[a week 3 lab exercise - in progress]
Suspended Life http://www.sptimes.com/2006/04/07/trapeze/ is an animated comic accompanied with an audio commentary by its creator, journalist S.I. Rosenbaum. It was the Best of New Media Design Monthly Winner for April 2006, a competition run by the Society for News Design, and was published on the St Petersburg Times newspaper website, where S.I. Rosenbaum works as a journalist.
On first inspection, Suspended Life is the simple and sweet story of a teenage girl’s passion for the trapeze, her family’s history in travelling circuses, and the impending pressure on her to get a ‘real job’ as college looms. The beautifully minimalist comic illustrates her trapeze routine and daily practice, and uses well placed, direct quotes to describe how she feels on the trapeze, and her fears for the future.
It’s a well-told and well-illustrated online animated comic and it could easily be fiction, but it’s not - it’s the result of an interview with a real person, Simone Dykes, 16 year old trapeze artist.
Why “journalism comic”?
In the accompanying audio commentary, S.I. Rosenbaum says that it is “very refreshing to be able to tell stories in a different way than in the way I usually do. Everyday as a reporter I’m storytelling using words and sentences, and this way I can use words and pictures instead.”
She also points out that comics allow her to “combine different pieces of information.” While she didn’t elaborate on this, perhaps she means how the comic format necessitates that only certain information from a story is extracted, interpreted and highlighted - and that it is these poignant moments or quotes, especially when combined with illustration, that can make a story of this kind emotionally powerful in connecting with its audience.
The reduction of content also means that a story may have more impact, because it is not lost in “background information” or the need to set the story in its wider context.
And because it is “art”, its beauty, magic, uniqueness and handmade qualities connect with us differently than a standard journalistic feature.
Journalism comics in the newsroom?
One journalist arguing the case for journalism comics is Jim Willse, editor of US newspaper the Newark Star-Ledger.
[My summary of his seminar, Super Prose: Comics Can Make You a Better Writer, to go here.]
In a very indepth article for the Columbia Journalism Review, The Case for Comics Journalism, Kristian Williams outlines the history of the journalism comic, or “graphic journalism” as it was known, the variety of styles and approaches to this medium, and puts forward its many strengths.
[My summary of this article to go here]
The history of journalism comics
Fantagraphics Books, publishers of comics and graphic novels, would argue that its artists have been producing what it calls “graphic journalism” long before newspaper journalists got on to the idea.
Comic artists like Joe Sacco and Ho Che Anderson are not journalists, yet their comics are clearly investigative or historical stories based in fact. Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine, published in 1993 “combined the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation”. Sacco’s biography argues that Palestine “set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first non-fiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus”.
[conclusion here]
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