Funny vs. Facts: How can you make a joke in comics journalism?

What’s the funniest comic you’ve ever read? Was it true?

Editing a magazine of comics journalism presents some interesting challenges. Symbolia merges non-fiction reporting, illustration, and interactive elements. We’re trying a new kind of news, and it seems to be working. We’ve built a truly global audience for our work (only 55% of our subscribers are in the US), which is amazing.

But there’s still something that I’m struggling to do: break through the somber tones affecting most comics journalism today and publish something that is deeply, truly, gut-bustingly hilarious. Editorial cartoons don’t count. While they rely on fact, the use of caricature and, y’know, opinion, can obscure the integrity of the reportage.

Seriousness is something that plagues non-fiction comics in general. From Fun Home to Stitches to Palestine, things can get pretty grim. It could be because comics are still trying to “prove themselves” as a medium—but I sure hope not. We’re all over the “but comics aren’t for kids anymore” thing….right?

When I was developing Symbolia, when it was just a twinkle in my eye, I was continually asked two questions:

  1. But how will you make it funny?
  2. Well, is it true?

I’d like to think there’s room in the world for both. Give me the John Jeremiah Sullivan of comics journalism. Please. The funniest non-fiction comics work I’ve read in the past few years has been autobiographical, not reportage: Vanessa Davis’ Make Me a Woman and Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz. More David Sedaris than David Remnick.

Matt Diffee’s reportage on snake handlers in the Cartoon Picayune is a refreshing break from the oh-so-serious comics journalism trope, but his breed of work is pretty rare. Andy Warner has also done some amazing work for us and we love the little easter eggs he peppers throughout each project.

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Matt Diffee for the Cartoon Picayune

What to do about it?

We’re closing production on Symbolia’s third issue now and one thing is painfully obvious: Comics journalism can be whimsical. It can be gut-wrenchingly honest. It can be evocative and convey real emotions. Comics can convey humor. Comics can convey truth. But can they do both?

I often feel, as an editor of a news product, that we have to prove the veracity of our work since it’s not “typical news.” That often means we fact-check the funny out.

That doesn’t mean that Symbolia is dry and dull and depressing. Joyce Rice, Symbolia’s cofounder, and I do all sorts of things to adapt: We have a really whimsical sense of design, we pair cultural reporting with stuff that goes a little deeper, investigation-wise, we add interactive treats to cultivate delight…but straight up humor is really, really hard.

Audrey Quinn and Kat Fajardo for Symbolia

Audrey Quinn and Kat Fajardo for Symbolia

So, we’ve developed all of these coping mechanisms to add delight–but our jokes are few and far between. We’re publishing a story on sexbot AI in the next issue and I finally feel like we have something that is deeply humorous, though it pushes a few journalistic boundaries.

I figured I’d take this conundrum to the HU community and ask you to prove me wrong. I’m looking for deeply funny, deeply true examples of comics journalism. SO: Let’s take this to the comments. I want you to tell me I’m wrong. What’s out there? Is what I’m looking for even possible?  I’ll be diving in and out of the ensuring thread over the weekend and will pull the most interesting, most insightful comments up into this post.

Starter question: What is the single most hilarious work of non-fiction comics you’ve ever read? Why? GO!

All right, we got some great ideas–R. Crumb, Jessica Abel, Harvey Kurtzman, and more.

Time for my next question: When the cartooning is REALLY cartoony, can a comic still convey truth?

Ethan on the Advantages of Comics Journalism

My post on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, and my skepticism about comics journalism, prompted several interesting responses from Ethan. I thought I’d highlight them below.

I can recall at least one specific, focused example Sacco has given in numerous interviews as to what benefit he sees in using comics: he can present environmental or visual details unobtrusively or repetitively in a way that other mediums cannot. He has spoke about how his drawings of the West Bank allow him to depict, for example, the ubiquitous presence of children and of mud without having to repeat at the end of every sentence “and the ground was muddy and there were kids everywhere.” You feel that impact through background drawings. On the other hand, were this a documentary, he would be entirely dependent on stock footage or b-roll of contemporary Gaza– and I imagine stock footage of 1956 Gaza is hard to come by, if it exists. Thus he is able to give his narrative much more visual impact than the “talking heads” would of a documentary. Plus, of course, he gains the ease of access and portability that a book has over a documentary, as well as the length and depth of the book (this documentary would be hours long if all the dialogue was read out loud). These are all relatively superficial advantages comics has. I’m sure you could come up with more.

Other reasons: Sacco has said he appreciates the necessary slowness of comics, which requires abandoning any sense of timeliness in favor of “slow journalism.” Carrying a sketchbook and pencil into a strange location is much less obtrusive and alienating (and much cheaper) than carrying expensive camera equipment. People react very differently when you put a camera on them.

“He was doing comics for years when almost nobody cared” — reminds me of more good reasons. Comics, especially when Sacco started, used to fly so far under the critical radar of wider society that you could get away with doing a book about Palestinians without any pushback, or, y’know, attention. On the other hand, the novelty of “Hey, it’s a comic about Palestine” probably got him a lot of readers and attention that he wouldn’t have gotten from (yet another) book or documentary. I mean, Edward Said wrote the introduction to the collected ‘Palestine’ volume.

 

Comics Journalism…Why?

Reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, I kept coming back to the same question. Namely — journalism as comics? Why? Sacco’s project — interviewing individuals in the Gaza Strip who were witnesses to two different Israeli massacres in 1956 — could easily have been presented as an agitprop book or as an agitprop documentary film. His methodology — the careful documenting of atrocities, the humanizing of the enemy, the nuanced by firm advocacy for the powerless — are all familiar tropes and tactics of left-wing investigative print and film journalism. Given that the content is familiar, what exactly does the comics form add? Why bother with it?

It’s a question that’s likely to make comics fans bristle. After all, to turn the question around, why should comics have to justify itself while other forms do not? Shouldn’t the success of the endeavor be more important than the medium?

Perhaps. And yet the question persists…in part because when you’re doing Joe Sacco’s brand of journalistic advocacy, journalism in prose and journalism in video have some major, easily apparent advantages over journalism in comics. Prose is unobtrusive and easily distributed; a Human Rights Watch report, for example, can provide facts and talking points with minimal fuss, and can also be readily quoted, linked, and copied, spreading a targeted, clear, footnoted message to as broad a range of people as possible. Film, on the other hand, can provide a sense of presence and urgency which is difficult to duplicate, allowing witnesses to speak in their own words with an authority and resonance that is very difficult to duplicate.

The advantage of prose or of film can perhaps be summed up as “authenticity.” Journalism’s goal is to show truth, and so spur to action. Prose and film are, for historical and formal reasons, often seen as at least potentially transparent windows on truth. Comics, on the other hand, foregrounds its artifice; as Sacco mentions in his introduction, everything you see on the page is rendered by his hand. And this is, incidentally, why Sacco is seen as an artist, rather than just as a reporter. Certainly, nobody that I’m aware of has ever referred to an HRW report as the work of a mature artist who has found his own style and voice, which is what friend-of-the-blog Jared Gardner called Sacco in his review of Footnotes in Gaza.

One upshot of making journalism comics, then, is to make journalism art, and to make the journalist an artist. The downside of this is that you then end up in a situation where the genius and sensitivity and angst of the journalist ends up pushing to the side the suffering and injustice which is the journalism’s putative subject. Sacco is certainly aware of this danger, and makes moves to undercut it, or problematize it, as on this second-to-last-page of the graphic novel.
 

 
However, I don’t think these gestures are ultimately successful. In this case, for example, indicting himself for insensitivity and hubris ends up validating his sensitivity and honesty, and also makes the book as a whole about his psychodrama and growth — about his experiences in Gaza, rather than about the experiences of those who are stuck in the place on a more permanent basis. In this context, contrition for selfishness still ends up as a way for the self to take up more space. The comics form has allowed/impelled Sacco the journalist to become Sacco the genius.

But while the artifice of comics journalism has its downsides, it has some advantages as well. Most notably, Sacco’s narrative is in no small part about the uncertainty of memory and of history. Comics, precisely because of its unfamiliarity as journalism, is less transparent; it demonstrates, almost reflexively, that journalism is not “truth,” but an effort to reconstruct truth.

Again, precisely because comics is a less familiar form for journalism than film or prose, it ends up emphasizing its own artificiality. Everything you see in Footnotes in Gaza is created and represented by Joe Sacco. His account always has a built in asterix. What he shows you is not what happened, but a collage stitched out of the words and memories of his interviewees and the fabric of his own visual imagination.
 

 
Sacco uses comics, then, to emphasize subjectivity. But…do you need to use comics to do that? Writers have been exploring the wavering, difficult nature of truth and of history for hundreds of years in prose, surely. Joseph Conrad’s narratives within narratives within narratives, or Paul Celan’s bleak koans hovering on the edge of comprehensibility, to cite just two examples, seem like more challenging and more thoroughgoing efforts to wrestle with the intersections of meaning, subjectivity, and historical trauma. For that matter, those Human Rights Watch reports I mentioned are usually pretty good about discussing the difficulty of gathering evidence and the conflicting testimony of witnesses. Do we really need the comics form to tell us that human memory isn’t perfect?

Indeed, the use of comics seems in some ways like a epistemological shortcut. Subjectivity can be linked to, or summarized as, the comics form, which is shown as obscuring the objective truth of reason and trauma. Comics may serve to call reportage into question…but it also, at the same time, validates or stabilizes the reportage. Thus, in that page above, the images of the Israeli’s swinging clubs are imaginative, or unverified…and their unverifiedness contrasts, or highlights, the more vouched veracity of the portraits, which are (at least probably) photoreferenced. And the referenced images, in turn, highlight the even greater veracity of the words, taken down from (presumably taped) interviews. Thus, while the comics form may initially appear to highlight subjectivity, it could instead be said to create a fairly clear hierarchy of representation, in which Sacco’s deployment of his research materials and his illustration signals the reader what is “truth” and what is less so.

This isn’t necessarily a weakness. You could argue that comics’ strength as journalism lies not in its artificiality per se, but rather in the ease with which it can evoke differing degrees of artifice; in the resources it has available for signaling truth or falsehood, or different levels of both. For example, one of the most interesting aspects of Sacco’s book is the way that he shifts back and forth between the 1956 atrocities and the ongoing violence on the West Bank. For comics, where still images evoke time, it is relatively easy to make two times equally physical and equally present.

Comics’ ability to show bodies discontinuous in time is used here to show trauma across decades; the self from the past is as real as the self in the present. That is, it’s not entirely real, but is composed of representation and memory, the present self made of a past self, as the past is made of, or created out of, the present.

The problem is that Sacco’s manipulation of artifice and memory is not always so deft. In that page we looked at earlier, for instance:

 

 

The cartooning turns the Israeli soldiers into deindividualized, snarling bad-guy tropes, all teeth and slitted (or entirely obscured) eyes. Is this how the Palestinian’s are supposed to have seen them? Or is it how Sacco sees them? And is the acknowledgedly subjective nature of comics supposed to make us question this demonization? Or is it supposed to excuse it? Or, as perhaps the most likely possibility, has the impetus for dramatic visuals been catalyzed by comics’ history of pulp representation to create a pleasing collage of villainy from which readers are encouraged to pleasurably recoil?

Or another example:
 

 
This is one of a number of times when Sacco zooms in on a grizzled Palestinian fighter, dramatically showing us his crazy eyes. As with the thuggish snarling Israelis, the formal contribution of comics here has to do less with emphasizing subjectivity and physicality, and more to do with the pleasures of pulp tropes. It’s Sacco’s own “Muslim Rage!” moment.

From this perspective, the advantage of comics as a form may be less the meta-questioning of the journalistic project, and more its unique ability to present itself as serious art while simultaneously coating its earnest reportage with a sugary dab of melodrama. One can debate whether this is ethically or aesthetically desirable, but either way it’s clear that Sacco’s comics provide something — a mix of high-art validation and accessible low-art hints of pulp — that is uavailable in prose or video long-form journalism. I don’t necessarily like Footnotes in Gaza that much, but I have to grudgingly admire its creator’s marketing instincts in finding and exploiting such an unlikely genre niche.

Comics Journalism for Dummies

A while back Michael Dean wrote a now semi-infamous essay in The Comics Journal where he declared that there was no comics journalism on the web — just link farms, commentary, and event coverage. I thought the essay was quite entertaining — a fine example of Comics Journal snark and industry bashing.

I couldn’t help wondering though — presume Michael was correct, and there was no comics journalism on the web. Why should anyone care? Do we really need investigative journalism aimed at comics? Investigative journalism can be great when it exposes injustice, or provides the public with vital information: Seymour Hersch’s reporting at the New Yorker, or Andrew Sullivan’s twitter-aggregating from the Iranian protests seem like cases in point. But…you know, comics is a relatively minor entertainment subculture. In a world of limited resources and limited time, wouldn’t it be better for someone with a real talent for investigative journalism to do something — almost anything — else?

I was thinking about this again in light of a panel I was on last night at C2E2, organized by Heidi McDonald of the Beat. Other participants were Brigid Alverson of Robot 6 and mangablog, Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading, Ron Richards of iFanboy
Lucas Siegel of Newsarama, Rick Marshall of MTV, and a very funny and sweet young guy named Caleb, whose affiliation I sadly missed. [Update: It’s Caleb Goellner from Comics Alliance.]

Anyway, I’m not going to give an extensive recap because — well, I’m not a journalist, and I didn’t take notes. But I can report that, perhaps inevitably, there was a fair amount of talk about what boiled down to professionalism. Brigid talked about the importance of “not being an asshole”. (Brigid is to be fair, coming from a background as a political reporter.) Rick worried some about the implications of making deals to get exclusive info; several people expressed frustration that some folks think they can just start up a blog and get online and expect to be taken seriously.

So, what the hell, let’s look at the top stories at the moment on some of these sites.

IFanboy currently has an exclusive Fear PC Game Download.

Newsarama has a reported interview with Brian Bendis from C2E2 puffing some new series which I refuse to remember the title of for even a second.

Heidi’s reports on news stories from C2E2, said news stories mostly involving new comics series and Diamond speculating about changing its release day from Wed to Thursday.

Robot 6 has a news roundup that’s largely the same as Heidi’s, almost as if they were attending the same convention.

At Comics Worth Reading Ed Sizemore has a brief review of Yotsuba book 8.

And at mangablog there’s a review by Melinda Beasi of You’re So Cool.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. Personally, the only things I have any interest at all in reading are the reviews by Ed Sizemore and Melinda Beasi, but that’s me. Lots of people want what these sites have to offer, and that’s cool. Download that video game, speculate about diamond, anticipate some new series…it’s all good, if that’s your poison.

But while there’s nothing to be ashamed of in providing such services, I would submit that there’s nothing to be especially proud of either. Being a stenographer for Brian Bendis? Showing up at a panel and duly providing marketing services afterwards? Offering free samples? Even, you know, providing a short well-written review of a popular title…this is not rocket science. It’s not curing cancer. It’s not even a vital, unpleasant task like picking up the garbage or digging coal. It takes time and enthusiasm and maybe some level of professionalism, but lots of jobs that are really quite important require those things as well, big whoop. These stories, in short, define “trivial.”

I tried to make this argument on the panel more or less (I am less eloquent in person than in print, as Johanna kindly noted afterwards), and lots of folks disagreed with me. Johanna said that when people talk about how it’s all “just comics” (my phrase) it’s generally an excuse for their own low standards. Rick said that people make their living at comics, so it can’t just be dismissed. Lucas talked about how important comics are to people.

To which I can only reply, whatever. Sure, people care about comics. Sure, it’s better to do a good job than a bad one in some sense, even if your job is inconsequential. And yes, people make their living at comics. None of this changes the fact that what we’re doing as comics bloggers and journalists and news aggregators is really pretty meaningless in even the not-so-grand scheme of things. It’s for fun.

People care about fun a lot. They make their living off fun. And they draw lines in the sand delineating their little bit of fun and, not coincidentally, their little bit of lucre. Somebody on the panel I think actually talked about how some blogs undermine everyone’s reputation. I mean, come on. You’re basically providing a stream of marketing copy for a long list of crappy products based around nostalgia and indifferently-executed sex and violence. What sort of reputation are you defending?

I don’t exempt myself here; HU is a labor of love, and I’m very pleased that there’s an audience for it. Hell, I’ve worked hard for virtually no money to build an audience for it. I’ve been able to do that in large part because blogging has almost no barriers to entry. That same fact — the there are no barriers to entry — means that there are lots and lots of blogs out there that I don’t care about, that don’t seem to me very good, or that irritate me for one reason or another. And, you know, my solution to that in general is that I don’t read them.

But neither do I wag my finger at them and accuse them of failing to rise to professional standards or whatever (unless I have some vested interest in having them improve, of course.) Because to accuse random little blogs x, y, and z of failing to rise to professional standards would be (a) condescending and (b) kind of embarrassing for me. Even the biggest Poobah in comicsdom is a pretty penny-ante Poobah. To rear up on your back legs and start hectoring and/or kicking at those two steps below you on the child-size step ladder of success — you might as well just podcast your insecurities to the world.

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For me the most fascinating exchange of the evening actually occurred after the panel, when Johanna explained how she makes money from her site. It’s too bad the question of how to make money off blogging wasn’t thrown open to everyone; I at least would have been curious to hear some of the nuts and bolts of how people are managing to make a living (or not make a living, in my case.)

In any event, many thanks to Heidi for inviting me. It was nice to be a real-live pundit briefly, to meet some folks for the first time, and to see Brigid and Johanna and lovely and talented Matthew Brady, who came out to watch. We’ll see if I’ve managed to convince everyone involved never to invite me again!