“I will alert the world to your suffering!”
Behind the rise of investigative cartooning
BY Brad Mackay
In January 2007, when David Widgington started thinking about a new project for his small-but-scrappy Cumulus Press, he quickly settled on a subject: the alleged wrongdoings of Canadian mining companies at home and abroad. The choice was a natural one for the Montreal-based publisher, which frequently tackles social justice issues.
Founded in 1998, Cumulus has earned a reputation for eclecticism, releasing everything from short fiction, memoirs and travel books to multimedia DVDs, music and poetry—including that of Governor General’s Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke. So when it came time to decide on the format for Cumulus’s latest project, Widgington—not unexpectedly—chose to forge new ground: comics journalism.
An idea that would have been dismissed by most publishers just a few years ago, a comics-based exposé of the mining industry is the kind of project that seems perfectly tailored for Cumulus’s young, politically engaged readers. Inundated by media and hungry for new approaches to storytelling, this younger demographic has been instrumental in the rise of the graphic novel (and the comic medium in general) over the past decade.
It’s a trend that Widgington was clearly aware of when he began to assemble his project 12 months ago. While working on it, Widgington came across The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s 1937 non-fiction book about the brutal living and working conditions in three mining towns in Northern England, and was inspired to bring a similar investigative approach to the mining practices of Canadian companies such as Goldcorp and Alcan.
This desire was heightened by his frustration over what he says is the largely credulous coverage the mining industry gets in the mainstream media. “Bre-X got a lot of press, but that was because of financial issues,” the 43-year-old explains from his home. “They didn’t talk about the potential impact on the communities where the supposed gold deposits were located.”
The choice to use comics was equally easy. “How do we make people who maybe don’t read the financial section of the newspapers aware of Canada’s role in the mining industry around the world?” Widgington says of his decision. “It seemed like the perfect opportunity; to get some comics and some journalism together, and see what happened.”
The result, released in December, is Extraction! Comix Reportage, an investigative graphic novel that reveals the dark side of the Canadian mining industry both internationally, in India and Guatemala, and at home in northern Quebec and Alberta’s controversial oil sands.
Divided into four chapters, each one dedicated to a precious (and profitable) resource, the book offers a gritty, ground-level look at the force that is brought to bear in the hunt for new sources of oil, gold, uranium and bauxite (or aluminium ore).
Unlike most graphic novels, the book itself is the product of a team of writers, artists and editors. Edited by Widgington, writer/activist Frédéric Dubois and veteran cartoonist Marc Tessier, each chapter is written by journalists and writers handpicked for their journalistic skill or intimate knowledge of the mining sector, such as Vancouverite Dawn Paley, Victoria-based Tamara Herman (who is active in groups opposing Alcan’s mining efforts in India), Montreal broadcaster Sophie Toupin and environmental consultant and academic Petr Cizek. In addition to Joe Ollmann—whose graphic novel This Will All End in Tears won the 2007 Doug Wright Award for Best Book—the artists tapped for the project include Phil Angers (Mac Tin Tac), Ruth Tait and cartoonist Stanley Wany.
Accustomed to working with tight timelines (not to mention tight budgets), Widgington says the unique process of Extraction! was a challenge over the nine months it took to see it to press. Both exciting and frustrating, “often at the same time,” he quips, the transition from the original scripts into the comics form was daunting.
“We scripted all of the articles before we handed them to the artists and we had all sorts of questions, like ‘Can we use mise-en-scène here? Or set up a scenario that actually didn’t happen, to get the information across?’ It was like, where does the journalism end and the comic begin?”
It’s these kinds of questions that make comics journalism so exciting to read, and often such a challenge to create. No one knows this more than Joe Sacco, the American cartoonist who is credited with coining the term “comics journalism.” Born in Malta and raised in Australia and the U.S., Sacco has hewed out a unique position for himself as the pre-eminent cartoonist/reporter of his age, thanks to the success of books such as Palestine, Safe Area Goražde and The Fixer (published by Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly Books).
According to Sacco, his books can take up to seven years to complete due to a time-consuming approach that includes months of research, dozens of interviews and countless reference photographs—and that’s not including the months needed to actually write and draw. It’s a method he originated in the early 1990s when he began working on Palestine, his genredefining debut that was recently re-released in a special edition featuring fascinating background notes, photos, outtakes and journal entries that provide a peek into his unique process.
“It would be a lot easier for me to be a print journalist,” says Sacco from his home in Portland. “When you’re writing, you can say, ‘We were escorted by an armoured car.’ [But] if you draw it, well, then what kind of armoured car was it? Do I make something up? And if I don’t find an exact reference, you think, ‘Is this how accurate it’s going to get?’”
For example, when he begins drawing a person, he sometimes changes the name to protect identity, a tactic common to traditional journalism, but then he has the additional challenge of drawing the person in such a way as to be true to the story, while protecting the subject from possible harm.
“There are no damn rules to it,” the 47-year-old says of his chosen medium. “And I think there cannot be. You have to think, ‘How important is that detail? Is it really going to change the essence of the story?’ ”
It’s Sacco’s obsessive attention to detail that helps make the 285 pages of Palestine hold up some 15 years after it was first published (then, as a poor-selling comic book series). The book, which chronicles Sacco’s two-month visit to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in late 1991, is packed with stories about the people he met along the way who’ve been uprooted and displaced by the Israeli government. But it’s also packed with thrilling visual experiments, both successful and unsuccessful, that serve as testament to his efforts to forge a new journalistic path.
A graduate of the journalism program at the University of Oregon, Sacco’s disillusionment with traditional journalism— along with his unease about his undertaking—are as much a part of Palestine’s narrative charm as are the stories he recounts. (In one scene, Sacco shows himself thinking, “I will alert the world to your suffering! Watch your local comic-book store….”)
This unease was on his mind so much during the making of the book that Sacco felt a need to give his unique new vocation a proper name. During interviews about the collected Palestine, he began calling it “comics journalism” to help explain what exactly it was that he did for a living. Seven years later, Sacco no longer has the need to explain himself, and has come to appreciate the inherent benefits of the form.
“The great thing about comics is that they’re so loose and so little had been done with the form that I didn’t feel like there were any footsteps that I had to follow,” he says. “Comics then, and maybe even now, were like untrampled grass and you could walk across it in any direction you wanted. It’s one of those mediums that’s so open to interpretation.”
Sacco is by no means the only cartoonist to take advantage of this creative freedom. Though he’s credited with giving comics journalism its name, many other cartoonists have worked in a similar vein, including Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman (founders of the socialist comics magazine World War 3 Illustrated), British cartoonist and anti-capitalist Sue Coe (an alumni of the groundbreaking “commix” anthology RAW), Canadian Guy Delisle (with Pyongyang, Shenzhen and his forthcoming book about Burma), and even the likes of Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith and Leonard Rifas, the rabble-rousing leftist cartoonist who created Corporate Crime Comics during the 1970s.
But to many comics historians, including Jeet Heer and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the roots of today’s comics journalists can be traced nearly 150 years further back, to the American Civil War. When the war began in 1861, newspaper and magazine editors were hungry for images to run alongside their coverage of the divisive confrontation. Unfortunately, nascent photographic technology wasn’t advanced enough to allow photographers to capture battles, says Heer.
“During all of the 19th century wars, like the Crimean War and the Civil War, the main defining images weren’t photographs of the battlefield, but from illustrators who were sent out there,” he says from Regina. “There are photographs of the Civil War, but they’re always after the battles because the cameras required exposures of five to 10 minutes.”
This reality paved the way for the success of popular printmakers like Currier and Ives, who made a fortune by selling prints of headline-grabbing Civil War battles.
This practice continued in later years, as newspapers sent their best illustrators (including George Luks, who penned the seminal comic strip The Yellow Kid for a stretch) to the front lines. Though their work bore none of the sequential narrative that we have come to identify as “comics,” their success helped pave the way for what Spiegelman calls the first wave of comics journalism.
The first incidence of the power of cartooning being harnessed for journalistic purposes actually came about a few years after the Civil War, in the politically corrupt world of New York City. While working for Harper’s Weekly, German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast began penning a series of cartoons that lampooned William “Boss” Tweed—a notorious New York politician who was the head of the city’s Democratic Party machine. Among the first political cartoonists, Nast created comedic and incisive cartoons—blending art with text—that brought to life the damning investigative reports the magazine had been running on Tweed in a format that was accessible to a wider audience.
Nast’s media melee eventually had reverberations north of the border as well. In 1873, John W. Bengough, one of Canada’s first professional cartoonists, founded Grip, a satirical weekly magazine that targeted politicians and the societal norms of the day. Bengough’s cartoons ridiculed Prime Minister John A. MacDonald and tackled topics like the Pacific Railway scandal.
A few decades later, The New Masses, the seminal American communist magazine, pushed the concept of comics reportage further by sending its artists to cover labour strikes and protests. Though still restricted to one panel, these artists (who included the likes of Crocket Johnson, who would go on to draw the comic strip Barnaby and illustrate the popular children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon) furthered the burgeoning tradition of cartoon reporting.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that the first true examples of comics journalism began to appear, thanks to Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad magazine. Kurtzman’s role in comics reporting came about after he left Mad in 1955, following a dispute over money with his publisher. In the years after, Kurtzman became something of a celebrity cartoonist, reluctantly rubbing shoulders with the likes of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner. As a result, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Kurtzman was commis- sioned to write and draw a number of high-profile assignments for Esquire, Pageant and TV Guide that saw him hanging out with Jimmy Cagney on a film shoot in Ireland, lurking around the set of The Perry Como Show or capturing the action in a Times Square penny arcade.
These strips, some of which are slated to be reprinted by Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books next summer, are fuelled by Kurtzman’s sly observations: on the set of The Fugitive Kind, Kurtzman depicts Marlon Brando as a down-to-earth celebrity with quirks—like a tendency to rub other people’s arms and his proclivity for public nose-picking. Largely forgotten except by the most devoted Kurtzman fans, his work from this time shows a visual experimentalism that can be seen in present-day cartoonists. His sprawling, wordless two-page spread on the life inside the bustling penny arcade manages to capture far more than mere words could do in the allotted space—a feat echoed by Sacco in a stunning two-page spread in Palestine.
Though not as serious as his editorial precursors, Kurtzman’s work during this period marked a turning point in both form and content, not unlike the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer that would emerge a few years later. This nascent trend of comics reportage would be further championed by Kurtzman in 1960, when he started up Help! magazine. Over the next five years, he hired an impressive cast of young talent to help fill its pages (including Woody Allen, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem) and made a practice of sending cartoonists like Jack Davis and Arnold Roth on comics assignments to interview baseball great Casey Stengel or report on daily life in Moscow. He also managed to recruit an aspiring cartoonist named Robert Crumb for assignments that included sketchbooks of Bulgaria and Harlem.
These seminal works would eventually serve as inspiration for the next major development in comics journalism. In the mid-1990s, cartoonist Art Spiegelman (as devoted a Kurtzman fan as they come) used these works, along with examples of French comics journalism from an early 20th century magazine called L’Assiette Au Buerre, as part of his pitch to create a “comics editor” position for himself at the popular men’s magazine Details.
Riding high on the success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, about his parents’ struggle to survive the Holocaust, Spiegelman landed the job and promptly began assigning stories to his cartoonist friends. Though overshadowed by many of his other achievements, his time at Details bore compelling comics by Kim Deitch (who visited an inmate on death row), Jamie Hernandez and Joe Sacco, whose 1998 strip about the Bosnian war crime tribunal earned Details acclaim within the magazine industry.
In the decade since, the increasing popularity of graphic novels and comics in general has only widened the audience for works of comics journalism. At the same time, newspapers, now faced with competition from the internet, have turned to new styles of storytelling in the hopes of attracting a younger readership. Taking a page from their predecessors nearly 150 years before, many papers, including the New York Times and the Guardian, now regularly turn to cartoonists like Sacco to interpret world events through featured comic strips. In Canada, the National Post has been particularly open to this, publishing comic reports on everything from the Liberal leadership convention to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Over the past couple of years, Post cartoonist Steve Murray has been sent on so many off-beat assignments that he has become the equivalent of a gonzo comics journalist. Murray (who also works under the pen name Chip Zdarsky) is grateful for the unique opportunity, but is quick to fess up to its challenges.
“It takes one really long day to write, draw and colour a piece, and of course whatever time I’ve spent researching,” he says via email. “I enjoy doing it, but it is hard work and, unlike a standard reporter, I have a whole other set of issues to deal with regarding the visuals, so it sometimes feels like twice the work.”
Murray often brings a scanner with him on assignment to file what he’s drawn.
“The main problem is that I’m presenting things pretty factually, but because it’s cartooning most people assume that big chunks are made up.”
This is complicated by the fact that his dispatches typically employ a guerrilla style of comedy that puts Murray the cartoonist squarely in the centre of the action, not unlike Hunter S. Thompson (except hopefully more sober).
Though that’s likely no longer a problem facing Joe Sacco, both artists agree that comics journalism is finally coming of age as a genre of its own. Sacco, now 230 pages into what will eventually be a 350-page book about the Gaza Strip, is stunned at the turn his luck has taken since the first issue of Palestine was published.
“[Back then] doing a book about the Palestinians was almost a fantasy project for me, in that I felt I had to do it—but I didn’t really think anyone was going to read it,” he says. “And hardly anyone did read it when it came out as a series; the sales just got lower and lower and lower. It was only when it came out as a book and the non-comics world saw it, that it started to do well. Now people are giving my work the time of day because it’s in comics form.”
“In other words, they’re probably not going to read another book about the Palestinians. But if I do another book about the Palestinians, I know there are going to be people who are going to read it because of the fact that it is a comic. Go figure that.”
