“Once upon a time, at the age of 24” Rosling said, “I was a student at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore. I was a guest student during one month of a public health course. And that changed my mindset forever.”

What followed involved colored dots flying around a projected screen while he covered 150 years of history. Rosling has been using Gapminder World graphics to provide information about health and income around the world since 2006, but if you expect it to sound anything like a History 101 lecture, you’d be wrong.

The statistics work independently to create the spine of the story. Rosling breathlessly reveals the context via his talk. The two together form a complete narrative. The audience—admittedly one very open to Rosling’s argument—cheers him on in a presentation that gathers energy and roars through more than a century of information.

In an interview posted in September, he notes that what’s surprising about what he’s doing is not really anything new about the data itself, “it’s what we can do with animation, with trends, the change over time.”

What can journalists learn from Rosling’s use of graphics for storytelling? How to make numbers come to life. In Rosling’s TED talk, the crowd responded audibly as a moving dot representing China’s longevity and income dropped dramatically during the Great Leap Forward.

Viewers get complex statistical narratives rendered comprehensible and entertaining via a deceptively simple audio track. Rather than individual human subjects, Rosling’s stories take whole nations for their characters.

Any newsroom could do the same. The software and data are freely available to the public. Last fall, Storyboard contributing editor MacGregor Campbell worked with colleagues Peter Aldhous and Jim Giles to use Gapminder graphics in a story on U.S. health care for New Scientist. 

Some newspapers, especially The New York Times, are already using large datasets to tell interactive stories that let users control what they see (such as this intriguing breakdown of how people spend their time). Trailblazers like the Times and Rosling show how moving data points can link storytelling’s past to its future.

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.

Michael Doret/WIRED

The result is seductive and memorable, but does it satisfy?

In its print form, “Cutthroat Capitalism” is an eight-page info-graphic, styled in the blocky bold colors of an NES-era cartridge video game. Interspersed among the pixilated illustrations are a buffet of equations, text boxes, org-charts, and diagrams, loosely tied together by the story of the September 2008 hijacking of the Hong Kong-flagged chemical tanker, Stort Valor. The game aesthetic sets readers up well for an actual browser-based game, which accompanies the online version of the story.

A narrative map

While the economics of Somali piracy have been covered before, notably by NPR’s Planet Money, Carney’s graphics attempt to simplify the phenomenon into what feels almost like a how-to manual. After a brief text introduction, we’re thrust into the piece’s version of scene setting. “The Hot Zone,” is a map of the region showing the locations of pirate attacks. We also see, in equation form, that the pirate’s wage is seventeen times that of the average Somali. With context out of the way, we move on to the action in three explicitly labeled acts: The Attack, The Negotiation, and The Resolution.

“When you talk about telling a story with equations, it’s very difficult to find the kernel,” says Carney. He and his editor had to impose a narrative to make the piece work, attaching minimal compartments of data and reasoning to an almost stock, three-act spine. “Writing it was different than a feature,” he says.

“The Attack” is part business plan, part video-game manual. We get the “Shipper’s Math,” an inequality that must hold true if the shipper is to sail through Somali waters. The “Pirate’s Math” gives a rough formula for figuring out when to attack. Finally we get the “Insurance Company’s Math” wherein we see a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the probability of being attacked. The section concludes with a brief Q & A with an unnamed pirate. The questions and responses are one of three interactions Carney’s piece has with actual human beings—the second being a brief interview with a security contractor and the third a chat with the Stort Valor’s captain. The story continues through the final two acts in much the same manner, giving formulas, for example, for how to choose a ransom amount and how to get away safely.

Courtesy of Siggi Eggertsson/WIRED

If there is an underlying mechanism that drives the parties in the piece, Carney lays it bare, a logical approach for a story about economic decision making. One wonders, however, how much nuance must ultimately get folded into such abstract simplifications.

“While we did learn about piracy as a business, we didn’t learn about the investigative hook that sold the article in the first place,” says Carney. He had originally pitched the story as one of collusion between insurance companies and security contractors. This dynamic is present in the disconnected boxes of the Negotiation and the Resolution, but it’s very much up to reader to make that connection.

“I like the story, I think it came out well. But in the end, you can tell a story better when you have words to deal with, instead of being restricted to graphics,” says Carney.

Playing the game

The “Cutthroat Capitalism” game keeps the same visual feel of the print piece and parallels its structure. In The Attack, the player navigates a boat in Somali waters from a top-down perspective, trying to intercept passing ships. Once intercepted, the player is taken to The Negotiation, where he makes ransom demands and can choose how to treat hostages in the attempt to move the transaction along. The player eventually either coerces a decent ransom payment and makes a safe getaway or overplays his hand and invites a Naval intervention, the two outcomes possible in The Resolution.

“The game is much more basic than the article, but what it does is draw in a reader and tells them a story in a different way,” says Carney. “Someone who plays it isn’t necessarily going to learn a lot about pirates. They might walk away with the idea that piracy is a business.”

Carney hopes that the article and game support each other, rather being an either-or proposition. For the player of the game, the article provides much more detail about what is actually happening. For the reader, the game invites a stroll in the pirate mindset, if only superficially. “It makes the reader think about that a little more viscerally than if he had just read the article,” says Carney.

Road testing the project

Shashank Bengali, a Nairobi-based McClatchy reporter, has interviewed and written about Somali pirates in the past. By email, he told the Storyboard that while the article and game presented an abstract view of a very human situation, he thinks it is a good way to communicate the economic story. 

“A lot of reporters have written about why Somalis went into the pirate business, because of the lawlessness and hopelessness of their country. This story tells us why they stay in the pirate game: because it’s good business,” he writes.

The human part that gets left out, according to Bengali, is that young Somali men simply have few employment options. “Piracy succeeds not just because of business calculations and structural issues in the shipping industry, but also because there’s no great alternative for young Somali men,” he writes.

Carney admits that he had to leave out many of the fruits of the six months of reporting that went into the piece. Given his prior narratives on black market skeletons and Indian crime bosses, one suspects this story could easily have taken a more traditional form. Carney seems happy to keep experimenting, however. Regardless of how stories are delivered, he says, “I think there’s inherent value in really strong content.”