I met de la Peña in London last summer and was particularly curious to hear her thoughts on “Gone Gitmo,” an immersive storytelling installation built as a virtual Guantanamo Bay prison. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, “Gone Gitmo” was constructed inside Second Life and appeared in prototype at the Bay Area Video Coalition. Users who enter the project experience a virtual detention inside the prison camp, with documentary footage embedded to create spatial narrative. De la Peña and I connected again last month via Skype to discuss her work. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

You have explained that the main idea of immersive journalism “is to allow the participant, typically represented as a digital avatar, to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story.” Immersive systems give the participant “access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions, that accompany the news.” How would you explain your main motivation to explore immersive journalism?

Immersive journalism really comes from understanding that there is a growing use of virtual and gaming platforms in which individuals are extremely comfortable with a virtual body. Using that as a starting point, I began to consider what that might mean for nonfiction. In the same way documentary grew in parallel with fiction film, I believe immersive journalism (which can also be considered as immersive documentary or immersive nonfiction) has an appropriate potential using new technologies. My journalistic work has often considered human rights issues, which makes it more likely such issues will be reflected in my immersive journalism work.

However, there are some very interesting questions that arise. For example, does the fact that the stories are accessed through a virtual body mean that they are necessarily subjective experiences? How do we ensure “objectivity?”

Our director of the journalism school at Annenberg, Geneva Overholser, really feels that transparency is the key here. If we can point to our sources, provide excellent research and be open to comment and criticism, immersive journalism can live up to its potential. In a sense, it’s simply about applying traditional journalistic principles to the new technologies.

Your work, as you say, is interrogating the phenomenology of narrative journalism. It seems to me that 3-D animation still presents a barrier to verisimilar storytelling in a way that “live action” or photographic realism does not…

I am not sure that is true. I think that “experience” can have value, especially given stories that are inaccessible. For example, Gitmo is off limits to most citizens and press, so we’ve made it accessible. You can read all you want to about the carbon markets, but when you literally follow the money, does that make the story better understood? And yet, the video released in the Baha Mousa case is extraordinarily disturbing, but when we built our piece in Mel Slater’s lab, that video had not yet been released. I would suggest we did a pretty good job considering that the information came from International Red Cross data and interrogation logs.

Now, what is the role of realism?  If the graphics get better, will the experiences become more comparable to the realism of video now? Mel’s work has shown that the video graphics don’t have to be great to work. Still, the last piece I saw in his lab on understanding violence used extremely good audio and dialogue (as well as very good voice actors). In terms of current technology, one thing I can say: If the audio is bad, forget it.

Yet that exact same premise holds true in documentary filmmaking. If you have bad lighting but good audio, the drama can still be pronounced. Without good audio, even the best sequences can fail.

So orality and sound still play a major role in storytelling…

Yes.

Are you concerned by the possible ethical implications? The proximity with video games, even serious games, the connotations of 3-D animation…

I am always concerned about ethical implications. I think the history of the use of propaganda makes it clear that we have to be ever vigilant.

I’m thinking of the widespread discourse of the first-person shooter for instance, in video games. Will people want to be in the place of the perpetrators? How would a journalist go about that, how to control the script?

I have gotten a lot of pushback on the Gitmo piece that we did not tell the story of the soldiers there. But as studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment make clear, giving people the role of the soldier can create some pretty intense scenarios. We decided it wasn’t appropriate for this project although we would be absolutely happy to have their experiences recounted in some way on the site. I would agree that the first-person shooter has to be considered carefully and ethically, but it would be a knee-jerk reaction to just shut down this avenue of storytelling based on that issue. For example, check out what happened with the Columbine game at Slamdance.

Would you say that in these exercises of immersive journalism or storytelling, the user, though he or she experiences situations physically, retains a level of passivity?

Very good question. The fact the user can move through the story raises a lot of issues. I have an earlier paper, when I was just starting to sort out the ideas about immersive journalism, which discusses such passive moments as the “embodied edit.” In “Gitmo,” that would be when we move the user along the “story” by teleporting them from place to place within the build. However, there are many moments when the user makes the decision where to go; still, they are within the context of the “news report” that is clearly consistent with reading about a story or watching it on TV.

A key aspect of your immersive journalism project is the blurring of boundaries between different fields, and one of the main elements in immersive experiences may be what you called the embodied edit. And Stroome allows users to remix, which is a form of editing…

Yes, considering how stories can be told differently in this new wave of technology. I consider immersive journalism still under development, but Stroome is about trying to give users a way to start telling stories today, collaboratively, journalistically and from different perspectives. For example, rather than write a letter to an editor or call up a TV station to dispute veracity, the audience member could just remix the story, telling it the way they see it.

Do you think that’s where journalism is headed, to giving users/readers the tools to re-tell the stories?

Once again, I quote Geneva (although I understand she borrowed it as well): The group formerly known as the audience, they are participants. Whether as sophisticated producers of content, or if they commit an “act of journalism” by capturing key footage on cell phones, Stroome supports both approaches.

How receptive do you think the major players in journalism are to this new form of storytelling, one open to empowering “the group formerly known as the audience”?

I think they are finding it very difficult. Even J-schools. I heard one major dean complain: “We are training professional journalists, not citizen journalists!” So they still aren’t recognizing how much this has all blurred. However, as Julian Assange explains in the “Wiki Rebels” documentary, at first he turned all of the data loose hoping that it would get vetted by the public, but ended up having to turn to journalists to analyze and distill and present to the public. However, what we are offering at Stroome offers really nice pillars of ways to collaborate and support. It is designed to consider how content is discoverable and not overwhelming.

And it is curated by a community and enabled by a specific platform…

Yes.

So, what you are suggesting is an important redefinition of the role of the nonfiction storyteller and therefore of the press…

Yes. In some ways both ends of the spectrum achieving the same goal. In one, similar editorial control present with news orgs now comes with having to design and build a 3-D immersive space. In the other, Stroome opens the landscape to all. Yet both focus on user participation with journalism that is unique to our technological present.

Where do you see written journalism going in this landscape?

We will always need good analysis.

Perhaps as ancillary material for the immersive or audiovisual experiences?

Yes, I agree. And sometimes the immersive component will be ancillary to the text.

—–

[Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London. He has written previously for Nieman Storyboard on the death of Harvey Pekar, manga memoir and on comics as narrative journalism.]

Pekar was a non-fiction storyteller who recorded his daily existence for others to draw. In the medium of American comics, where the power fantasies of corporate superheroes in tights are the norm, Pekar’s work stands out as the extraordinary testimony of an ordinary working-class man in an ordinary American city. Pekar’s main topic was the chronic ache of life, and reading his work brings relentless reminders that life takes death along for the ride.

Newspapers have published lengthy obituaries on Pekar (see our list at the end of this post). Comic book fans and specialists have populated the Web with profiles of all kinds. Harvey Pekar was, for a time, a trending topic on Twitter. But Pekar has already told us about his life in excruciating detail, and so the best source on his life may well be Pekar himself.

Encouraged by Robert Crumb in the early 1970s, Pekar started writing comics. Even when his work was illustrated by well-known graphic artists such as Crumb and Dean Haspiel, the creative spotlight was always on him as writer and protagonist. His work offered the ordinary adventures of a middle-aged file clerk suffering from a restless existential angst.

“Curmudgeonly” is perhaps the word most often used to describe him, but the tone and themes of his stories were as diverse as the team of artists who rendered his dialogue and plots. To read an issue of his “American Splendor” series is to perceive a single life as a polyphony where a character’s psychological and physical identity is never the same.

So what was Harvey Pekar’s contribution? How were his comics different?

A comic book author who could not draw, Pekar became one of the leading artistic figures of an often unappreciated medium. Like the graphic genius of underground masters Harvey Kurtzman and Crumb, Pekar’s comics were an anomaly. Nothing in them reflected the “splendor” that had defined comics for decades. His narrative universe was in fact a form of “minor literature,” focusing on the deliberately picayune instead of the grandiose.

Part Steinbeck and part Bukowski, Harvey Pekar unwittingly reimagined the Great American Novel as a comic book. If any greatness were to be found in this exercise, it would be in shedding light on the grim reality of everyday urban life. “American Splendor” did for comics what Allen Ginsberg’s “Reality Sandwiches” did for poetry, but unlike Ginsberg, Pekar’s writing was always part of a collaborative effort, where dramatic dialogue was waiting to be “performed” through the illustration styles of a gallery of artists.

Coming from the streets of Cleveland, “American Splendor” proved that “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” The series was inserted into the black and white tradition of underground cartooning, but it shied away from the hallucinogenic scatology of the 1960s comix that Crumb and others pioneered. Unlike many of his peers, Pekar did not cater to fantasy. He made no attempt to imagine a better world. He simply wrote his life as he lived it, and in collaboration with the artists he created a very personal form of urban, hyper-local, working class, neurotic autobiographic storytelling. His narrative skills transcended the grids of printed comic book pages to reach the realms of film, music, and biography and webcomics.

Like other key figures of American comic book culture (Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware) Harvey Pekar was a passionate collector of jazz records, and it is possible to read in his work the syncopated melancholy of an art form in danger of extinction. “Our Cancer Year,” the graphic novel he wrote with his wife Joyce Brabner, represents the height of his drive for the existential monologue, which he had inaugurated in an early collaboration with Crumb (“The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” later translated into the 2003 film “American Splendor,” in which he played himself, as did star Paul Giamatti).

If ever there were a comic book tragic hero, it is Pekar. More Hamlet than Macbeth, he was constantly concerned with self-reflection and the imminence of death: the hospital archive where he worked most of his life until retirement was a constant reminder of life’s futility, and therefore of the importance of stories not usually told. Pekar’s storytelling was, most literally, a survival mechanism, a life-affirming exercise.

His aesthetic and political perspective acquired the critical appreciation of an educated elite; nevertheless Pekar wanted to write “clearly” in order to be understood by everyone. In 2003, he appeared in a movie about his life and work, and his belief that “you can do anything with comics” guided his life project.

In his final years, Pekar told the story of his troubled teenage years for the first time in “The Quitter,” which received widespread critical acclaim. For Smith magazine, Pekar worked with a team on “The Pekar Project,” creating an ongoing webcomic series to explore in different formats and styles his concerns about life and death in corporate America. His last work is journalistic in nature, offering glimpses of what the future of online, non-fiction graphic reporting might become.

Pekar achieved an intensely personal, visual body of work that was nonetheless collaborative. Seamlessly combining the short story with long-form narrative, he employed his obsessed depression to illuminate the beauty of the mundane.

In Harvey Pekar’s comics, life and art merge, but between the romantic ideal of success and the objective hardship of daily life, there is still a chasm. Pekar might have been successful enough to become a regular guest on David Letterman, but his pen (and tongue) remained too sharp to settle in the soft focus of mass media. His work was tense with contradictions: optimistic in its negativity and funny in its seriousness. Moreover, in a medium built on fantasy and lies it told the uncomfortable truth.

[For more on Harvey Pekar's life, see these links to obituaries and remembrances worth checking out, from Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (with others here and here), New York Daily News, The Washington Post, The Washington Post’s comics blog, Mediaite, Comics Reporter, Comics Beat, The Comics Journal and The Guardian.]

Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London. He has written previously for Nieman Storyboard on manga memoir and on comics as narrative journalism.

Last year also brought the publication of A Drifting Life, an 855-page memoir by 75-year-old Yoshihiro Tatsumi, published by Drawn & Quarterly. Tatsumi is recognized by fans as the grandfather of alternative manga, a style identified with social realism and visual experimentation. It’s worth taking a look at both projects, because Tatsumi’s life and memoir have arguably played a role in making innovative storytelling projects like Manga Memoirs possible.

A Drifting Life

Eleven years in the making, A Drifting Life is several things at once: a graphic narrative portrait of the manga artist as a young man after World War II, a treatise on the storytelling possibilities of experimental manga, and a testimonial to the very concrete relationship between form and content in comics.

A Drifting Life offers insight into the development of manga as an industry and a form of multimedia storytelling. Hiroshi, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s stand-in protagonist, starts creating and publishing manga in seventh grade, inspired by the “postcard manga” contests hosted by the comics magazines that he and his jealous, chronically-ill brother passionately read and analyze. Coming from a poor family, Hiroshi uses one and two-panel humorous manga submissions as a means to make ends meet.

Hiroshi would soon find the postcard and two-panel format too constricting, and would begin creating longer stories with serious plots and experimental visuals inspired by world literature (Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare) and Japanese and American film (Kurosawa and Hitchcock). Managing to combine the personal with the theoretical, Tatsumi’s memoir offers an account of the historical development of manga as a medium caught between the demands of the market and the drive to experiment with narrative approaches.

Tatsumi’s graphic storytelling about serious subjects predates that of his American counterparts by decades (see my prior Storyboard series for a history of true stories in American graphic novels). If, as The New York Times assures, A Drifting Life “has a rolling, rumbling grandeur,” it is because Tatsumi has done more than take on serious subjects—he aspires to change the way stories can be told. During one of his internal monologues about the creative process, Hiroshi aspires to synchronize “panel and time.” By using the medium of comics to tell his life story as an author and the story of the Japanese comics medium itself, Tatsummi achieves not only the seamless blending of life and art, but also an impressive example of graphic storytelling, where the images themselves serve as examples of the cultural history they tell.

A Drifting Life emphasizes the basic role that letter writing and the postal system, including the waiting times in between sending and receiving letters and packages, played in defining the creative process and narrative techniques of Japanese comics. Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s lesson is clear: the ways that comics are produced determine the medium’s storytelling powers. Without knowing it, in his struggle to develop a kind of “manga that wasn’t manga” by aspiring to recreate cinematic storytelling out of still images in panels on printed pages, Yoshihiro Tatsumi was anticipating the revolution of digital storytelling.

In A Drifting Life Hiroshi spends a long time writing, reading and waiting for letters delivered through the post. “Postcard manga” combined a medium of communication with an art form—the postcard was the art work itself. Tatsumi’s book is also testimony to the influence of non-Japanese cultural products, and in this sense his comics are also an expression of multiculturalism.

Manga Memoirs

If Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir emphasizes the key role that reader-submitted material played in the development of Japanese comics, Manga Memoirs takes this formula, based on the direct interaction between readers and publishers, into the realm of Web 2.0.

Manga Memoirs is the 21st century expression of manga storytelling. It stimulates manga creation to narrate experiences of multiculturalism, a hybrid approach that is mirrored in the website, which combines print and digital media.

The anthology is the result of a continuous open call for submissions from regular people of Japanese/Canadian descent who register to the site and submit their work for consideration. The best stories are commented on by readers and participants of the community and chosen by a committee. The site combines online digital tools with the publication of a printed book anthology featuring the winning submissions. It is based on user-generated content but reciprocates by stimulating comics creation, reflection on multicultural identities and the active participation in a social networking site composed by people with shared backgrounds and interests.

Manga Memoirs’ creative director, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, describes the narratives they ended up featuring:

The vastly personal nature of the stories submitted, and the restrictive 8-page count gave birth to some lovely and meaningful “slice of life” moments. Layer in the innocent feel of manga artwork and the result is a charming and approachable form of story consumption.  I believe that people who may not be drawn to short stories or other text-based forms of autobiography still find themselves drawn to Manga Memoirs because of the artwork, and end up moved by the intimacy of the author’s offering, in spite of themselves.

Even though the first anthology has already been published in print, they keep receiving submissions, and allow the publication of comments, reviews, blogs and new related work. Says Clark-Bojin:

At this time the first Manga Memoirs anthology has gone through a limited print run in both English and Japanese, and we are in early talks with partners to launch the campaign for the second anthology. The response to the quality of the artwork, storytelling and the process in general has been so positive, I would be surprised if this first volume was the last.

The digital comics platform/reader allows the user, through the “page peel” function, to learn about the creative/production process behind each story, as well as extra information that completes the narrative, such as scripts, drafts, reference images, information about characters and creators, etc.

Talking about facilitating the digital manga project, Manga Memoirs editor Morgan Jeske says

The great thing about Manga Memoirs, to me, was that it strived to showcase both cultures, using a medium that is in its infancy here in North America. When I say infancy, I don’t mean it to sound as if I’m saying it’s stunted or underdeveloped, but that in comparison to manga in Japan, it’s very, very young.

Despite the sometimes uneven quality of the source stories in the final print anthology, the project offers insight into the promising future of true comics storytelling and publishing by combining print and digital tools and “opening up” the publishing platform to regular people. While Tatsumi’s memoir is largely limited to the physical identity of a bound book, Manga Memoirs turns his ideas into a social enterprise that can unfold everywhere for all participants.

Though its achievements are similar to those of Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde (discussed in Part 2 of this series), Le Photographe unfolds in radically different form. The series’ most striking aspect is the unusual combination of documentary photography (Lefèvre’s original work) and highly stylized drawings.

The documentary photographs align in sequence like comics panels. They never contain words and leave the verbal narration to the drawn panels, lending the photos a “silent” narrative weight absent from the word-and-drawn-picture panels.

Le Photographe, Tome 3/Dupius

Guibert’s clear line style does not have the overt “cartooniness” of Joe Sacco’s. Pale grays, light browns and faded yellows evoke the desert landscape, further locating Guibert at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from Sacco’s black-and-white underground style. But these drawings fall well within the tradition of European comic books—a tradition more suited for conveying the epic dimensions of Lefvre’s harsh journey.

A more recent example of the power with which comics can narrate real events is Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles, originally published in 2007. Delisle is a Quebecois cartoonist and animator who has created comics about his trips to Asia before—Shenzhen in 2000 and Pyongyang in 2003. But in Burma Chronicles, he makes literary progress by developing a spare language reminiscent of the haiku.

Delisle travelled with his wife, who works for Medecins Sans Frontières, to Rangoon, where they lived for a year. The book is composed of somewhat disjointed short stories, building a narrative from microunits rather than a single arc. Delisle’s drawing style—a clear, minimalist line less realistic than Guibert’s—makes use of pale green colors that evoke both the tropical warmth and Burma’s militarized situation.

Burma Chronicles fascinates because it tells us of a life both inside and outside the local conflict; Delisle is basically a stay-at-home dad who works from home drawing comics. (“It is really my job!” he tries to explain to the expat mothers).

Delisle tells a side of the story usually untold: the apparent normality of domestic life in extraordinary circumstances, perceived from a particular point of view. There is no central incident in his narrative; the day-to-day experiences bear witness to life as a foreigner in a country ruled by a repressive regime.

This personal point of view also anchors Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and Le Photographe. Like Burma Chronicles, their stories transcend autobiography by functioning as personal dispatches on current events. Rather than survivors’ tales, they are tales of survival.

Because their function is not limited to the delivery of news but is also political and aesthetic in scope, these nonfiction efforts examine the boundary between events and how those events are represented. And because they build bridges between objective facts and a literary tradition, these graphic narratives are close cousins of literary journalism.

The 1990s “indie” comics scene saw two trends. One reflected an almost neurotic drive to get away from the power fantasies of superhero stories. Using a careless graphic style that emphasized the pathologically normal, authors told stories from the point of view of a “defeatist,” in the words of comics artist Joe Sacco.

On the other hand, this was the era in which American non-superhero comics also started engaging with topics bigger than the middle-class suburbs of their creators. Inspiration came from the sudden acceptance of comics in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, which also built a bridge between the artistic language of the European bande dessinée and its comparatively low-brow American cousin.

Bringing these two trends together, the first issue of Joe Sacco’s Palestine came out in 1993, followed by nine original single comic book issues. Trained as a journalist, Sacco tells the story of the two months he spent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 1991 and 1992.

Joe Sacco/Fantagraphics Books

Palestine’s visual style descends directly from R. Crumb-style 1960s and ’70s “comix.” Black and white drawings make deliberate use of cartooning techniques, such as the amplification of body parts (noses, ears), adding up to punk-inspired visual noise.

But despite initially sharing the same target audience (and the same publisher) as earlier comix, Sacco’s work differed greatly in what it attempted to do. Sacco consciously tackled the complicated relationship between West and East, subjectivity and neutrality, journalism and fiction. The set eventually appeared as a complete story in a single volume, with an introduction by Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said.

Palestine’s success was followed by a six-page story on the Bosnian war crimes trials in the Netherlands, commissioned by Art Spiegelman for Details magazine. Then came publication of Safe Area Gorazde, the War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995.

In Safe Area’s 240 pages, Sacco applies the same techniques he used for Palestine to explore the conflict in a small, Muslim UN-protected enclave in the midst of the Bosnian conflict. His personal voice asserts itself, presenting events from Sacco’s point of view but also allowing other characters to speak directly. There is no intention to achieve “neutrality” or “objectivity.” Both Palestine and Safe Area narrate from the border between documentary and personal travelogue.

Like Safe Area, the first issue of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis arrived in 2000. Satrapi’s complete narrative, published in France, is also a compilation of instalments published over time. Both feature strong narrative voices, with protagonists representing the actual authors.

Unlike Persepolis, however, Sacco’s works are not primarily autobiographical. Though Sacco tells us about specific moments from his life, and makes no attempt to hide the subjectivity filtering the narrated events, the focus of his stories is not himself, but the people and circumstances of the places he visits.

Persepolis and Maus are personal stories narrating very specific moments in human history—the Shoah and the Iranian Revolution. But in spite of all the political and narrative relevance of the historic events in both books, their main genre is that of memoir. Most of the events happened in the past, sometimes before the authors were born, or happened with them being central to the event.

Sacco’s work, notwithstanding all the delay between lived experience and the final act of graphic narration, recounts situations he witnessed in real time and as an observer whose mission was to depict those events in comics form, bringing comics one step closer to the techniques of literary reportage.

 [Part 3, continuing the shift from survivors’ tales to tales of survival, will appear next week.]

Unlike traditional journalism, literary journalism deals with facts to create a lasting meaning from the narrated events. Its purpose is not only the transmission of information but the telling of a story with an awareness that the how is as important as the what.

Joe Sacco/Fantagraphics Books

Literary journalism’s emphasis on the story and on the ideas and emotions conveyed by it relates directly to what some comics have been doing in recent years. Rising out of the underground and independent comics scene, “comics journalism” combines the structural conventions of the traditional comic book with those of literary journalism.

Like literary journalism, comics journalism has to deal with delay between the time of an event and the time of publication. “News” journalism relies on speed, but creating comics journalism requires even longer than it takes to do literary journalism. Nevertheless, a tradition of non-fiction comics exists, and recent graphic narratives are offering innovative ways of telling stories about real events.

From superheroes to “loserdom”

The “graphic novel” exists as a category in most Western book shops, libraries and web sites, even if the name evokes a vagueness comics scholars have yet to clarify. For now, the graphic novel enjoys more prestige than the comic book, which retains an aura of narrative immaturity and low-brow geekiness. It also has decidedly more status than the comic strips fated to help sell moribund newspapers—gag-structured tales doomed to be read in a flash and forgotten.

Contemporary non-fiction comics reflect the heritage of the underground “comix” of the late 1960s and 1970s.  Born as an alternative to the commercially-driven superhero tales addressed to a teenage audience, the works of Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar helped define the potential of comics to tell stories based on real events.

In the 1980s and early 1990s Art Spiegelman would draw the masterstroke with his two-tome Pulitzer-winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a memoir telling the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with both his father, a Holocaust survivor, and his father’s testimony. Written and drawn over thirteen years, Maus demonstrates comic books’ ability to narrate the most serious of subject matters, marking a kind of coming of age in the cultural sphere.

The 1990s were also the age of the autobiographic comic story, long narratives focusing on the existential angst of the personal lives of their mostly-young authors. Promoted by independent publishers with an awareness of the importance of sophisticated book design, these stories addressed a reader other than the typical superhero “fanboy.”

D.B. Dowd defined these comics of the early and mid 90s as “an illustrated literature of loserdom.” But beyond their self-absorption and fictional self-awareness, the works of Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, Roberta Gregory, and Debbie Drechsler explored comics as a way of narrating real life through the distortion inherent in cartooning.

Roberta Gregory/Fantagraphics Books

In the mainstream popular imagination, comics were a language used to express a fictional reality as impossible as the powers of superheroes. In the hands of these new authors, the examined real life became the main focus of the stories. This tension between real subjects and a highly manipulated form of representing them remains one of the most fascinating aspects of graphic storytelling.

Surely the written word filters “reality” as well. But how is it that cartoons, which evoke such a sense of distance between subjects and their representation, can address real events and people in truthful, thought-provoking ways?

[Part 2 continues the story of comic book news with a look at the turn toward graphic narrative nonfiction.]

Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London.