A Comic Writer's Take on Journalistic Truth

      

     I've recently been on a political, graphic novel kick and I've realized that there are a lot more of them than I ever imagined-- and a lot more specifically about conflicts in the Middle East. Most self-respecting liberals these days have most likely consumed the pages of the Persepolis comics but few have branched beyond that, or perhaps know the variety and the seriousness of the subjects that many of these comics try to tackle. 
       I just finished Joe Sacco's Palestine, winner of the 1994 American Book Award. In the novel, Sacco illustrates the raw material generated by a freelance reporter in his day-to-day work on the border regions of Pakistan, Israel, and Egypt. In the novel our protagonist, Joe Sacco himself, interviews individuals about their experiences with the occupation, the heavy violence, and with public institutions like jails, and the scant number of dilapidated and discriminatory hospitals and schools. 
       Joe Sacco's work has been featured in many reporting magazines and newspapers but he has battled public associations of the comic genre with fluff, camp, and pulp. After reading Waltz with Bashir, (see my last post) and Palestine, I feel especially touchy and defensive when it comes to this subject.  Sacco does a great job of describing the role of the comic journalist in his newest collection, Journalism (2012) from their need to be intensely observational and attuned to detail like a courtroom illustrator might be, to their qualifications as writers and interviewers, and courageous forces of nature, like other freelance journalists and wartime reporters. 

He writes: 

"      There will always exist when presenting journalism in the comics form, a tension between those things that can be verified, like a quote caught on tape, and those things that defy verification, such as a drawing purporting to represent a specific episode. Drawings are interpretive even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing. A cartoonist assembles elements deliberately and places them with intent on a page. There is none of the photographer’s luck at snapping a picture at precisely the right moment. A cartoonist “snaps” his drawings at any moment he or she chooses. It is this choosing that makes cartooning an inherently subjective medium.

            This does not let the cartoonist who aspires to journalism off the hook. The journalist’s standard obligations—to report accurately, to get quotes right, and to check claims—still pertain. But a comics journalist has obligations that go deeper than that. A writer can breezily describe a convoy of UN vehicles as ‘a convoy of UN vehicles’ and move on to the rest of the story. A comics journalist must draw a convoy of vehicles, and that raises a lot of questions. So, what do these vehicles look like? What do the uniforms of the UN personnel look like? What does the road look like? And what about the surrounding hills?

            Fortunately, there is no stylebook to tell the comics journalist how far he or she must go to get such details right. The cartoonist draws with the essential truth in mind, not the literal truth, and that allows for a wide variety of interpretations to accommodate a wide variety of drawing styles. No two cartoonists are going to draw a UN truck exactly the same way even if working from the same reference material.        "