The Case for Comics

By Kristian Williams, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted March 17, 2005.

It has been nearly 20 years since comics could safely be dismissed as kids’ stuff. In 1986 three books changed the way Americans saw the medium. Two of them — Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns — brought a sense of gloomy realism to the superhero genre. The third, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, used cartoon conventions to tell of his father’s experience in the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Magazines were suddenly full of stories about comics “growing up,” and the term “graphic novel” entered the literary lexicon.

Somehow “graphic journalism” didn’t make the headlines. But since the renaissance of the mid-'80s, more and more writers and artists have been producing serious nonfiction comics about current events, from war crimes to hip hop. In the mid-1990s, Joe Sacco’s two books on Palestine were hailed as groundbreaking works and made Sacco the best known of the new graphic journalists. Now comics, or graphic, journalism is turning up in daily newspapers, where its inherent subjectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom’s dispassionate prose — another round in the debate over what journalism should be in the 21st century.

In the Shadow of No Towers: Art Spiegelman, courtesy Pantheon Books

In the Oct. 10, 2004, issue of The Edmonton Journal, for example, David Staples and Jill Stanton used the comics format to tell the story of Dave Eamer, a Canadian truck driver who lost the use of his legs in a highway accident and went on to become North America’s first paraplegic long-distance trucker. The Oregonian has adopted a regular comics column, called “CulturePulp,” in which M.E. Russell depicts, among other things, his experiences running a marathon, hunting wild mushrooms, and watching a risqué lounge act. Perhaps not to be outdone by the competition, Willamette Week, a weekly paper in Portland, adopted the comics format for record reviews and interviews with bands. Those newspapers are following the lead of magazines like The New Yorker, which had Spiegelman cover the 2004 GOP national convention, and Details, which featured Sacco’s coverage of the Bosnian war crimes trial in 1998, Peter Kuper’s depiction of the 1997 Burning Man festival, and Kim Dietch’s account of the execution of Ronald Fitzgerald.

Culturepulp, M.E. Russell, courtesy of the artist.

The move toward respectability began in earnest in the 1970s, when The Comics Journal — the genre’s leading trade magazine — began agitating for serious study of the art form. The underground comics of the previous decade had helped demolish some of the barriers to more adult work, and the emergence of “direct market” comics shops opened a niche for small presses, many of which were doing this kind of work. The creators increasingly experimented with new artistic styles and narrative strategies, and comics journalists have adapted these, searching for innovative ways to present the news.

Comics journalism entails a startling variety of approaches and styles. Something of that aesthetic range is represented by the two main pieces in the 1989 book Brought to Light. In one half of the volume, Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates tell of the 1984 bombing at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, which killed eight people and injured 28 others. The presentation is straightforward, using plain language and realistic illustrations, and drawing on the accounts of witnesses and the evidence presented in the Christic Institute’s lawsuit alleging CIA involvement in the bombing.

Flip the book over, and you find a story with similar themes told in a very different manner. The celebrated comics innovators Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz present a fable-like retelling of CIA history, narrated by a lonely, alcoholic eagle wearing an ugly checkered sports coat. Sometimes painterly, sometimes cartoonish, in places using techniques of collage, the piece outlines a record of atrocities culminating in the Iran-contra affair. The tone wavers between the confessional and the bombastic, and the imagery employs heavy symbolism, with human chess pieces, sprinting swastikas, and swimming pools full of blood.

But the facts are there, and the nightmarish surrealism seems to fit the subject matter. Indeed, the reader is forced to question the propriety of the standard journalistic conceits — the calm recitation of facts, the carefully hedged allegations, the measured tone. A drunken eagle swimming in blood may actually come closer to the point.

Brabner explained the strategy for Brought to Light: “There were two ways that people were relating to the story” of the CIA’s role in Nicaragua. “One was that people get wrapped up — too wrapped up — in the conspiracy stuff. The other was moral outrage, based on a historical analysis. And I thought, ‘We don’t have to sacrifice; we can do a topsy-turvy book.’”

Kristian Williams is the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Soft Skull Press, 2004). He is presently at work on a book about torture and U.S. imperialism.

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