Comics journalism

[6] Visual narrative storytelling has existed for thousands of years, but comics journalism brings reportage to the field in more direct ways.

Illustrated reporting, or comics journalism, takes days, weeks, or months to craft a story, which can run for pages, and which may or may not be presenting an opinion.

"[7]The use of the comics medium to cover real-life events for news organizations, publications or publishers (in graphic novel format) is currently at an all-time peak.

[9] Editor/cartoonist Leonard Rifas' two-issue series Corporate Crime Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, 1977, 1979) was an early example of comics reportage,[9] with a number of notable contributors, including Greg Irons, Trina Robbins, Harry Driggs, Guy Colwell, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Jay Kinney, Denis Kitchen, and Larry Gonick.

In October 1994 cartoonist Bill Griffith toured Cuba for two weeks, during a period of mass exodus, as thousands of Cubans took advantage of President Fidel Castro's decision to permit emigration for a limited time.

[14] Cartoonist Art Spiegelman was comics editor of Details in the mid-1990s; in 1997 — modeling himself after Harvey Kurtzman — Spiegelman began assigning comics journalism pieces to a number of his cartoonist associates,[15] including Sacco, Peter Kuper, Ben Katchor, Peter Bagge, Charles Burns, Kaz, Kim Deitch, and Jay Lynch.

[9] Starting in 1998, and really intensely in the years 2000 to 2002, Peter Bagge did a number of comics journalism stories — on such topics as politics, the Miss America Pageant, bar culture, Christian rock, and the Oscars — mostly for Suck.com.

[16] Other digital magazines which focused on comics journalism during this period included Darryl Holliday & Erik Rodriguez' The Illustrated Press[17] and Josh Kramer's The Cartoon Picayune.

Jen Sorensen was editor of the "Graphic Culture" section of Splinter News (formerly Fusion) from 2014 to 2018, while Matt Bors edited the online comics collection The Nib from 2014[4] to 2023.

In 2017, it published "Welcome to the New World,"[20] by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan, chronicling a Syrian refugee family settling in the United States.

[9] Among the techniques he uses to protect his subjects — who are often survivors of conflict zones in the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia — are to change their names and use his art to anonymize their faces.