To continue where I left off, here’s a little more on another (often neglected) form of journalism comics…
Part Two: Instructional/Info-comics
At the core, comics are pictographs. Like all pictographs, the most effective comics are instantly understandably. Think of common pictographs in our culture – street signs, instruction manuals and warning iconography; they are innocuous, but they instantly help us engage with unexpected or unfamiliar external stimuli.
Good journalism, I would argue, often serves the same purpose. Journalists provide us with a public record, but often interpret the events that compose that record, too. To do this, journalists write. But words comprise letters, and really, letters themselves are just pictographs that require a lot of cognitive energy to convert into meaning.
So if you have to explain a topic – say, quantitative easing – to the public, why not save some breath and let pictures do the talking? Journalists have always relied on infographics, photography and, more recently, video for this very purpose. And similar to the way graphs and charts can help clarify complex statistical analysis, comics can be an effective way to communicate complex situations or organize concepts in an easy-to-digest visual manner.
One clever example I’ve seen is Nicole Buys a Hooptie, a three-part consumer guide to buying a used car. The joint effort between a St. Petersburg Times intern, consumer affairs reporter and staff cartoonist Steve Madden is simple, but fairly effective.
Comics also can serve as an eye-catching way to summarize a story. Case in point, see the recent graphic for a New York Times business article about DecorMyEyes.com and anti-salesmanship in Internet commerce. There’s a nice contrast between the lengthy, anecdotal article and the dramatized comic which succinctly summarizes the first page of the article and crux of the story in seven quick panels.
There are also tons of comics – many of which are kind of corny – that explore meaty subjects like the Constitution and the 9/11 Report in graphic novel-length books. Journalistic applications are obvious here, too. Take for example this brief comic history of the Honduras coup, which happened just last year. At the time, Dan Archer and Nikil Saval created a nice visual guide that explains how Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted.
It’s fair to argue that info-comics often tackle dry subject matter and end up being fairly middling. But the goal here isn’t really narrative dynamite, it’s just the facts, ma’am. Then again, I would argue that there are no boring subjects, just boring storytellers. For a great example, look no further than the Scott McCloud Google Chrome comic.
Have no doubt, McCloud’s comic is Google PR, but it’s also an exceptional attempt to explain the reasoning behind Google’s web browser. It works as a nice piece of advertising, but it’s also a pretty engaging take on specialized subject matter.
Comic artists like McCloud, Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti and Richard McGuire among others have openly embraced the raw pictography of their art form. At the same time, it seems like journalism is experiencing a sort of renaissance of visual journalism that could easily embrace some interesting variations of info-comics.
Next up: Interviews, Reviews and Opinion