen great work happening inside 3D spaces. That’s why with Empathetic Media, I wanted to take some of these visuals and these representations and move them into a third dimension.
LA: Having written so many different stories, what is one piece of reportage that stood out to you in terms of its impact on you? DA: It’s very hard to sort of compare and contrast different stories. I suppose the one that I was most invested in longterm is the human trafficking project in Nepal, and then beyond—we extrapolated it to Hong Kong. Largely because trafficking is such a malicious conflagration of so many different abuses—sexual, coercion, financial, patriarchal, so many. What was different there is the comics that I did were used as part of a research study. So we were able to really map what has more impact on a wider audience, a poster, a piece of text, a radio play, a comic, or an animation? Working with a team of social scientists and backed by the State Department, with a sample size of over 5000 people, it really was a piece of work that we were able to then turn around and give back. We translated it into Nepali, and that was really important in terms of collaborating. I’m very excited to get back once this whole COVID shitstorm blows over. I think that sort of impact was very gratifying to see, and we made all the resources available to smaller NGOs that might not have access to them as well as our findings. My hope was that I was chronicling the process that I went through to create all of those and how we did all that in the graphic novel. AM: You mentioned that there are some stories that maybe shouldn’t be told in comics journalism or that don’t lend themselves to that. So what are some of the structural limitations on comics journalism, and how have you encountered those limitations in your work? DA: To be honest, the biggest challenge, fundamentally— and this is less so digitally, but still happens—is space. Often people will say, “Can you do this piece on (insert very broad, decades-long, complicated historical study) in three pages?” So you don’t want to do an illustrated narrative where all of the heavy lifting is done in the captions, and you’re just essentially putting some lovely visuals to go with it. When I started out I was certainly guilty of doing that, and there are pages and pages, where I look back and think, “Whoa! incredible amount of text.”
It’s always great to have the luxury to be able to take a step back and let a page and its artwork breathe. Andy Warner is a master of explaining what might be dryer topics in a very approachable, captivating way. I did some reporting around the 2008 financial crisis, for example, and incorporating some of the visuals into that was a challenge. We later turned it into an animation, but I wonder whether that was because it’s less part of my wheelhouse. I feel more passionately engaged with human stories that are largely focused on social justice and bringing stories that might not necessarily see the light of day, were they presented in other ways, to the fore. I try and get away from sort of talking heads stories, of “here are the three sources I spoke to,” and essentially I just transcribe what they say and put those to visuals. I think it’s much more immersive and compelling to have access to the places and spaces that the sources have been in and recreate them, and almost have them as the conduit through it. I similarly don’t want to be restrictive. I’m sure there are people out there that can really excel doing these things. I remember once trying to do an illustrated cookbook and approaching it in a different way. Because fundamentally for me, one of the inherent challenges of working in the digital is you always have to think about how the work can be optimized for which device it’s going to be published on. The Nib got up to speed very well by doing mobileoptimized responsive format. But back in the day that’s how I used to think about things: it will be like a three-by-three grid, so sometimes you’d be thinking, “How can I do a wider establishing shot, without having to do a swipe-swipe sort of panel transition?” So I think someone like Wendy [MacNaughton], for example, has managed to get around that beautifully in her whole style of parallax scrolling as a narrative device, that’s a really cool way of doing that. Like 360 animations, I worked on one, a few years ago around a film called The Promise around the Armenian genocide. That was an interesting space to be able to draw in 360 degrees. AM: I’m reading the way that you’re answering: the value of comics journalism is a greater ability to facilitate an emotional connection and empathy, along with getting across concrete facts and reporting. When you’re working with a VR or AR sort of experience, what are your struggles and what are the bounds that you feel you’re breaking through when facilitating that emotional connection in your work? DA: That’s a great question. The hardest thing, frankly, is trying to create assets or models or experiences that don’t look like panel-beaten mannequins—having 3D models, even with motion capture, and how they respond and the whole beauty of the uncanny valley, and that sort of thing. The most powerful VR experiences I have seen have been ones where they’ve very elegantly moved away from representation and more towards symbolic representation, and audio, for example, like Notes on Blindness, or other experiences where they deliberately left representation aside.
To an extent that’s what comics have done as well—Ben Passmore’s work, Mattie Lubchansky—I’m always in awe of people who draw in quite a cartoony way, but yet tackle these more serious subjects. I suppose I go more realistic, but my style is more looser illustrative. Jason Lutes was my mentor at CCS, and I was always totally, and still am, in awe of his linework and how precise it was. I was inspired by the realistic representation, but through putting down as much life into as few strokes as possible. The challenge with a 3D setup is that you have to make those calls, because they so drastically affect the performance of the machine. So you can’t have every blade of grass in a scene. When we did Ferguson, you had to make sure that the distances and all the spatial requirements of the actual scene were recreated, which we did using photogrammetry. Little things like the way that the light hits the textures on the building can make people think, “Oh, that looks like Minecraft, that’s not appropriate.” I’ve looked at trying to pull out those less realistic representations, or deliberately embrace them. I’ve done a lot more 360 video. I did a white paper around VR, focusing largely on cinematic VR, or 360 videos. But that’s really the fundamental challenge: The humanity, when you look in someone’s eyes, even with the most insanely powerful rendering (like you see in Pixar), there’s still something [off]. We have such an innate ability to be able to sniff out the artificiality in those paralinguistic features of faces. I think we will get there, but it’s going to take time. The important question for representing these stories now is: How can you bring that humanity to the fore without necessarily leaning so heavily on the visual? I think audio is a key way to doing that. LA: Comics can represent traumatic experiences particularly well because of the fragmented quality that both trauma and comics share. When constructing and reconstructing entire realities, do you feel that full-scale interactive media and VR offers too much information to the viewer, and have you received any pushback from viewers who think that reliving national trauma or state terrorism in VR is harmful?
DA: It’s interesting you should mention terrorism as sort of the apogee of trauma. Even state terrorism is lived at a very individual, discreet level. I would say yes, certainly I’ve had detractors. I did a story in Canada for the CBC around the tragic terrible story of a homeless, Native American woman, who was attacked and later lost her legs in this brutal attack. I recreated it from her point of view, because the way that she was represented, that her voice was represented, she was always in the third person, and she was very much denied the ability to speak. So when we spoke to her, we said, “Are you able to go into this space and bring us there?” I definitely don’t take it lightly. That’s a space that I’m most interested in, in terms of the amount of my future works. I’m currently looking at recording physiological signals inside VR, inside potentially stressful or traumatic experiences in order to engender perspective-taking. In the latest experiment that I’m hoping to run, you embody a Muslim woman who is subjected to Islamaphobic abuse. We put a biosensor on someone’s index finger and essentially map: It gives us galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, temperature. I’m looking at how our individual baseline levels of those autonomic responses change under pressure and whether or not there is a spot where if you overstress someone, if that can have the opposite effect versus with too little they remain unstimulated and distanced from the experience. One of the things that technology can afford us is the ability to take metrics more stringently. Because a lot of people say, “Why do comics?” and I produce a lot of work to raise awareness. My question is, what does that actually look like? How can we action that? Is the impact measured in people’s willingness to donate to a related charity, or to share a link, or clicks? I think the metrics that we’re currently using are sort of out of whack in this world of clickbait and what have you, and that’s why I think effective storytelling in terms of affect rather than effect is going to be the next wave. Particularly as we look at our devices, forward-facing cameras are going to start looking at our emotional responses to stories and mapping bigger responses. That’s where I think a lot of this storytelling can also go.
Eventually, I’m hoping to create a feedback loop, so that, in a situation where you would be experiencing this, and your body signals indicate that you are under stress and it is too much, then it would temper itself down so that it becomes almost like a biofeedback experience. AM: What advice would you give to aspiring comics journalists? DA: I think the most important thing is to produce work. There’s always a risk. Originally people would say, “Read this book or go to the sources or what have you,” and I think the first thing that an editor or someone who might commission you will look for is examples of what you’ve done, and even if you can’t find more widespread sources or clients, just produce a sample series of sample comics or pieces, and put them on a website so you can send a link. I would also think about what your respective beat is: What makes you different from other people who might be offering similar things? Is it your style? Is it the issues that you’re passionate about? Is it your willingness to travel and to do it in different languages? Focus on creating work and keep things short, to begin with. The first thing that I tried at CCS was a graphic novel about the plague in London—the Great Plague of 1666—written in modern medieval English...a little over the top. Needless to say, it didn’t last more than two, three dozen pages. Keep things relatively self-contained, put them online, share the link, and also find a community of like-minded others, who are doing similar stuff, because they’ll keep you buoyant throughout these tough times when you’re probably locked in your room under quarantine. LA: Any last thoughts before we wrap up? DA: I’m just very excited to come out and see this exhibition in person and also have more of these discussions. This is probably the most talking that I’ve done since lockdown began.
