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Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism

By Chris O?Brien

Over the summer, I saw an incredibly exciting piece of visual journalism over at USA TODAY. The production involved a mash-up of sorts between one of USA TODAY's most popular bloggers (Pop Candy), Twitter, some comic book artists, and a nifty bit of flash animation.

You can check out the results here. The project was produced by three folks at USA TODAY: William Couch, an interactive multimedia designer; Ron Coddington, Art Director; and Frank Pompa, an online artist. Couch was kind enough to answer some questions I had through email about how this came together. I've included our exchange as a Q&A at the bottom of this post.

There are a couple of things that got me excited. First, I just find it visually engaging. Next, it involves some unusual sets of collaboration (are discussed in the Q&A) to produce something distinct. On a personal level, it warmed my heart that a "newspaper" was trying something this daring. On the whole, this is also a good reminder that innovation doesn't just have to be about embracing the new digital tools (though they played a big role in this case). It can also involve working with new people or groups that you don't usually collaborate with. And it can include finding new ways to tell stories that embrace older forms, such as comics.

Some folks may shrug, or dismiss it because it involves comics. But while I've never been much of a comic book reader myself, I've seen some amazing uses of the form to produce some really interesting journalism in recent years.

One of the most dramatic versions of this is a full-length, comic book documentary called "Palestine" by Joe Sacco. I saw Sacco speak a couple of years ago at the Nieman Narrative Conference in Boston. Essentially, he spent months in Israel and the West Bank trying to see first hand what was happening there. He then told his tale in comic form. It's powerful stuff.

More recently, there have been a couple of notable uses of comics to tell non-fiction stories. One was by The Globe and Mail in Toronto. They produced a full-page comic to explain the current fiscal crisis. I first saw this via Juan Giner's blog:

Another comic that got a lot of attention recently was one produced by Google to explain the technology behind its Chrome browser. The comic was produced by Scott McCloud:

But as with all new tools and innovations, one of the central questions people have to ask is how this possibly fits into all the other things they already have to do? How time consuming is it? What new skills are needed?

To understand that batter, I asked Couch to elaborate on how his Pop Candy project happened:

Q: Who is "Pop Candy"?

Couch: Pop Candy is a pop culture blog maintained by Whitney Matheson. It's one of our site's most popular blogs, and one that has very passionate and regular readers. Whitney often will often connect with her readers when she attends geek- and pop culture-related conferences, as she usually tries to organize meet-ups, or encourages her readers to meet-up with one another.

Q: Whose idea was this project?

Couch: Whitney was planning on having one of those meet-ups at this summer's Comic-Con conference, and she wanted to create something fun and exclusive for those who would come. Since she has quite a devoted following, many of whom are pop culture geeks, she thought she'd have some readers who also dabble in comic book drawing to illustrate some of her posts to Twitter (which she also frequently updates, both day-to-day and at conferences). She made a call out on her blog, got a lot of good responses, and chose a number of them to feature in a pocket-sized fold-out comic. She then came to a Life projects meeting to present the final product to see if there was something we could do online with it. Further, to maintain the exclusivity of the actual book she handed out, Whitney wanted to present the graphic in a way for her readers to view it, but not (easily) recreate it, so we considered an interactive Flash presentation.

Q: Who was involved in the execution and organization?

Couch: Earlier this year, I'd pointed out to Ron Coddington, our Art Director, the TiltViewer component from Airtight Interactive as a simple but engaging way to present images. Ron was quick to suggest we experiment with the component with this project. Frank Pompa, one of our online artists, worked on integrating the JPEGs from the comic (including the cover, by USA Today artist Keith Carter) and styling each card panel. Ron and I worked on adding the image overlays in the corners to give it some foundation and to subtly maintain the USA Today brand.

Q: Did you have to sell your bosses on the idea? And if so, how difficult was it?

Couch: The use of the TiltViewer technology was Ron's idea, so there was no need to sell him on that. As with all of our projects, we have to evaluate the amount of effort required to complete the project against the expected return (journalistic, branding, traffic, training, etc.) from it and others competing for our limited resources. In this case, we felt it was fast enough to do, helped with branding, gave us a chance to experiment with new technology and had traffic potential that it was worth doing, especially since we had some time before the next major project needed our attention.

Q: How did you build the actual site? How long did it take?

Couch: Again, we used the professional version of the Tiltviewer component (there's also a free version, with fewer customization options) from Airtight Interactive: . It's an XML-driven Flash piece that utilizes Papervision 3D to generate the 3D environment. We modified the styling of the graphic through custom variable assignments and again, added the image overlays. We probably spent 2 days on it, and that was among other projects, so not much time at all.

Me: What kind of reaction have you gotten at USA Today? Do you think this is a one off project, or are you hoping to use this technique in some other way?

Couch: Whitney received very good responses from her readers and the comic artists. A number of blogs picked up on the piece, including the prominent comic blog, Newsarama. Twitter also picked up on the piece -- one of its co-founders, Biz Stone posted a link to it on his Twitter account.

We'll likely consider using the component again, especially considering the quick deployment of the piece, but as with all projects, we'll be evaluating it on a case by case basis.

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on September 25, 2008 (boomark / email).