Comics Reportages and “Expat” Graphic Novels

Also informed by the centuries-old tradition of newspaper illustrations, but mainly reflecting the generic characteristics of the autobiographic graphic novel, comics reportage developed at the intersection of journalistic practice and comics drawing. The genre became popular in both the North American Comics, and Francophone bande dessinée. This article describes the (trans)media genre of comics reportage and some of the frontiers of the phenomenon.

Two Trends in Graphic Journalism

In recent years, we have seen two major tendencies in graphic or comics journalism that are at first glance distinct from each other. One is the flourishing of data journalism that works with data and creates data visualization, such as infographics, figures, or maps. Media discourse analysis conventionally treats figures and infographics as having an objectivity effect . The other tendency, a contrary one, is the ongoing “reinvention” of decidedly subjective journalistic drawing, regarded as an opinion genre, while more recently comics reportage also gains increasing popularity through its subjectivity and its expressed relationship to the represented.

However, these two types of graphic journalism and their use show similarities. They demand time from both the creator and the recipient — and they encourage the reader to dwell on the work, due partly to the expectations stripped from the routines of linear reading, and their tabularity, and the visual representation placed within the space of the page. Comics journalism, the explicitly subjective comics reportage, and data journalism reinventing objectivity with data visualization and infographics are versions of graphic journalism and investigative journalism as well. Instead of the indigestible, constantly rolling and multiplying images of news and actualities, they provide the opportunity for a slower, and deeper reception – potentially reflecting the trend of Slow Journalism.

Journalistic Practice and Comics Drawing

Also informed by the centuries-old tradition of newspaper illustrations, but mainly reflecting the generic characteristics of the autobiographic graphic novel, comics reportage developed at the intersection of journalistic practice and comics drawing. The genre became popular in both the North American Comics, and the French-Belgian(-Swiss) bande dessinée tradition since the turn of the millennium. Joe Sacco’s influential war reportages on the Middle East and the Balkan Wars canonized certain characteristics of the genre.

Sacco’s works, although retaining some of the authentication procedures of conventional reporting, including references to real space and time, make a spectacular break with the requirement of journalistic objectivity. The author-narrator-protagonist is, therefore, in a sense, an autobiographic reporter who draws himself into the narrative, and becomes a character and participant in the events. He reflects on the impressions, experiences, and feelings he encountered during his field work, as well as on his own cultural background and biographical history. The latter feature also links the comic book report to autobiographical works. He observes, represents, and sometimes comments on everyday occurrences, and his conversations with local people are also “put on stage”. Creating comics reportage presupposes both journalistic and cartoonist work and skills.

Comics Reportage as a Transmedia Genre

Based on his professional identification, the work of Patrick Chappatte clearly demonstrates the emergence of the comics reportage genre in various media environments. Patrick Chappatte has produced over thirty pieces of comics reportage. They were published in his 2011 book, and in various Swiss, Italian, French, and US-based magazines. The reportages covered a wide variety of topics and locations, from Nairobi’s ‘tin town’ through the French presidential palace to the world of drug offenders in Guatemala and the daily life of residents in the vicinity of the minefields of South Lebanon. The bilingual website provides web adaptations of his works published in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps as well as the television version of his South Lebanon report. The cartoonist’s highly optimistic, hopeful, committed TED lectures in the style of stand-up shows — also in French and English — review the generic characteristics of comics reportage, and the potentials represented by its mediatic spread.

The nonfiction graphic novel Le Photographe, a work by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercie prominently features photographs and the materials of the photojournalist, and combines the solutions of photography and comics in connection with the subject of Afghanistan, where the work of the photojournalist is framed by drawn comics elements. At the same time, The Photographer also represents a direction of comics journalism detached from the autobiographical tradition. It is precisely the diversity of the skills of the journalist, the drawer, the photographer, sometimes the inker etc., all of which are necessary for the creation of comics journalism which might create an ideal setting for collective work.

“Expat” Graphic Novels

An emerging genre, similar to comics reportage, depicting the experience of countries, languages and cultures distant from the home of the reporter, could be referred to as the “expat graphic novel”. The genre largely originates in the work of Guy Delisle. The narrator of these graphic novels transfers from his own country to a foreign linguistic-cultural environment. Such a situation emerges in Delisle’s novels, first published in 2000, either or both because of the narrator-protagonist’s work as an animated filmmaker, and the missions of his spouse, Nadège, who works for the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders. The first group includes novels describes North Korean and Chinese experiences, and the second includes “expat experiences” in Burma and Israel/Palestine, exhibiting the everyday life and the relationships with the locals and other expats. In Delisle’s graphic novels, the frequent topics of international journalism, such as North Korean propaganda and Israeli West Bank Wall appear in the comics narrator’s subjective perspective, usually depicted on the level of the practices of daily life. The novel set in Jerusalem also features a comics reportage part, but its narrative framework suggests deviation from the genre, emphasising even more that outside this experiment we are not reading a comics reportage, and therefore it is not recommended to approach this graphic novel along the expectations of general journalism and comics reportages.

Unlike Joe Sacco, the founding father of comics journalism, Guy Delisle, is not a professional journalist. As travel literature expert Jelena Bulić points out in her thorough analysis of Delisle’s novels, these works are not journalistic reports (“reportages”) in the sense of Joe Sacco. They are rather accounts (“reports”) that bypass the canonical conventions of travel literature and travel- related media narratives, and attempt to convey the experience of everyday life. The daily routine is also discussed in detail regarding topics such as work, cooking or childcare — a kind of thematization not unusual in autobiographical comics and autobiographies.

The full reports of the study are available within the recently published NEWSREEL2 research report.

This article was written by Gyula Maksa (University of Pécs).

Photo: Pixabay