Authorship in Comics Journalism Laura Schlichting Authorship in Comics Journalism Laura Schlichting Authorship in Comics Journalism UVK Verlag · München Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Die vorliegende Publikation wurde am 15.12.2020 an der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen im Fachbereich „Sprache, Literatur, Kultur“ als Dissertation angenommen. Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften in Ingelheim am Rhein. © UVK Verlag 2021 - Ein Unternehmen der Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · 72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISBN 978-3-7398-3123-7 (Print) ISBN 978-3-7398-8123-2 (ePDF) Contents Acknowledgment 11 Abstract 13 Zusammenfassung: „Autorscha in Comic-Journalismus“ 15 1 Introduction: Comics, Journalism, and the Author 39 1.1 Comics Journalism and the Comics Journalist . . . . . . . . . 42 1.2 Hypotheses, Key Questions, and Aims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 1.3 Key Concepts and State of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 1.4 Corpus, Methodological Issues, and Outline . . . . . . . . . . . 55 2 Theoretical Premises and Generic Constituents of Comics Journalism 59 2.1 Changing Journalistic Field and Profession . . . . . . . . . . . 60 2.1.1 De ning Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 2.1.2 Topicality and Relevance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 2.1.3 Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 2.1.4 Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 2.1.5 List of Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 2.2 Representation of Facts: Accuracy and Imagination . . . . . . 78 2.2.1 Fake News and Alternative Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 2.2.2 Truth, Essential Truth, and Emotional Truth . . . . . . 84 2.2.3 Imagination and Informed Imagination . . . . . . . . . 86 2.2.4 Objectivity in Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 2.3 Narrative Mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 2.3.1 Author and Authorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 2.3.2 Reality Narrations and Reality References . . . . . . . 101 5 2.3.3 Mediated Authenticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 2.4 The Popularity of Drawing(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 2.5 In the Tradition of New Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 2.6 Classi cation Categories for Comics Journalism . . . . . . . . 120 2.6.1 Way and Medium of Publication . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 2.6.2 Duration of Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 2.6.3 A Combination of Journalistic Genres . . . . . . . . . 142 3 The Author in the Storyworld: The ‘Comics Journalistic Pact’ 151 3.1 Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 3.1.1 Voice-Giving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 3.1.2 Narrative Mediation in Comics Journalism . . . . . . . 161 3.1.3 First-Person Narration vs. Neutral Documentary-Like Narration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 3.1.4 Metaization and Self-Referentiality in Comics Journalism 181 3.2 Face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 3.2.1 The Role of Witnessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 3.2.2 The Relationship between Autobiography and Comics Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 3.2.3 Visual Self-Re ection and the ‘Cartoon-Me’ . . . . . . 207 3.2.4 The Challenge of Collaborative Authorship . . . . . . 224 4 The Author in the Extratextual World 227 4.1 Hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 4.1.1 The Comics Journalist as a Handicraftswoman . . . . 230 4.1.2 The Comics Journalist as a Messenger . . . . . . . . . 247 4.1.3 The Comics Journalist as an Engaged Person . . . . . 255 4.2 Practices of Authorship in Comics Journalism . . . . . . . . . 283 4.2.1 Staging of the Authorship? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 4.2.2 Phases and Methods of Working . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 4.2.3 Formal Aspects of Practicing Comics Journalism . . . 299 4.3 The Use of Social Media in Comics Journalism . . . . . . . . . 315 4.3.1 Announcement, Advertisement, and Distribution . . . 317 4.3.2 The Importance of Networks, Brands, and Styles . . . 321 5 Conclusion and Outlook: Authorship Ma ers in Comics Journalism 333 5.1 ‘The Comics Journalistic Pact’ Refers to Voice, Face, and Hands 337 5.2 Limitations and Further Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Works Cited 357 6 List of Figures 0.1 Übersicht über journalistische Darstellungsformen, aus denen sich spezi sche Merkmale für Comic-Journalismus ableiten lassen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 0.2 Klassi kation der narrativen Situationen anhand der diskutierten Primärwerke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 0.3 Modell der erzählerischen Vermittlung im Comic-Journalismus 30 0.4 Die verschiedenen Ebenen des Engagements des Autors . . . . 31 1.1 Screenshot, “I’m a Comics Journalist” (Neufeld, Adventures in Comics Journalism n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 1.2 Page, David Axe Is a Journalist but Not a Comics Journalist ( War Is Boring 5) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 2.1 Page, “What is Journalism? ” ( Rolling Blackouts 296) . . . . . . 63 2.2 Page Excerpt, Walter Lippmann ( The In uencing Machine 101) 83 2.3 Page Excerpt, Three Apes ( The In uencing Machine 110) . . . 89 2.4 Excerpt, “Objectivity Is Impossible” ( The In uencing Machine 95) 93 2.5 Page Excerpt, “Words [A]re [. . . ] [A]bstract [I]cons” ( Understanding Comics 28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 2.6 Page Excerpt, “[A]mpli cation through [S]impli cation” ( Understanding Comics 30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 2.7 Page Excerpt, “What [A]re [Y]ou [R]eally [S]eeing? ” ( Understanding Comics 31) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 2.8 Screenshot ( Inside Death Row n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 2.9 Page Excerpt, Schwerter Zeitung, Ruhr-Nachrichten (Lensing- Wol et al. n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 2.10 Screenshot, “Graphic Recording Scribbles” (Edely n. pag.) . . . 134 7 2.11 “Early January 2017 Simmozheim” ( Escaping Wars and Waves 76) 136 2.12 Facebook Posts by Dan Archer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 2.13 Overview of the Dimensions of Journalistic Forms of Representation (Neuberger and Kapern 44) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 2.14 Overview of the Main Features of Comics Journalism . . . . . 148 3.1 Screenshot, Inmate Art “Windows on Death Row” (Hromadka et al. n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 3.2 Model of Narrative Communication in Comics Journalism . . 168 3.3 Page Excerpt, Asset Narrates ( Journalism 41) . . . . . . . . . . 170 3.4 Splash Page, Left Part ( Threads 140) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 3.5 Splash Page, Right Part ( Threads 141) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 3.6 Page Excerpt, “Freetown, Sierra Leone, 23. Februar” ( Freetown ) 174 3.7 Screenshot, Start Screen ( NSS n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 3.8 Screenshot, A Google Map and a Timeline ( NSS n. pag.) . . . . 177 3.9 Screenshot, The Perspective of Iraqi Police O cials at 12: 24 p.m. ( NSS n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 3.10 Screenshot, The Perspective of the Civilians ( NSS n. pag.) . . . 178 3.11 Screenshot, The Perspective of the Blackwater Guards at 12: 24 p.m. ( NSS n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 3.12 Classi cation of Narrative Situations with Examples . . . . . . 180 3.13 Page, Sarah Glidden Working on Her Project ( RB 297) . . . . . 184 3.14 Screenshot, “Die Zeit für eine Zeichnung” Part I/ IV ( Die Zeichnungen von Nicolas Wild n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 3.15 Screenshot, “Die Zeit für eine Zeichnung” Part IV/ IV ( Die Zeichnung von Nicolas Wild n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 3.16 Screenshot, Start Screen ( FF n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 3.17 Page Exerpt, Fieldwork ( Europe’s Waiting Room: Visiting the Refugees on Lesbos n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 3.18 Compilation of Joe Sacco’s Body Postures . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 3.19 Sarah Glidden’s Change of Her ‘Cartoon-Me’ . . . . . . . . . . 213 3.20 Scott McCloud’s ‘Cartoon-Me’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 3.21 Page Excerpt, Sarah Glidden and Sarah Stuteville ( RB 20) . . . 216 3.22 Page Excerpt, “I’m a [B]ouncer” ( Threads 90) . . . . . . . . . . 220 3.23 Page, “It’s not a [S]tory” ( Threads 138) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 3.24 Page, “It’s not a [S]tory” ( Threads 139) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 4.1 Right Part of the Splash Page, “1st October 2015” ( Threads 7) . 231 4.2 Friday Press Brie ng at the White House by Bill Hennessy (Stelter n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 8 4.3 Screenshot, A View into Hassan’s Tent ( Kawergosk - 5 Sterne n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 4.4 Page Excerpt, Two Dead Men ( War Is Boring 66) . . . . . . . . 238 4.5 Screenshot, The Jewelers at the Camp ( Beldangi n. pag.) . . . . 239 4.6 Screenshot, The Repair Shop ( Beldangi n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . 240 4.7 Page, Refugees’ Protest by Stitching up Their Mouths ( Threads 158) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 4.8 Page, Imitation of a Photograph Shown on a Smartphone ( Threads 108) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 4.9 Page, Imitation of a Video Shown on a Smartphone ( Threads 156) 244 4.10 Page, Imitation of a Video Shown on a Smartphone ( Threads 156) 245 4.11 The Camera as a ‘Weapon’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 4.12 Page, “Home” ( Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos n. pag.) . . . . . . . . 249 4.13 Page Excerpt, “No, I [D]on’t [W]ant [Y]our [M]oney” ( Journalism 59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 4.14 Page Excerpt, “I’ve [K]icked a [H]ornet’s [N]est” ( Journalism 142) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 4.15 The Author’s Di erent Levels of Engagement . . . . . . . . . 259 4.16 Page Excerpt, Evans Is Portraying Refugees ( Threads 76) . . . 262 4.17 Page Excerpt, Looking over the Author’s Shoulder ( Threads 78) 263 4.18 Page, Handing Over of the Portrait ( Threads 77) . . . . . . . . 264 4.19 Page, Portrait Study of an Afghan Kid ( Threads 106) . . . . . . 265 4.20 Page, Interview with Dan ( Rolling Blackouts 35) . . . . . . . . 267 4.21 Page, Verifying Her Drawn Portrait with a Photograph ( Threads 113) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 4.22 Page Excerpt, Children Draw Reinhard Kleist ( Kawergosk - 5 Stars n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 4.23 Page Excerpt, Art Workshop with Children ( Beldangi n. pag.) . 273 4.24 Page, Leisure Time at the Jungle’s Art Dome ( Threads 162) . . 274 4.25 Page, Flying Mannequins at the Camp in Calais ( Threads 167) 275 4.26 Screenshot, “History is Happening: Four Cartoonists on Organizing and Activism,” Third Part by Roxanne Palmer (Palmer and Taylor n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 4.27 Screenshot, “History is Happening: Four Cartoonists on Organizing and Activism,” Fourth Part by Whit Taylor (Palmer and Taylor n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 4.28 Engagement of Comics Journalists in the “Women’s March 2017” 280 4.29 Page Excerpt, “[W]ould [Y]ou [T]rust [T]hem [M]ore [. . . ]? ” ( The In uencing Machine 112) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 4.30 Page, “Transparency [I]s the [N]ew [O]bjectivity” ( The In uencing Machine 113) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 9 4.31 Page Excerpt, “[I]s [T]hat [T]oo [M]uch [I]nformation? ” ( The In uencing Machine 111) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 4.32 Screenshot, Building Comics (Lefeuvre n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . 292 4.33 Collage, Insights into Felix Schaad’s Sketchbook (Schaad, “Die Comic-Zeichnung aus der Todeszone”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 4.34 Screenshot, Sarah Glidden Asks the Crowd for Advice (Glidden, “Keeping research organized”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 4.35 Page Excerpt, Quote by Richard Morgan (Cagle, “Eight Years of Solitude” n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 4.36 Screenshot, Caricature in The New York Times ’ International Edition on 25 April 2019 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 4.37 Screenshot, “Horror Movies for Freelancers” (Correll n. pag.) . 310 4.38 Page Excerpt, New Channels of Distribution ( Proud of You Burundian Journalist n. pag.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 4.39 Screenshot, Sketch vs. Final Drawing by Aimee de Jongh (de Jongh, “Sketch versus Final Drawing”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 4.40 Screenshot, Sarah Glidden Announces and Promotes Her Workshop on Comics Journalism (Glidden, “Comics Slideshow”) . . 319 4.41 Screenshot, Josh Neufeld Publishes His Drafts (Neufeld, “Preparing #2020Census ”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320 4.42 Screenshot, Kate Evans Begs Her Followers to Spread Her Name (Evans, “Begging for Sharing”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 4.43 Screenshot, Dan Archer Retweets a Post by Empathetic Media on Immersion (Archer, “Proud to Contibute to Immerse ”) . . . 322 4.44 Page Excerpt, Drawing Style and Color ( Rolling Blackouts 56) . 328 4.45 Page, Drawing Style and Color ( Threads 133) . . . . . . . . . . 329 5.1 Page Excerpt, “So [N]ow [W]hat? ” ( Rolling Blackouts 289) . . . 333 5.2 Model of Narrative Communication in Comics Journalism . . 341 5.3 Classi cation of Narrative Situations with Examples . . . . . . 343 5.4 The Author’s Di erent Levels of Engagement . . . . . . . . . 346 10 Acknowledgments Comics journalism is proliferating basically all over the world, but I was never one of those people who regularly read comics during their childhood, though. My attitude towards comics suddenly changed when I came across the book The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders (2009). Since then, I have been interested in how comics work as non ction and how a medium can provoke questions about the boundaries between fact and ction. Moreover, I have always been thrilled by journalism and storytelling. I started wondering why people are in discomfort with a drawing as a possibly real or non ctional system of communication. This made me all the more curious to work with the combination of literature, art, culture, and journalism. As a result, I handed in this book as a dissertation at Justus Liebig University Giessen in June 2020, and successfully defended it six month later. Many kind people have guided, supported, changed, and challenged me during my academic years. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Prof. Dr. em. Wolfgang Hallet ( JLU Giessen) and Prof. Dr. Wibke Weber (Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland) for their continuous support, advice, and valuable feedback. I owe gratitude to the International Ph.D. Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) of the International Centre for the Study of Culture for travel funding and the funding of the native-speaker copy-editing of this study, especially Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning and Dr. Elizabeth Kovach. Also, I want to thank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation which has nanced me during my entire doctorate period. Additionally, I am very happy and thankful to announce that this book has been printed with the kind support of Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften. Moreover, I thank UVK for the opportunity to publish, especially Uta Preimesser for the pleasant cooperation. 11 I am grateful for having bene ted from conversations with my colleague Dr. Johannes C. P. Schmid (University of Flensburg), with whom I organized the conference on non ction comics entitled “Graphic Realities” in 2018. In addition, I am indebted to the working group on comics studies of the German Association for Media Studies, and the German Society of Comics Studies (“ComFor”), in particular, to Dr. Véronique Sina (University of Mainz). Moreover, I am highly indebted to Dr. Alexander Matschi from “Lektorat & Übersetzung Matschi,” to the Wagner-August family (Giessen), and to my friends Martina Barthel (Wiesbaden) and Dr. Anna Lena Weigel-Heller (Giessen). I am grateful to all comics journalists whom I have come across during this study and who opened my mind tremendously, among others, Dan Archer, Patrick Chappatte, Sarah Glidden, Kate Evans, Aimeé de Jongh, Olivier Kugler, Josh Neufeld, and Joe Sacco. They made me realize that striving for truth and raising one’s voice has become more important than ever before. I could not have written the book without my loved ones who have supported me from the very beginning in every possible way. Thanks for always trusting and believing in me: my lovely parents Anke and Thomas Seifert, and my brother Lukas. Above all, I am not only a researcher but also a wife and a mother. My husband André has been my most conscientious critic during the process of writing and I will never forget his persistent and continuous support with the technical editing. This dissertation would not have been the same without his extremely helpful expertise. Last, and de nitely not least, my dear children, you are the center of my universe. I love you! Gießen/ Münster im Sommer 2021 12 Abstract Comics journalism not only expands the borders between literature and journalism but also changes the traditional notion of authorship. More and more twenty rst-century journalists and cartoonists explore and play with the potential of visual storytelling in sequential art by drawing on journalistic techniques and methods. Comics journalism can be de ned as a genre using drawn fact-based narrations of reality, acknowledging “essential truth,” and the impossibility of full objective reporting. This study on “Authorship in Comics Journalism” gives a broad and extensive overview of the manifold forms of contemporary comics journalism by highlighting the special and outstanding role of the author. It argues that authorship in comics journalism can only be understood properly by considering the author both on the textual and extratextual level. By bringing together literary, media, and communication studies, and combining comics analyses with cultural, sociological, and literary studies approaches, I eventually introduce the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ which is an invisible agreement between author and reader, addressing issues of narration (‘voice’), testimony (‘face’), and journalistic engagement (‘hands’). Close readings of exemplary works by Dan Archer, Kate Evans, Sarah Glidden, Reinhard Kleist, Olivier Kugler, Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, and Nicolas Wild, to name but a few, show that comics journalism is not restricted in its content and form. However, although their styles di er, all of the authors practice a strong and self-determined authorship, follow the journalistic techniques of investigation, stick to accuracy, and work with the Internet that ful ls several important functions in comics journalism. Because literature and journalism deal di erently with the concepts of the author as someone who narrates, and someone who creates a piece of comics journalism, this study renegotiates the concept of “authorship,” especially with regard to means that prove the person’s authenticity, and that verify the production process in comics journalism. Elaborating on genre characteristics, this study also proposes categorizing comics journalism both as a borderline genre between literature, art, and a serious medium of information gathering in the contemporary journalistic eld. 13 Deutsche Zusammenfassung Comic-Journalismus polarisiert durch seinen Umgang mit der Darstellung von journalistischen Fakten im ktionalen Medium des Comics. Comic-Journalismus ist nicht als Journalismus über Comics zu de nieren, sondern als ein neuartiges Genre und Phänomen an den Grenzen zur Literatur, Kultur, Kunst und Journalismus. Comic-Journalismus verbindet journalistische Methoden, Techniken und moralisch-ethische Regeln mit den Eigenschaften und Vorzügen des Comics, um berichtenswerte und relevante Sachgeschichten zu produzieren. Insbesondere stellt Comic-Journalismus bisher akzeptierte literarische De nitionen von Konzepten wie „Autor“ 1 und „Autorschaft“ in Frage und revolutioniert somit das bisherige Verständnis von Journalismus, insbesondere wie Journalismus gemacht wird und in welcher Form journalistische Fakten dargestellt werden können. Die vorliegende Studie hat sich deshalb zum Ziel gesetzt, einen Ansatz zu entwickeln, der Antworten darauf geben soll, wie die Konzepte von „Autorschaft“ und „Autor“ im Comic-Journalismus dargestellt werden und welche Funktionen des Autors identi ziert werden können. In der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts hat sich die für lange Zeit umstrittene Trennlinie zwischen reiner Nachrichtenberichterstattung und dem Schreiben von Meinungen spürbar verändert (vgl. Worcester 138). Immer häu- ger experimentieren Journalisten und Schriftsteller mit unterschiedlichen Ansätzen, um Informationen zu vermitteln: Literatur benutzt Ergebnisse von dokumentarischen Recherchen und journalistisch aufgearbeiteten Sto en; Journalismus wiederum bedient sich narrativer Elemente, insbesondere des „storytelling“, um Reportagen für die Leser erlebbar zu machen und den Sto interessant zu vermitteln. Diese Studie richtet sich daher an alle, die an einer alternativen Lesart von faktenbasierter Informationen in einem ktionalen 1 Die vorliegende Zusammenfassung verwendet das generische Maskulinum, bezeichnet darunter jedoch alle Scha ende (m/ w/ d). 15 Medium interessiert sind. In jedem Fall sind Comic-Journalismus und die drängenden Fragen nach Wahrheitsgehalt, Faktentreue sowie autorialer Subjektivität in einem Zeitalter, das einen Weg nden muss mit „technisch leicht zu manipulierenden Nachrichten“—unabhängig vom Medium—umzugehen, von hoher Relevanz. Die Arbeit behandelt Comic-Journalismus als Genre, das die Grenzen zwischen einst getrennten Systemen von Literatur und Journalismus aufhebt. Die Hauptthese ist, dass Autorschaft im Comic-Journalismus unterschiedlich verhandelt wird. Insbesondere dem Autor wird eine sehr wichtige, gar essenzielle Bedeutung zugeschrieben, weil in der Journalistik, im Gegensatz zur Literaturwissenschaft, nicht zwischen dem Erzähler und dem Autor unterschieden wird. Dies ist zugleich der entscheidende Ausgangspunkt, von dem aus ich die Analyse von Comic-Journalismus beginne. Aus diesem Grund habe ich auch den literarischen Begri des „Autors“ neu verhandelt. Zudem plädiere ich für die Akzeptanz von Comic-Journalismus als seriöse und ernst zu nehmende Form der journalistischen Berichterstattung. Im Theorieteil (siehe Kapitel 2) diskutiere ich fünf mögliche Gründe, die meines Erachtens zum Bekanntwerden und Erstarken von Comic-Journalismus verantwortlich sind. Des Weiteren stelle ich in Kapitel 2.6 Möglichkeiten zur Kategorisierung von Comic-Journalismus vor. Um die vielfältigen Rollen des Autors und seiner Autorschaft herauszuarbeiten, berücksichtige ich die texttuelle und die extratextuelle Ebene. Um sich Comic-Journalismus anzunähern, habe ich den ‚comic-journalistischen Pakt‘ entwickelt, der aus drei Teilen besteht—Stimme, Gesicht (beides Kapitel 3) und Hände (Kapitel 4). Dieser wird zwischen dem Autor und dem Rezipienten abgeschlossen. Folglich erfordert der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ einerseits eine bestimmte Schreibweise. Der Autor verwendet verschiedene Methoden, um Glaubwürdigkeit zu demonstrieren und Fakten zu veri zieren. Andererseits erfordert der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ auch eine bestimmte Leseart und Haltung des Lesers, um diese genrespezi schen Ansprüche zu akzeptieren. Daher ist der Pakt so zu lesen, dass das, was der Comic-Journalist erzählt, bezeugt, erlebt und darstellt, auch wahr ist und wirklich stattgefunden hat. Hypothesen, Kernfragen und Ziele der Arbeit Erstens, Comic-Journalismus ist ein Genre. Wie alle Genres ist auch er einem historischen und kulturellen Wandel sowie diskursiven Verhandlungen unterworfen. Die allgemeinen Grenzen sind ießend und können sich im Laufe der Zeit ändern, denn die Merkmale eines Genres werden diskursiv verhandelt und sind nicht statisch. Unter der Voraussetzung, dass Comics, die nach den Standards und ethischen Regeln des Journalismus produziert werden, ihren Anspruch auf Genauigkeit und Vertrauenswürdigkeit hervorheben, stellt das Medium an sich diese Ansprüche und alle Versprechen des Autors in Frage. Der Autor und sein Umgang 16 mit dem Produktionsprozess muss dann notwendigerweise eine bedeutendere Rolle übernehmen und seine Methoden o enlegen anhand derer er sich bei der Recherche und dem Schreiben orientiert. Strategien, die zur Authenti zierung des Wahrheitsgehalts des Autors dienen, sind dann unabkömmlich. Zweitens, Comic-Journalismus zeichnet sich durch eine von dem Autor beabsichtigte Subjektivität aus. Die bildbezogene Selbstthematisierung ist ein zentrales Muster der postmodernen Gesellschaft. Visuelle Medien beein ussen und verändern uns. In einer diachronen historischen Perspektive wird die Zeichnung, die früher das Standardverfahren zur Illustration von Informationen war, zum ‚neuen alten‘ Trend. Die Spur des handgemachten und gezeichneten Comics ist an sich schon eine persönliche Aussage. In der Folge bedeutet dies, dass eine neue Art von Journalismus die Illusion eines objektiven Journalismus durch einen Journalismus, der von Haltung und Persönlichkeit geprägt ist, ersetzt. Die weithin akzeptierte Annahme der Entpersonalisierung durch ein Medium gilt somit nicht für den Comic-Journalismus. Drittens, Comic-Journalismus zeichnet sich auf textueller Ebene durch eine au ällige Überschneidung zwischen den Konzepten von „Autor“, „Erzähler“ und „Figur“ aus und verbindet drei analytische Ebenen zu einer. Der Erzähler, der bisher eine streng textuelle Kategorie bildete, kann nun nicht mehr eindeutig vom Autor unterschieden werden. Dies unterstreicht die Annahme, dass eine Annäherung an das Genre nur durch einen personenbezogenen, nämlich autorzentrierten Ansatz möglich ist. Daher werden die Möglichkeiten der erzählerischen Vermittlung für Comic-Journalismus an bisherige Theorien angepasst und neu verhandelt, um die Konzepte des Autors und des Erzählers richtig einzubeziehen. Comic-Journalismus wird folglich als ein neuartiges Grenzphänomen angesehen, das zwischen Kunst, Literatur und Journalismus oszilliert und sich nicht eindeutig einem System zuordnen lässt. Eine Verschiebung der Grenzen zwischen dem literarischen und dem journalistischen Bereich, insbesondere bezüglich der Autorschaft, ist somit notwendig. Viertens, Comic-Journalisten halten die Bedeutung journalistischer Standardmodelle für die Nachrichtenberichterstattung hoch, aber sie setzen auch auf eine subjektivere Form der Vermittlung, die es ihnen erlaubt, mächtigen Institutionen gegenüber kritischer zu sein und ihren eigenen Produktionsprozess transparenter zu gestalten. „Wenn Objektivität bedeutet, der Wahrheit gerecht zu werden und Fakten genau zu berichten,“ so Wibke Weber und Hans-Martin Rall, „dann streben Comic-Journalisten nach Objektivität. Wenn Objektivität bedeutet, unvoreingenommen und unparteiisch zu sein, dann erfüllt der Comic- Journalismus dieses Kriterium nicht“ (Weber und H. - M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 3, meine Übersetzung). Viele Autoren stehen zu ihrer Meinung und versuchen, über das, was sie mit ihren eigenen Augen gesehen haben, zu re ektieren. Infolgedessen muss es eine Übersetzung zwischen dem, 17 was gesehen wurde, und dem, was gezeichnet wird, geben, weil dieser Bruch in erster Linie durch die zeitliche Verzögerung zwischen dem Erleben und dem Schreiben/ Zeichnen des Comic-Journalismus verursacht wird. Daher muss die prozessorientierte Seite des Nachrichtenmachens Strategien der Veri zierung und Authenti zierung entwickeln, um einen intersubjektiv nachvollziehbaren Prozess bis zum fertigen Endprodukt o enzulegen. Fünftens, die Rolle des Lesers ist für das Verständnis von Comic-Journalismus von zentraler Bedeutung. Die Form des Comics ermöglicht eine einzigartige Darstellung mehrerer, jedoch gleichzeitig statt ndender Zeitebenen und Seh-, Wissens-, und Ereignisweisen. Scott McCloud zum Beispiel, der inzwischen als „Großvater der Comics“ (McCloud, “An Interview with Scott McCloud” n. pag.) bezeichnet wird, hat den Begri „closure“ geprägt. Dieser beschreibt den Akt des Lesers, die Lücken zwischen den einzelnen „panels“ im „gutter“ gedanklich auszufüllen, um so die Handlung und Bedeutung zwischen zwei Bildausschnitten nachzuvollziehen. Das „gutter“ ist auch das Herzstück von Comics, denn der Leser muss mittels seiner Vorstellungskraft zwei getrennte Bilder synthetisieren und zu einer Idee transformieren (cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics 66). Somit erfordern Comics eine größere Beteiligung der Rezipienten als in traditionellen Prosatexten (vgl. Eisner 148). Vor diesem Hintergrund verfolge ich drei Hauptziele: Erstens soll diese Arbeit einen Überblick über die zahlreichen Formen des zeitgenössischen Comic-Journalismus geben und die einzigartige Rolle des Autors und seiner Autorschaft sowohl auf textimmanenter Ebene als auch auf extratextueller Ebene herausarbeiten. Zweitens, da es für dieses relativ junge Forschungsgebiet bisher wenig bis keine analytischen Kategorien gibt, entwickle ich verschiedene Möglichkeiten der Kategorisierung, die helfen, das Phänomen des Comic- Journalismus zu systematisieren. Drittens plädiere ich unter Berücksichtigung der textuellen und der extratextuellen Ebene für eine Neuverhandlung des literarischen „Autor“-Begri s und fordere im Gegenzug die Akzeptanz des Comic-Journalismus als seriöse Form der Berichterstattung. Basierend aus den eben skizzierten Erläuterungen ergeben sich folgende Forschungsfragen: • Wie wird die Autorschaft im Comic-Journalismus dargestellt? • Was ist die Rolle des Autors? • Inwieweit ist es hilfreich, sich Comic-Journalismus mit der Kategorie des Autors zu nähern? • Wie verhandelt der Autor im Comic-Journalismus sachliche Berichterstattung, inhaltliche Erzählung und einen individuellen künstlerischen Präsentationsstil? • Inwieweit kann man von einer Fiktionalisierung im Comic-Journalismus trotz seines Anspruchs auf Faktizität sprechen? 18 Methodik, Schlüsselkonzepte und aktueller Forschungsstand Um die große Vielfalt des Comic-Journalismus in seiner ganzen Komplexität zu analysieren, habe ich einen „bottom-up“-Ansatz gewählt und zunächst alle Veröffentlichungen von nicht ktionalen Comics ( non ctional comics ) angeschaut, um sie einzuordnen. Auch wenn Comic-Journalismus allein in den letzten fünf Jahren einen enormen Aufschwung erlebt hat, bleiben Werke dieser Art eine Randerscheinung innerhalb der Mainstream-Nachrichtenkultur. Trotzdessen, dass Comics in der Gesellschaft o enbar eine größere Akzeptanz gefunden haben und trotzdessen, dass eine positive Entwicklung für die Zukunft zu erkennen ist, sind vor allem deutschsprachige Publikationen in einem von der englischen Sprache dominierten Korpus selten zu nden. Der Korpus dieser Studie besteht aus Werken, die alle nach 2010 verö entlicht wurden. Dies sind u.a. “Inside Death Row” von Patrick Chappatte, Threads von Kate Evans, Rolling Blackouts von Sarah Glidden, Journalism von Joe Sacco, Escaping Wars and Waves von Olivier Kugler, “Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos” von Judith Vanistendael, A.D. von Josh Neufeld, “Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room” von Aimee de Jongh, “The Michael Brown Shooting: Choose Your Eyewitness” und “NSS” von Dan Archer, The In uencing Machine von Brooke Gladstone und Josh Neufeld sowie das „Refugee“-Projekt von ARTE, u.a. mit Reinhard Kleist und Nicolas Wild. Darüber hinaus betrachte ich für die Analysen auch die extratextuelle Welt des Autors, indem ich vor allem seine Webseiten und Social-Media-Auftritte verfolgt habe, hier insbesondere Facebook, Twitter und Instagram. So zeigt sich, dass der Autor und sein Umgang mit Autorschaft, insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Recherche, Produktion und Verbreitung seiner Werke, das einzigartige Merkmal des Comic-Journalismus ist. Darüber hinaus habe ich textzentrierte mit intermedialen (Rippl; Schwanecke; Wolf), journalistischen (Downie und Schudson, Kovach und Rosenstiel; Lö elholz; Meier; Neuberger und Kapern; Weischenberg), kulturorientierten (Assmann) und soziologischen Ansätzen (Go man; Emcke) kombiniert. Um den ‚comic-journalistischen Pakt‘ zu etablieren, habe ich Lejeunes Konzept des „autobiographischen Pakts“ modi ziert und Kleins und Martínez’ Konzeptualisierung über „Wirklichkeitserzählungen“ angewandt. Als hybrides Phänomen an der Schnittstelle von Literatur, Kunst und Journalismus weist der Comic-Journalismus Ähnlichkeiten mit dem „New Journalism“, der in Amerika in den 1960e/ 70er Jahren entstand, auf (Bleicher und Pörksen; Wolfe). Darüber hinaus habe ich das Modell der journalistischen Darstellungsformen von Neuberger und Kapern übernommen und für meine Zwecke angepasst, um das zu entwickeln, was ich die ‚Merkmale des Comic-Journalismus‘ nenne. Diese ergeben sich aus den individuellen Charakteristika der journalistischen 19 Textsorten und sind Bericht, Feature, Reportage sowie visueller und verbaler Kommentar (siehe Kap. 2.6.3). Für die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Begri des „Autors“ habe ich vor allem mit Jannidis, Lauer, Martínez und Winko, seitens der Comic-Theorie mit Abel, Klein; Grünewald; Hescher; Kukkonen und Schüwer gearbeitet. Unterstützend kamen Theorien der narrativen Medialisierung und Fokalisierung (Genette; Nünning, Nünning; Thon), der Okularisierung und Monstration (Groensteen; Thon) sowie der Zeugenschaft (Krämer, Schmidt, Schülein; Emcke) zu Hilfe. Für eine Klassi zierung des Comic-Journalismus habe ich Levines Gedanken zu „Formen“ genutzt. Weitere Ein üsse über Comic-Journalismus basieren auf den Forschungsarbeiten von Chute, Ludewig, Mickwitz, Schmid sowie Weber und Rall. Darüber hinaus habe ich mit comic-journalistischen Texten selbst als Sekundärquellen gearbeitet, weil sie Elemente enthalten, die für meine Studie ebenso relevant und wissenschaftlich-interessant sind wie die traditionelle Sekundärliteratur. Beispiele, die in dieser Weise einzigartig sind, sind The Inuencing Machine , Understanding Comics , Reinventing Comics und Teile von Rolling Blackouts , ebenso wie ausgewählte Werke von Dan Archer, Susie Cagle, Gemma Corell und Josh Neufeld. Auf diese Weise versuche ich, meinen Beitrag zur ernsthaften Behandlung von nicht ktionalen Comics zu leisten und sie für eine akademische Nutzung heranzuführen. Theoretische Prämissen: Fünf Gründe für das Erstarken von Comic-Journalismus Mein theoretisches Kapitel besteht aus insgesamt sechs Teilen, von denen ich in den ersten fünf Sektionen potenzielle Gründe betrachte, die zum Aufstieg des Comic-Journalismus beigetragen haben. Dazu zähle ich ein sich wandelndes journalistisches Feld und die damit verbundenen beru ichen Anforderungen (vgl. Kapitel 2.1), die mediale Darstellung und Aufbereitung von „essenzieller Wahrheit“, Objektivität und Fakten (vgl. Kapitel 2.2), die narrative Vermittlung in den Nachrichten und ihre scheinbar vermittelte Authentizität (cf. Enli; vgl. Kapitel 2.3), die zunehmende Popularität von Zeichnungen (vgl. Kapitel 2.4); sowie der Wandel von Genres, der hybride Formen wie z.B. den New Journalism hervorbringt (vgl. Kapitel 2.5 ). Erstens, der Bereich des traditionellen Journalismus, insbesondere der Printformen, ist massiven Veränderungen unterworfen. Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig und bedingen sich oft gegenseitig. Zum Beispiel hat der wirtschaftliche Druck zu Kostensenkungen beim Personal und technischer Ausrüstung geführt, was in der Folge viele (kleine) Medienhäuser zu Einsparungen gezwungen hat. Dadurch muss am Personal gespart werden, was jedoch wiederum das Risiko des Verlusts von Qualitätsjournalismus birgt. Auch das Internet und 20 die Digitalisierung stellen bisherige Modelle des Journalismus vor massive Herausforderungen. Zweitens, die traditionelle Unterscheidung zwischen der Welt der Fakten und dem Bereich der ktionalen Literatur ist nicht mehr als selbstverständlich anzusehen. Die Darstellung von Fakten muss durch ihre Fülle an Informationen und die elektronische Verbreitung schnell analysiert und auf Echtheit und Korrektheit überprüft werden, um gegebenenfalls zeitnah gegen gefälschte Nachrichten vorgehen zu können. Der Grad der Manipulation von Fakten und die vermeintliche Überlegenheit des Mediums der Fotogra e gegenüber der Zeichnung führen mich zu der Prämisse, dass ein gewisses Maß an Pragmatismus im Umgang mit der medialen Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit erforderlich ist. Weil Medien manipulierbar sind, können Geschichten und Informationen, die auf Wahrheit basieren, nur dann erfolgreich sein, wenn die Rezipientin im Comic-Journalismus keine wörtliche Wahrheit und hundertprozentige Objektivität erwartet, stattdessen sind die Darstellung von den wichtigsten Kernfakten und eine größere persönliche Perspektivierung des Autors Kernprämissen des Comic-Journalismus. Drittens, der Aufstieg der Hybridisierung von Genres wird oft mit der Krise der Nachrichtenorganisationen, der sich überschneidenden globalen sozioökonomischen Krise und dem technologischen Fortschritt in Verbindung gebracht. Technische, wirtschaftliche, politische und soziale Innovationen im Informations- und Kommunikationssektor führen zu weitreichenden strukturellen Veränderungen im Mediensystem. Diese Entwicklung beein usst auch die Funktionalität der Medien und das Vertrauen in sie. Der Großteil der Bevölkerung erhält Informationen auf vermittelte Weise, die unsere primäre Quelle des Wissens über das, was in der Welt geschieht, ist. In diesem Zusammenhang stellt sich die Frage, wie Journalismus und Literatur mit den Begri en „Erzähler“ und „Autor“ umgehen. Während der Journalismus nicht in Frage stellt, dass die Person, die den Text recherchiert und geschrieben hat, auch der Autor ist, unterscheidet die Literatur zwischen genau diesen beiden analytischen Ebenen, was meiner Hypothese der Fokussierung auf den Autor und seiner Art von Autorschaft im Comic-Journalismus Rechnung tragen muss. Viertens, das Zeichnen in unserer Gesellschaft gewinnt immer mehr an Bedeutung und entwickelt sich zu einer vergnüglichen Freizeitbeschäftigung mit Entspannnungsmodus. Zeichnungen sind für Comics das, was das Herz für den menschlichen Körper ist. Die Zeichnung als eine der ältesten menschlichen Ausdrucksformen und eine Form der visuellen Kommunikation ist somit die Grundlage des Comics. Die Abstraktion und Reduktion der visuellen Information auf das Wesentliche stellt eine bedeutende geistige Leistung dar, die in der Comic-Forschung noch stärker zum Tragen kommen muss. Für den Journalismus gilt, dass die zentrale Frage, die bis heute diskutiert wird, die ist, 21 ob der Journalismus die Komplexität der Welt reduzieren kann, während er rein beschreibend bleibt, oder ob er eine eigene Realität konstruiert. Ähnlich dazu bietet auch die Zeichnung aufgrund ihrer verschiedenen Abstraktionsebenen die Möglichkeit, komplizierte Sachverhalte deutlicher, verständlicher und zugänglicher zu machen als manch reiner Text es könnte. Fünftens haben wir es in unserer Kultur mit einer zunehmenden Überschneidung zwischen einst unterschiedlichen Systemen zu tun—die Literarisierung des Journalismus und die zunehmende Versachlichung der Literatur (je nach Genre) sind keine Ausnahmen von diesem Trend. Die Erweiterung der De nition von Literatur und Journalismus hat daher unmittelbare Konsequenzen. Die Grenzen zwischen Fakt und Fiktion beginnen sich aufzulösen. Historisch gesehen ist diese Unschärfe kein neues Phänomen, denn ein Genre zwischen Literatur und Journalismus hat bereits in den 1970er Jahren in den USA bestanden und zog unter der Bewegung des „New Journalism“ die Aufmerksamkeit auf sich. Aufgrund vieler Ähnlichkeiten argumentiert diese Studie, dass der Comic-Journalismus in Tradition des New Journalism steht, denn einige seiner wesentlichen Merkmale lassen sich auch im Comic-Journalismus identi zieren. Dazu gehören u.a. die Konzentration auf das Narrative, dass Emotionen und Intuitionen des Autors erlaubt sind, und dass das Leben von Menschen anstelle der Beschreibung von Dingen beleuchtet wird. Darüber hinaus wirft diese literarische Bewegung erkenntnistheoretische Fragen der Objektivität und Wahrheit im journalistischen Bereich auf. Außerdem ähneln sich in manchen Punkten die Subjektivität des Autors und die intensive Untersuchung, manchmal auch die dramatische Komposition und Dramatisierung der Erzählung zum Comic-Journalismus. Drei Möglichkeiten zur Kategorisierung von Comic-Journalismus Im sechsten Abschnitt des Theorieteils (vgl. Kapitel 2.6) wird gezeigt, dass man sich Comic-Journalismus—nebst der Betrachtung von Autorschaft—mit Hilfe drei verschiedener Kategorien annähern kann. Erstens: das Medium und die Art und Weise der Verö entlichung. Hier kann man zwischen digitalem und analogem Comic-Journalismus unterscheiden, weil beide Publikationsformen Vor- und Nachteile aufweisen. Darüber hinaus kann gedruckter Comic- Journalismus erstens in ‚novel-length‘ Büchern, zweitens in Zeitschriften und Magazinen, und drittens in Zeitungen auftreten. Zweitens kann man Comic-Journalismus anhand der Dauer des Produktionsprozesses unterscheiden. Der Comic-Journalismus nimmt die langsamere Produktionszeit, die entgegen der Nachrichtendevise der sofortigen und aktuell-relevanten Nachrichtenverbeitung steht, in Kauf und trägt damit zum zeitgenössischen Phänomen des „slow movement“ bei, was eine bewusst gewollte Entschleunigung bzw. Verlangsamung vorsieht. Auch hierin gibt es ver- 22 schiedene Möglichkeiten: ‚live-sketching‘ steht im Gegensatz zu ‚sketch-like‘ journalism und Comic-Journalismus, der aufgrund seiner Rechercheleistung und seines Zeichenstils vergleichsweise zeitaufwendig erscheint. ‚Skizzieren in Echtzeit‘ bedeutet, dass der Autor Ereignisse in unveränderter Form über verschiedene Social Media-Kanäle, vom Ort aus und mit (sehr) kurzer Zeitverzögerung der Ö entlichkeit zur Verfügung stellt. Eine dritte Möglichkeit Formen des Comic-Journalismus zu identi zieren, bildet für mich die Kategorie der journalistischen Genres. Für den Journalismus haben Christoph Neuberger und Peter Kapern ein Modell entwickelt, das als „Dimensionen der Darstellungsformen“ bezeichnet wird und zu unterschiedlichen journalistischen Textsorten führt. Ich habe das Modell entsprechend neu geordnet und angepasst, woraus sich für den Comic-Journalismus Abbildung 0.1 ergibt. Daraus schlussfolgere ich die Merkmale des Comic- objective level (intersubjective verifiability = “outer” circumstances) subjective level (accessible only through introspection = “inner” circumstances) level of facts level of interpretation report reportage feature facts as a basis for verbalnarratorial and visual-pictorial script; CJ does seldom deal with daily news coverage explanation and contextualization of facts; feature and report are often interwoven due to the medium, the way of drawing can already be a commentary on its own; glosse may be realized as visual satire, irony, or in a cartoony, caricature-like drawing style “portrait” is superfluous since it is the visual basis of figural dialogue and speech balloons Features of Comics Journalism visual and verbal commentary Abbildung 0.1: Übersicht über journalistische Darstellungsformen, aus denen sich spezi sche Merkmale für Comic-Journalismus ableiten lassen Journalismus, welche sich aus den individuellen Eigenheiten der journalistischen Textsorten von Bericht, Reportage, Feature, visueller und verbaler Kommentar ergeben. 23 Auch wenn das Konzept des Autors das immer wiederkehrende und verbindende Element ist, ist die Anwendung selbigens für die Analyse der Erzählwelt jedoch nicht ausreichend, weshalb ich mich auch mit der „Autorschaft“ in der extratextuellen Welt befasse. Mich interessiert dabei, wie Autoren des Comic-Journalismus die sachliche Berichterstattung, die inhaltliche Erzählung, die stilistischen Mittel und den individuellen künstlerischen Präsentationsstil verhandeln, um dem ktionalen Charakter des Mediums entgegenzuwirken. Anhand von zehn vertiefenden Fallstudien und der Betrachtung vieler weiterer Primärwerke, die dem Comic-Journalismus zuzuordnen sind, wird deutlich, dass sich die traditionellen Konzepte der Literaturtheorie, insbesondere der Narratologie, bei der Konzeptualisierung der Merkmale des Comic-Journalismus als begrenzt hilfreich erweisen. Vielmehr bedarf es einer neuen Denkweise, um diesem relativ neuen Phänomen gerecht zu werden. Durch die Kombination von journalistischen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven und unter Berücksichtigung von Theorien und Konzepten aus der Literatur-, Kultur- und Medienwissenschaft sowie der Soziologie und Journalistik habe ich den ‚comic-journalistischen Pakt‘ entwickelt, der sowohl den Autor in der Erzählwelt als auch auf der extratextuellen Welt berücksichtigt. Dieser Pakt soll zum einen zum Verständnis beitragen, wie Comic-Journalismus wirkt und zum anderen zur Analyse selbiger hilfreich sein. Der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ erfordert einerseits auf der Produktionsseite eine bestimmte Schreibweise und eine Haltung des Autors. Andererseits erfordert er auch eine bestimmte Lesart und Zugeständnisse auf der Rezeptionsseite, um die genrespezi schen Besonderheiten des Comic-Journalismus zu akzeptieren. Definition „Comic-Journalist“ vs. „Comic-Journalismus“ Eine Person, die Comic-Journalismus erscha t, kann unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen als Comic-Journalist bezeichnet werden. Ein Autor, der in der realen Welt Journalist ist und im Comic-Panel als eben solcher auftritt, ist jedoch per se kein Comic-Journalist, solange er nur für eine Tätigkeit zuständig ist, nämlich für die Recherche oder das Zeichnen von Texten. Ein Comic-Journalist ist kein Journalist, der über (Sach-)Comics berichtet. Ein Comic-Journalist ist eine Person, die in der realen Welt lebt und ihre journalistischen Geschichten zusammen mit journalistischen Methoden und Ethos im Medium Comic selbst zeichnet und recherchiert. Ein Comic-Journalist übernimmt die Verantwortung für alle Schritte der Produktion, was der Grund für eine starke selbstbestimmte Autorschaft ist. Darüber hinaus ist ein Comic-Journalist entweder eine Person mit einer professionellen journalistischen Ausbildung und dem Talent zum Zeichnen/ - Illustrieren/ Designen (wie Susie Cagle und Joe Sacco) oder eine Person mit einer professionellen Ausbildung in Cartoons/ Gra k/ Design, die beginnt, jour- 24 nalistisch zu arbeiten. Dies gilt für die Mehrheit der Comic-Journalisten. Journalisten, die als solche auch textimmanet dargestellt werden und im Comic- Journalismus für den geschriebenen Text verantwortlich sind, bleiben Journalisten und werden nicht zu Comic-Journalisten. Mit anderen Worten, ein Journalist, der für ein comic-journalistisches Projekt verantwortlich ist, aber von einem Illustrator gezeichnet wird, kann nicht als Comic-Journalist bezeichnet werden. Der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ Der Autor und der Rezipient tre en im Comic-Journalismus unterschwellig und freiwillig eine unsichtbare Vereinbarung miteinander. Der Pakt bezieht sich dabei auf folgende Aspekte: • Die Form und der Aufbau folgt den grundlegenden Merkmalen der Comics. • Die Themenauswahl ist nicht beschränkt und wird mit „Wirklichkeitserzählungen“ (vgl. Martínez) umschrieben, die tatsächliche Referenzen zur extratextuellen Realität aufweisen. • Die Hauptfunktionen des Comic-Journalisten sind die des verbalen und visuellen Erzählers, des Zeichners, des Augenzeugen und bisweilen die einer aktiv involvierten und engagierten Person. • Der Autor ist nicht der Protagonist der Geschichte, auch wenn er eine Figur (ein Charakter) in selbiger sein kann; trotz allem kann auf autobiogra sche Züge nicht gänzlich verzichtet werden. • Die Produktion des comic-journalistischen Werkes erfolgt nach größtmöglich transparenten und veri zierbaren Maßnahmen, die zugleich die Authentizität des Autors bezeugen und seinen Umgang mit Fakten offenlegen; die bedeutungsvolle Rolle des Internets ist zu berücksichtigen. Teil I: Die Stimme des Autors - Drei Möglichkeiten narrativer Vermi lung Vor dem Hintergrund der anhaltenden Diskussion über den Grad und die Berechtigung von Subjektivität im Journalismus und dem mediums-inhärenten ktionalen Status, wird es nicht möglich sein, die Kluft zwischen Objektivität und Fiktionalität der Informationsvermittlung zu überbrücken. Vielmehr geht es im Comic-Journalismus um die Art und Weise, wie mit einem vermeintlich weniger objektiven Journalismus umgegangen wird, der durch einen ‚mode of address‘ gestützt ist, welcher die Haltung und Persönlichkeit des Autors in die Analyse einbezieht. Der Teil über „Stimme“ widmet sich dabei narratologischen Fragestellungen und argumentiert, dass der Comic-Journalist die Person sein muss, die recherchiert und zeichnet. Anders als die bisherigen Theorien der Literaturwissenschaft vorschlagen, stimmt der Erzähler des Werkes in der erzählten Welt mit dem Autor aus der extratextuellen Welt überein. Zwischen dem Au- 25 tor, wie er in der realen Welt auftritt und wie er im Werk dargestellt wird, ndet dennoch eine Vermittlung statt, weshalb ich auch darauf hinweise, dass es verschiedene „Ichs“ eines Autors geben muss, so z.B. das erinnernde Ich, das erzählende Ich, das erlebende Ich und das zeichnende Ich. Nichtsdestotrotz erfordert das Zeichnen eine Perspektive und den Standpunkt des Autors. Comic-Journalismus untergräbt die bisherige Trennung zwischen Erzähler und Autor jedoch grundlegend. Als Mischform wurde bisher weder die Unmöglichkeit einer strikten Trennung zwischen Autor und Erzähler noch die Verschmelzung der beiden in der Forschung ausreichend berücksichtigt. Des Weiteren analysiert dieser Teil des Pakts, inwieweit das Konzept der Fokalisierung die narrative Darstellung beein usst, woraus auch die Rolle und Funktion des Autors in Comic-Journalismus mit Einzelautorenschaft abzuleiten ist, insbesondere unter Berücksichtigung seiner Glaubwürdigkeitselemente. Der Pakt geht davon aus, dass der Journalist derjenige ist, der die Feldforschung und Vor-Ort-Recherchen betreibt, der die Notizen und Skizzen macht und als Augenzeuge nah am Geschehen, über das er berichtet, dabei ist. Basierend auf diesem Teil weiß der ideale Leser um die herausfordernde Stellung zwischen Literatur und Journalismus und akzeptiert, dass Comic-Journalismus oft mit einer Trichotomie des Autors arbeitet, der für die verbale und visuelle ‚Stimme‘ sprich für die Erzählung verantwortlich ist, denn dies gilt es in Text-Bild- Kombinationen di erenziert zu berücksichtigen. Teil II: Das Gesicht des Autors - Die Darstellung des ‚cartoon-me‘ Das ‚Gesicht‘ bildet den zweiten Themenschwerpunkt des ‚comic-journalistischen Pakts‘ und analysiert die visuelle (Selbst-)Darstellung des Autors. Das Gesicht spielt, wie der Titel bereits erahnen lässt, hierbei eine wichtige Rolle, denn der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Sehen und Gesehenwerden des Autors. Das Sehen ist eine Grundvoraussetzung für das Beobachten , um eine Zeichnung der Wirklichkeit zu scha en. Daher wird in diesem Kapitel eine weitere Rolle der Autorschaft hinzugefügt, nämlich die des Augenzeugen . Comic-Journalisten sind nicht nur Zeugen, sondern bestätigen das Gesehene und Erlebte mit Stift und Papier. Vor dem Hintergrund des kulturellen Gedächtnisses und dem „postgaktischen Zeitalter“ mit gefälschten Nachrichten und „alternativen Fakten“ kann sich das Verständnis des Comic-Journalisten als Zeuge als hilfreich und relevant für weitere Analysen erweisen. Für die visuelle Darstellung des Autoren führe ich den Begri des ‚cartoonme‘ ein, der als eine Art ‚visueller Klon‘ des Comic-Journalisten zu verstehen ist. Damit ist die Präsentation des Autors in der diegetischen Welt ein besonderes Merkmal des Comic-Journalismus. Dieser resultiert daraus, dass weder die in der Literatur- und Filmwissenschaft verbreiteten Begri e „Avatar“ noch „Alter Ego“ der Darstellung im Comic-Journalismus Rechnung tragen. Erstens 26 spielen Comic-Journalisten nicht mit geheimen Identitäten. Als professionelle Journalisten und Autoren folgen sie journalistischen Regeln und Methoden. Sie stehen mit ihrem Namen für ihre Berichterstattung ein. Zweitens gilt zu beachten, dass sich der Begri „Avatar“ auch auf ein nicht-anthropomorphes Objekt oder eine nicht-anthropomorphe Form beziehen kann. Das würde bedeuten, dass man einen menschlichen Journalisten aus der extratextuellen Welt beispielsweise mit dem Symbol eines Mauszeigers gleichsetzt, der auch als „Avatar“ bezeichnet werden kann. Drittens soll eine Überschneidung mit der zugrunde liegenden Konnotation im ktionalen Bereich vermieden werden. Ein cartoonartiger Stil des ‚cartoon-me‘ lässt den Lesern Möglichkeiten für eine visuelle Interpretation, erhöht den Wiedererkennungswert des Comics Journalisten und ermöglicht emotionale Distanz. Auch wenn nicht jedes ‚cartoon-me‘ als abstrakte Selbstdarstellung erscheinen muss, so deckt sich doch die karikaturhafte Sehweise mit der Seh-, Beobachtungs- und Recherchierweise des Comic-Journalisten, was vielleicht eine der größten Errungenschaften des Comic-Journalismus ist, denn „[c]artooning is not just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing“ (McCloud, Understanding Comics 31). Die neue Bedeutung des Gesichts im Panel trägt damit sowohl zu einer personalisierten Art des Mediums als auch von Journalismus bei. Eine tiefenpsychologische Selbstre exion zu konstatieren, wäre nicht gerechtfertigt, jedoch handeln Comic-Journalisten nach der Devise: ‚Ich stehe für das ein, was ich gesehen und erlebt habe.‘ Darüberhinaus erfüllt die Verwendung von ‚cartoon-mes‘ verschiedene Funktionen, zum Beispiel: • zur Identi zierung und Einprägsamkeit des Comic-Journalisten im Werk • als Aufmerksamkeitsträger und Lenker für die Blickrichtung der Betrachtung • als Re exions gur für den Rezipienten • als Schutzschild für den Autor im Falle einer zu großen emotionalen oder physischen Nähe zum berichterstattenden Subjekt • als ‚Was-wäre-wenn‘-Maske für die Erzeugung einer Welt Daraus resultiert, dass Comic-Journalisten nicht nur Journalisten und Geschichtenerzähler, sondern auch wichtige Zeugen unserer Zeit sind. Sie zeichnen unsere Gesellschaft in all ihren Formen und Varianten mit visuellen Mitteln auf. Man könnte sogar argumentieren, dass sie nicht nur ‚Zeugen‘ eines gesellschaftspolitischen Diskurses, sondern auch ‚Bezeuger‘ einer Wahrheit und ‚Erzeuger‘ eines comic-journalistischen Werkes sind. Die Verwendung des „Zeugen“-Begri s erlaubt eine ethisch-politische Diskussion im Comic-Journalismus und macht die subjektive und emotionale Seite erfahrbar. Durch die Kontextualisierung und die mediale Einbettung in die zeitgenössische Medienlandschaft kann die Verwendung von Zeugnissen 27 eine Möglichkeit sein, die inhärente Subjektivität des Comic-Journalisten in der Erzählwelt zu rechtfertigen. Indem das Konzept des Zeugnisses durch den Augenzeugen als selbstverständlich und faktenbasiert betrachtet wird, macht es die Debatte um Fakt und Fiktion für Comic-Studien zugänglich. Somit verhält sich das Bezeugen zu Comic-Journalisten ähnlich wie das Vertrauen des Rezipienten zu (Comic-)Journalismus. Darüber hinaus rechtfertigt die Darstellung des faktenbasierten Zeugnisses die Darstellung von ‚im Kern wahren‘ Inhalten im Comic-Journalismus. Jaron Lanier behauptet, dass in der Welt der Information der Begri der Autorschaft für die Idee des individuellen Standpunktes selbst steht (Lanier 4). Greift man diese Aussage auf, so ist davon auszugehen, dass die Selbstdarstellung des Autors—verbal und visuell—im Comic-Journalismus, insbesondere bei Comic-Reportagen, eine besondere Bedeutung zuteil wird, weil in der postmodernen Zeit die Betonung der Perspektive des Autors authentischer und glaubwürdiger ist als die pseudo-versteckte Stimme eines Erzählers, der dem Autor entspricht. Im Comic-Journalismus begegnet man drei verschiedenen Möglichkeiten zur Analyse der Erzählsituation. Diese ergeben sich aus der Unterscheidung zwischen ‚verbal‘ und ‚visuell‘ sowie zwischen ‚o en‘ und ‚verdeckt‘. Dies erlaubt vier Kombinationsmöglichkeiten, wobei ‚visuell o en und verbal verdeckt‘ jedoch unlogisch ist und im Comic-Journalismus nicht existiert. Ein Autor, der sich selbst durch ein ‚cartoon-me‘ in der Geschichte darstellt, verwendet eher eine Ich-Erzählung als einen neutralen Ton. Im Gegensatz zu ktionalen Erzählungen, die den Leser absichtlich täuschen können, muss man darauf vertrauen, dass der Comic-Journalist genau und gerecht berichtet, was sich nicht vom Anspruch des traditionellen Journalismus unterscheidet. Der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ unter der Berücksichtigung des Autors geht daher von einer Gleichheit der Identität des Autors der extratextuellen Welt mit dem verbalen und visuellen Auftreten in der erzählten Welt aus. Je nach der erzählerischen Position des Autors kann der Comic-Journalismus daher entweder subjektiver oder dokumentarischer erscheinen. Wenn der Autor die Funktionen des Journalisten, des Zeichners, des Augenzeugen und des Erzählers erfüllt, hat man es mit einer sehr starken Einzelautorenschaft zu tun. Diese Erzählsituation wird in der Regel ‚verbal und visuell o en‘ dargestellt. Darüber hinaus wird sie durch eine direkte Rede in Bildunterschriftenen und Sprechblasen gekennzeichnet. Das ‚cartoon-me‘ des Autors wendet sich dem Leser zu und adressiert ihn direkt. Dies tri t insbesondere auf Comic- Reportagen zu, z.B. von Kate Evans, Joe Sacco oder Sarah Glidden. Im Gegensatz dazu steht die narrative Situation, in der der Autor sowohl visuell wie auch verbal verdeckt agiert. Dies erweckt einen eher dokumentarischen Charakter, wodurch die Werke von Olivier Kugler und Dan Archer gekennzeichnet sind. 28 Abbildung 0.2 zeigt die Einteilung und fasst die wichtigsten Primärwerke dieser Studie entsprechend ihrer Erzählsituation zusammen: Visual Overt Covert Ver bal Overt reads: From the Refugee Crisis, Rolling Blackouts, Journalism, Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos, One Day in Kara Tepe, Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room, e Influencing Machine, … Freetown, Schwerter Ruhr-Nachrichten, some Introductory Panels, e.g., Inside Death Row Covert Ferguson Firsthand, The Nisoor Square Shooting, The War Over Water, Escaping Wars and Waves Abbildung 0.2: Klassi kation der narrativen Situationen anhand der diskutierten Primärwerke Während die fett gedruckten Beispiele in der rechten unteren Ecke die eher dokumentarisch zu verstehenden Arbeiten zusammenfassen, lassen sich in der oberen Reihe Beispiele der Ich-Erzählung anführen. Außerdem kann man feststellen, dass die linke untere Ecke frei bleibt, da diese Kombination, wie eben erläutert, unlogisch und somit nicht existent ist. Darüber hinaus ist eine ‚visuell und verbal o ene‘ Erzählweise im Genre der Reportage, das auch im Comic-Journalismus eine besondere Rolle spielt, besonders erfolgreich. In diesem Fall können auch die Rolle des Autors und die Situation des Erzählers als Gründe dafür angesehen werden, warum Comic- Journalismus oft fälschlicherweise mit Comic-Reportage gleichgesetzt wird. Aufgrund einer o enen autorialen Ich-Erzählung sehe ich die Comic-Reportage als eine Form des Comic-Journalismus an. Für die Einzelautorenschaft habe ich ein Modell entwickelt, das die zwei Hauptebenen der Vermittlung darstellt (siehe Abb. 0.3): 29 ‘Real’ Comics Journalist Storyworld 1 Extratextual Level (‘Reality’) ‘Cartoon-Me’ (of the Comics Journalist) Cartoon Image of the ‘Real Person’ ‘Real’ Person Storyworld 2 Textual Level Abbildung 0.3: Modell der erzählerischen Vermittlung im Comic-Journalismus Die extratextuelle Welt, in der sich der reale Comic-Journalist und die reale Person, die als Interviewpartner agiert, be nden. Die ‚storyworld 1‘ be ndet sich innerhalb der extratextuellen Welt. Das ‚cartoon-me‘ verkörpert die visuelle Selbstdarstellung des realen Comic-Journalisten in Form eines Cartoons. Im Falle, dass der Comic-Journalist andere Figuren zu Wort kommen lässt, damit sie ihre Geschichte selbst erzählen können, wird die ‚storyworld 2‘ eingeführt. Der Comic-Journalist erzählt die Geschichte dann nicht mehr verbal, sondern nur noch visuell. Darüber hinaus ist die Existenz von ‚storyworld 2‘ mit einer Zeitverschiebung verbunden. Während der Comic-Journalist meist die ‚storyworld 1‘ präsentiert, ist die von einer Figur erzählte Handlung oder das Ereignis in der Vergangenheit geschehen und erö net somit eine andere narrative Ebene (‚storyworld 2’). Es zeigt sich jedoch, dass in fast allen Werken die ‚storyworld 2‘ vorkommt, um eine kohärente Handlung zu erzeugen. Im Gegensatz zu jenen Stücken des Comic-Journalismus, die sich durch einen verdeckten Erzähler auszeichnen, scheint die Unterscheidung zwischen einem Erzähler und einem Autor angemessener zu sein. Die Erzählsituation des Comic-Journalismus mit eher dokumentarischem Charakter ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass der Erzähler die Fakten eher dokumentiert, sammelt, 30 kontextualisiert und aufzeichnet. Dies lässt sich auch beobachten, wenn der Comic-Journalist nicht selbst als Augenzeuge fungiert. Des Weiteren zeigt sich, dass der Unterschied zwischen ‚storyworlds 1 und 2‘ mit einer zeitlichen Rückverschiebung einhergeht. In Kombination mit der visuellen Darstellung der Figur ist dies eine Möglichkeit, die Immersion zu erzeugen. Während der Autor gleichzeitig Augenzeuge der Geschehnisse in ‚storyworld 1‘ ist, entsteht ‚storyworld 2‘ sobald eine Figur beginnt, ihre Geschichte zu erzählen. Der Autor konnte nicht selbst erfahren, was die Figur in ‚storyworld 1‘ erzählt. Darüber hinaus erscheint ein neutraler Ton, wenn der Autor etwas in den Hintergrund tritt und eine andere Figur die Geschichte erzählen lässt. Solche Beispiele zeigen die Unschärfe und Schwammigkeit zwischen dem dokumentarischen und dem journalistischen Modus und verwischen die allgemeinen Grenzen zwischen Literatur und Journalismus. Dies ist ein möglicher Grund dafür, weshalb andere Wissenschaftler den Begri „dokumentarischer Comic“ anstatt „Comic-Journalismus“ bevorzugen. Teil III: Die Hände des Autors - Grad der Involvierung und des Engagements in der eigenen Geschichte Der dritte Teil des ‚comic-journalistischen Pakts‘ ist mit ‚Hände‘ überschrieben. Diesem Teil kommt eine Sonderstellung zuteil, weil er versucht die Symbiose zwischen dem Autor in der diegetischen Welt und in der extratextuellen Welt zu erkunden. Die Verwischung der vermeintlichen Trennlinie zwischen dem Erzähler und dem Autor eines Textes wird in diesem Kapitel besonders sichtbar. Insbesondere beeinussen physische und emotionale Nähe zwischen dem Comic-Journalisten und seinem Subjekt der Berichterstattung den Grad der Involvierung und des Engagements in der eigenen Geschichte. Es sind dabei verschiedene Grade des Engagements von Comic-Journalisten vorzuweisen, welche in Abbildung 0.4 illustriert sind: engaged like an activist physically and/ or emotionally engaged (‘messenger’) silently observing Kate Evans Ted Rall Joe Sacco Sarah Glidden Dan Archer Olivier Kugler Josh Neufeld Aimée de Jongh low high less/ more Abbildung 0.4: Die verschiedenen Ebenen des Engagements des Autors 31 Die Unterscheidung zwischen den Positionen erfolgt dabei graduell, zwischen geringem und hohen Engagement. Bezüglich des Grads der Beteiligung des Autors schlage ich vor, von einem ‚mehr‘ oder ‚weniger‘ statt von strikten Dichotomien zu sprechen. Das bedeutet, dass man von einem Autor spricht, der weniger aktivistisch, aber mehr beobachtend ist, im Gegensatz zu einem Autor, der sehr aktiv und helfend in das Geschehen eingreift. Es zeigt sich, dass es im Comic-Journalismus kaum möglich ist, eine strikte Grenze zwischen den Ebenen der erzählten Welt und der extratextuellen Realität zu unterscheiden, was dazu beiträgt, dass Comic-Journalismus ein sehr hybrides Phänomen ist. Eine interessante Situation entsteht, wenn sich der Comic-Journalist in der Geschichte o enbart, indem er sich von einer bloß ‚beobachtenden‘ Position zu einer aktiv eingreifenden und sich engagierenden Position wandelt. Es entsteht ein interessantes Spannungsverhältnis, was der traditionelle Journalismus aufgrund seiner geringen physischen und psychischen Distanz strikt ablehnt. Auf der linken Seite der Skala kann man den Autor als stillen Beobachter und Zeugen situieren, der die Fakten eher dokumentiert und als weniger subjektiv in seiner Berichterstattung erscheint. Je weiter man sich an das rechte Ende der Skala bewegt, desto höher wird der Grad der Beteiligung des Autors. Während der Autor in der Mitte der Skala beginnt, seine physische und emotionale Unvoreingenommenheit zu verlieren, ähnelt der rechte Pol einem stark emotional und physisch involvierten Comic-Journalisten, der aktiv an der Welt teilnimmt, aus der er ein comic-journalistisches Werk erscha t. Comic-Journalisten wie Kate Evans und Ted Rall können daher als Aktivisten bezeichnet werden. Starke und selbstbestimmte Autorscha im Comic-Journalismus Die Konzeption und Ausübung von Autorschaft sind historischen Veränderungen unterworfen und beein ussen das Verständnis von Comic-Journalismus. Im Allgemeinen ndet man eine starke und selbstbestimmte Einzelautorschaft bei der Mehrheit der comic-journalistischen Werke wieder. Der Comic-Journalist verantwortet als Autor seine Arbeit selbst. Gibt es mehrere Autoren, so bezieht sich Autorschaft auf diejenigen Autoren, die einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Konzeption, künstlerischen Gestaltung, journalistischen Umsetzung sowie technischen Implementierung geleistet haben. Diese Arbeit zeigt, dass viele Comic-Journalisten eine starke Autorschaft ausüben, was zum einen auf ihren Status als Freiberu er zurückzuführen ist, die ihre Arbeit ständig vermarkten und verkaufen müssen. Zum anderen folgt Comic-Journalismus der Tradition des Autoren-Comics und des unabhängigen Journalismus, weshalb die klassischen hierarchischen Strukturen des „corporate journalism“ in dieser Form in Comic-Journalismus nicht zu nden sind. Die digitalen Wege der Verbreitung, Ankündigung und Werbung sind 32 für Comic-Journalisten außerordentlich wichtig. Das Internet und insbesondere die sozialen Medien bieten geeignete Wege und dienen verschiedenen Funktionen: Erstens hilft das Internet die zeichnerisch dargestellten Fakten zu überprüfen und die Glaubwürdigkeit des Autoren zu beweisen. Zweitens können die Autoren über die Social Media-Kanäle sehr schnell ein breites Publikum und potenzielle Konsumenten erreichen und über ihre neuesten Arbeiten informieren. Drittens können Comic-Journalisten mit Hilfe von sozialen Medien in direkte eins-zu-eins-Kommunikation mit dem Leser treten, aber auch das eins-zu-viele-Kommunikationsmodell mit dem Publikum beibehalten. Der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ bezieht sich auf Einzelautorschaft. Sind mehrere Autoren an einem Werk beteiligt, so gestaltet sich der Pakt schwierig und ist einigen Hürden ausgesetzt. Insbesondere durch das Internet hat die Anzahl an comic-journalistischen Werken mit gemeinsamer Urheberschaft erheblich zugenommen. Das liegt auch daran, dass die Kompetenzen und Fähigkeiten, die ein traditioneller Journalist heutzutage erfüllen muss, das einfache Recherchieren und Schreiben von Texten bei Weitem übersteigt. Dies wird bei den technischen Fähigkeiten und dem Einbeziehen verschiedener medialer Plattformen sehr deutlich. Vor allem Multimedia-Projekte und Webcomics, die ausschließlich für das Internet konzipiert sind, erfordern technisches Fachwissen. Da der Leser mit dem Comic-Journalisten einen Pakt eingeht, verändert sich die Situation bei ‚kollaborativer‘ Autorschaft, die zwischen verschiedenen Personen notwendigerweise aufgeteilt ist. Dadurch wird auch die Vertrauensbasis beein usst. Verteilen sich die Rollen auf mehrere Personen, so manifestiert sich das Vertrauensverhältnis zwischen Leser und Autor vergleichsweise weniger stark, weil die Fragen des zuverlässigen Erzählens, Erlebens und Bezeugens anders beantwortet werden. Es stellt sich heraus, dass die Gleichsetzung der Autorfunktionen, von denen der Pakt ausgeht, bei ‚kollaborativem‘ Comic- Journalismus nicht gut funktioniert, insbesondere nicht in Comic-Reportagen, denn die Reportage ist eine der am stärksten personalisierten journalistischen Textsorten. Die Authentifizierungsstrategien des Autors Um die Möglichkeiten der Fiktionalisierung und des Fälschens zu minimieren, sind Strategien, die die Vertrauenswürdigkeit des Autors beweisen und seine Treue zu den Fakten untermauern, besonders wichtig. Authenti zierungsstrategien wirken somit pro-aktiv und dienen der autorialen Bestätigung. Diese Strategien sind überwiegend außerhalb des Werkes angesiedelt, also auf der extratextuellen Ebene. Zudem wäre es ohne sie schwierig, Comic-Journalismus zu verstehen und die Rolle des Autors zu identi zieren. Basierend auf Weber und Rall, die die „Präsenz des Autors“, seine „physische Ähnlichkeit“, „Stilmittel“, „dokumen- 33 tarische Beweise“ und die „Meta-Geschichte des Comics“ (Weber und H. - M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 1) als Authenti zierungsstrategien angeben, konnte ich diese bestätigen, vertiefen und weitere identi zieren. Die Verwendung von Multiperspektivität ermöglicht, dass der Autor verschiedene Personen die gleiche Geschichte aus jeweils anderen Blickwinkeln erzählen lässt. Eine zusätzliche Möglichkeit ist das Einfügen verschiedener Medien in die panels, die zum einen die Geschichte des Comic-Journalisten untermauern und zum anderen ihn selbst veri zieren. Das Internet spielt aufgrund der Vermischung der Erzählwelt und der extratextuellen Welt eine überaus wichtige Rolle, was insbesondere für Comic- Reportagen gilt. Die Nutzung und der Umgang des Autors mit seinen sozialen Medien wie Twitter, Instagram und Facebook, kann die sachliche Botschaft unterstützen. Darüber hinaus deuten persönliche Blogs und Websites darauf hin, dass eine Trennung der Ebenen von Geschichte und Diskurs zwar nicht immer sinnvoll, aber notwendig ist, um den ‚comic-journalistischen Pakt‘ zu respektieren. Hinsichtlich der Umsetzung der Faktenprüfung kann man feststellen, dass der Autor in den panels Fußnoten verwendet, die dann der diegetischen Welt angehören und deren Einfügung einen Lesebruch verursachen, was signalisiert, dass man es nicht mit Fiktion zu tun hat. Darüber hinaus sind die Einbeziehung anderer Quellen, die der Comic-Journalist beim Schreiben verwendet oder auf die er während der Recherchen gestoßen ist sowie die Einfügung von Prologen, Epilogen und kurzen Kommentaren, in denen er sich auf die Anonymisierung und den Quellenschutz beruft, oder in denen Making-of-Bilder von ihm selbst gezeigt werden weitere Möglichkeiten, die der Comic-Journalist nutzt, um seine Identität und Glaubwürdigkeit zu bezeugen und damit den Produktionsprozess überprüfbar zu machen. Die Stärken von Comic-Journalismus Diese Arbeit hat Comic-Journalismus in seiner Vielfalt analysiert. Wie alle Genres ist auch Comic-Journalismus einem historischen und kulturellen Wandel unterworfen. Die systemabgrenzenden Linien sind ießend und verändern sich mit der Zeit, weil ein Genre auch durch gesellschaftliche Diskurse verhandelt wird und die Merkmale durch externe Ein üsse mit geprägt werden. Festzuhalten bleibt, dass Comic- Journalismus eine Synthese aus Kunst, Kultur, Literatur und Journalismus ist, weil er Merkmale und Techniken der sequenziellen Kunst des Comics mit journalistischen Konzepten, Arbeitsprozessen und Methoden verschmelzen lässt. Ein Comic-Journalist, der keine geschützte Berufsbezeichnung trägt, recherchiert und handelt wie jeder andere in den traditionellen Medien arbeitende Journalist. Obwohl die Darstellung von Nachrichten und Ereignissen aus der Wirklichkeit die thematische Grundlage bildet, haben Comic-Journalisten Vorteile bei der Kreation von Bildern. So verlagern Comics das Gewicht der 34 Authenti zierung von den medialen Voraussetzungen auf ihre Autoren und damit auf die von ihnen referenzierten textlichen Eigenschaften. Die subjektive Stimme des Autors wird oft visuell hervorgehoben, absichtlich exponiert und mit einer Vielzahl von Mitteln, die von paratextuellen über textuellen bis hin zu extratextuellen Strategien reichen, transparent veri ziert. Im Idealfall lassen sich Zusammenhänge auf diese Weise besser darstellen und helfen, Themen einer breiten Ö entlichkeit zu vermitteln. Somit greift Comic-Journalismus auch gesellschaftspolitische Diskurse auf. Comic-Journalismus lässt sich den Bewegungen des literarischen, des langsamen Journalismus, des „watchdog-“ sowie des anwaltlichen Journalismus zuordnen. Zudem steht er in der Tradition des „New Journalism“. Daher ist Comic-Journalismus besonders durch eine subjektive Haltung und Persönlichkeit des Autors geprägt, doch was als Hindernis für eine sachliche Berichterstattung angesehen werden könnte, ist zu einer wertvollen Ressource und einem zentralen Merkmal des Comic-Journalismus geworden. Auf textueller Ebene zeichnet sich der Comic-Journalismus durch eine au ällige Überlappung zwischen Autor, Erzähler, Zeichner, Augenzeuge und Figur der Geschichte aus. Im Gegensatz zu Formaten, die auf mit der Kamera aufgenommenen Bildern basieren, wie Fotogra e und Film, können nicht ktionale Comics nicht den Anspruch erheben, die vormediale Realität zu indizieren. Des Weiteren hat sich gezeigt, dass Comic-Journalismus eine bestimmte Art der Produktion und der Rezeption erfordert, weshalb der ‚comic-journalistische Pakt‘ die Rezeptions- und Produktionsseite betri t. Zum einen erfordert er nicht nur einen überaus sorgfältigen Umgang mit Quellen und Arbeitsmethoden, sondern stellt zum anderen auch hohe Anforderungen an seine Leser, denn die Rolle des Lesers ist in diesem Genre von zentraler Bedeutung. Der Leser muss mitdenken, um die Handlung zwischen den panels im Kopf zu füllen und fortzusetzen und er muss die einzigartige Darstellung mehrerer, und doch unter Umständen gleichzeitig statt ndender Zeitebenen lesen können. Der Autor erfüllt viele Rollen und ist für die Analyse des Comic-Journalismus existentiell. Abgeleitet aus dem Pakt fungiert der Comic-Journalist mit Einzelautorschaft als Journalist, Zeichner, Erzähler, Augenzeuge, Beobachter, Zuhörer, Helfer, Unterstützer, Aktivist, Lehrer, Traumatherapeut, Unterhalter, Bote, Bastler, Künstler, Stimmgeber, Reisender und manchmal einfach ‚nur‘ als Figur in seiner eigenen Geschichte. Comic-Journalisten sind immer einsatzbereit, weil sie nicht von technischen Geräten abhängig sind, sondern mittels einiger weniger externen Mitteln, wie z.B. dem Zeichenblock und dem Bleistift, arbeiten können. Diese puristische Ausstattung, die in jede Tasche passt, ermöglicht ihnen oft den Zugang zu Orten, die anderen Medien verwehrt bleiben. Dies ist der Fall, wenn Fotogra - 35 en und Filmaufnahmen entweder nicht erlaubt, nicht willkommen oder aus technischen und pragmatischen Gründen nicht möglich sind. Der Comic-Journalismus will das Bedürfnis des Publikums nach einem besseren Verständnis der Entstehung der Nachrichten durch eine persönliche Linse und durch eine Kontextualisierung befriedigen, die sich am Autor orientiert. In dieser Hinsicht sind Comic-Journalisten entscheidende Zeugen unserer Zeit, unserer Kultur und unserer Gesellschaft und tragen damit auch zu einer anderen Tradition der kommunikativen Praxis bei. Diese Studie zeigt, dass Comic-Journalismus ein nicht zu unterschätzendes Genre ist, obwohl es oft selbst einer kritischen Analyse unterliegt, zugleich aber auch sozio-politische Themen kritisch diskutiert und somit zum einen als seriöser Informationslieferant dient und zum anderen zur kulturellen Welterzeugung beiträgt. Die Interdependenz zwischen Beschreibung und Erzählung, zwischen Erzählen und Zeigen, zwischen Sehen und Gesehen werden, in Kombination mit universell verständlichen (hand-)gezeichneten Bildern, die die Realität in comichafter Manier darstellen, ist ein einzigartiges mediales Angebot. Darüber hinaus ist es die O enlegung des Recherche- und Produktionsprozesses, v.a. über Social Media- Kanäle, die gewollte autoriale Subjektivität statt falscher Neutralität, der individuelle künstlerische Ansatz statt der Einhaltung normativer und vorde nierter Zwänge sowie die Anwendung journalistische Methodik, das Comic-Journalismus einzigartig macht. Auch wenn Comic-Journalismus allein in den letzten fünf Jahren einen enormen Aufschwung erlebt hat, bleiben Werke dieser Art Randerscheinungen der Mainstream-Nachrichtenkultur. Vor allem die deutschsprachigen Publikationen bleiben in einem von der englischen Sprache dominierten Korpus Ausnahmen. Auch wenn Comics in der Gesellschaft o enbar eine größere Akzeptanz gefunden haben und auch wenn die Tendenz eine positive Entwicklung des Comic-Journalismus für die Zukunft zu versprechen scheint, bleibt noch viel Forschungsarbeit zu leisten. Diese könnte wie folgt fortgeführt werden: Erstens, der Korpus kann für eine Analyse des Comic-Journalismus erweitert werden und z.B. auch den spanischen, japanischen, asiatischen und russischen Sprachraum berücksichtigen. Zweitens, eine Förderung von empirischen Studien zur praktischen Umsetzung der Autorenschaft, z.B. in Bezug auf exakte Gehälter von Comic-Journalisten, Arbeitsbedingungen, Arbeitssuche, Abhängigkeiten von Redakteuren oder Verlegern wäre wünschenswert um bisherige Ergebnisse und Vermutungen zu bekräftigen oder zu bestätigen. Eine rezeptionsorientierte Studie wäre, drittens, folgerichtig, um mehr über den Leser und seine Vorlieben für Comic-Journalismus herauszu nden. Viertens könnte sich eine weitere Studie stärker auf den performativen Aspekt der Autorschaft konzentrieren. Obwohl ich hauptsächlich die Auswirkungen auf 36 die Einzelautorenschaft analysiert habe, habe ich meine Zweifel an der kollaborativen Autorschaft im Comic-Journalismus geäußert. In Anlehnung an Harald Loves Konzeptualisierung eines performativen Modells der Autorschaft (vgl. H. Love) könnte so einer zunehmenden Tendenz zur Digitalisierung und zum Webcomics-Journalismus entsprochen werden. Die Entwicklung einer allgemeinen Comic-Narratologie muss, fünftens, ktionale wie nicht ktionale Comics berücksichtigen, da die Konzepte des Erzählens, Wahrnehmens und Sehens unterschiedliche Überlegungen erfordern. Sechstens, neben „Migrationscomics“ und „Gefängniscomics“ wird es auch zukünftig weitere Ausprägungen von Comic-Journalismus geben, die hauptsächlich nach ihrem Inhalt kategorisiert werden. Siebtens könnte man auch eine Politik der A ekte und Emotionen im Comic-Journalismus genauer untersuchen, denn wie sich gezeigt hat, spielen Emotionen bei Reportagen eine große Rolle, untergraben aber die Idee der physischen und emotionalen Distanzierung gegenüber den zu berichtenden Untersuchungssubjekten. Mein achter Vorschlag bezieht sich auf die Frage nach dem Verhältnis des Mediums Comic zur Hoch- und Populärkultur. Der Comic ist als Kunstform stark genug. Warum ist das Medium Comic plötzlich akzeptiert? Braucht die Hochkultur den Comic und nicht umgekehrt, wie oft dargestellt? Neuntens könnte der Frage nachgehen, inwieweit das traditionelle einseitige Autor-Text-Leser-Kommunikationsmodell für interaktive und partizipative Formen von Web-Comics-Journalismus angepasst werden müsste. Als zehnten Punkt rege ich die weiteren Untersuchungen über die Einbindung von Comics für die Didaktik, insbesondere in Schulen, an. Kunstunterricht, Fremdsprachenunterricht, politische Bildung und Gemeinschaftskunde könnten zusammenwirken und den Lehrplan mindestens durch projektbezogene Arbeit ergänzen. Es ist nicht übertrieben zu sagen, dass zumindest die politischen Ereignisse in unserer gegenwärtigen Gesellschaft unser Bewusstsein für den herausfordernden Status von Begri en wie Literatur und Journalismus sowie unser Verständnis von Fakt und Fiktion enorm geschärft haben. Daher sind wir gezwungen, das Wesen neuer generischer Hybride mit verschiedenen Arten von ktionalen Aspekten sowie Aspekten der extratextuellen Realität besser zu verstehen. Diese Studie zeigt, dass eine Überschreitung disziplinärer Grenzen neue Felder der Rezeptions- und Produktionsprozesse erö net, die auch neue Wege der Informationssammlung und -vermittlung bieten. Wie ist unser Verhältnis zu Fakt und Wahrheit, welche Rolle spielen ge lterte Meinungen? Systeme wie Journalismus und Literatur sind ständig im Wandel und man muss immer wieder aufs Neue die Erkenntnistheorie des Journalismus sowie die Möglichkeiten literarischer und journalistischer Methoden erforschen, um neuen Formen wie Comic-Journalismus eine Möglichkeit zu geben. 37 Chapter 1 Introduction: Comics, Journalism, and the Author Figure 1.1: Screenshot, “I’m a Comics Journalist” (Neufeld, Adventures in Comics Journalism n. pag.) 39 Comics journalism polarizes with its objective to do journalism in a drawn manner. It does not describe journalism about comics in magazines or elsewhere, as US comics journalist Josh Neufeld explains (see Fig. 1.1). Even though a comprehensive understanding of comics journalism will probably only emerge at the end of this study, a rst de nition of the term should already be made now. It is a eld which combines journalistic rules and techniques with the medium of comics to produce newsworthy and relevant non ctional stories. Comics journalism challenges previously accepted literary de nitions of concepts such as the author and revolutionizes the eld of journalism. It contributes to the diversity of reality narrations in non ction and, because comics are a familiar medium all over the world, telling stories through words and pictures is likely to make journalistic information accessible to a broad public, and humor can be a part of comics (see Fig. 1.1). In the second half of the twentieth century, the dividing line between straight news reporting and opinion writing, which had been frowned upon for a long time, has become steadily blurred and changed noticeably (cf. Worcester 138). More and more frequently, journalists and literary writers experiment with di erent approaches in order to get information mediated. Thus, this study is for all those who are interested in an alternative reading of fact-based information in a ctional medium. In any case, comics journalism and the pressing questions about iconicity, indexicality, facts, production, and authorial subjectivity are highly relevant in an age that has to nd a way of dealing with “fake news” regardless of the medium. Both “comics” and “journalism” have a long and rich tradition. Together, these disciplines form a special, if not paradoxical, combination. And yet, they already share a common history, but “journalistic comics” (Worcester 137) are a contemporary phenomenon. The modern comic strip occurred as early as the middle of the nineteenth century (cf. Kunzle); Western journalism even developed one century earlier (cf. Collins and Palmegiano), even if earlier forms of how we understand them nowadays date back much longer in history. Comics strips and (editorial) cartoons have been published in newspapers and magazines for over a century (cf. Worcester; cf. Pett). As Worcester points out, “the distinction between journalism and cartooning was self-evident: journalists gathered news; cartoonists entertained readers” (Worcester 137). In other words, these two phenomena existed side by side for a long time, but only in recent years have they discovered the advantages of a symbiosis. The press coverage of the nineteenth century has contributed signi cantly to the separation between literature and journalism (cf. Roß 86), and the growing dominance of “news journalism” has marginalized “author journalism” (cf. 86). The emergence of non ction comics can be explained by a greater interest in the combination of comics and non ction in view of, for example, the 40 depiction of war, Holocaust, and trauma in comics (cf. Chute, Disaster Drawn ). Furthermore, one can ascribe the success of comics journalism to the 1960s and their magazine journalism. It was the time in which the turn from comics as juvenile literature to serious-minded cartooning took place (cf. Vanderbeke 73). For comics, it holds true that, by the late 1960s, an underground movement self-published comics for adults which narrated the events of everyday life. These stories included issues about work, relationships, and family but also about drug use, sexuality, and violence. Robert Crumb contributed to many of the seminal works of the “underground comix” scene (Sabin 92). In response to attempts by ‘mainstream’ publishers to appeal to adult audiences, so-called alternative comics focused on many of the same themes as the underground comix. At that time, serialized from 1980 to 1991, Art Spiegelman published his groundbreaking comic book The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale about his father’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor. It was the rst comic to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (cf. Spiegelman). Comics journalism, and comics in general, have their roots in political cartooning (cf. Pett n. pag.). Both caricatures and comics work with cartoony imagery, and thus also with abstractness, dramatization, and simpli cation. Cartoons, too, are subject to historical change. Nowadays, they observe political debate and life quite carefully. A political cartoon is a visual commentary and subjectively marked journalistic form of depiction (cf. Knieper 98). The primary goal is to attack, discredit, and disparage an object through drawing in the public (cf. 28). In contrast to comics, caricatures can be good-natured, entertaining, ironic, but also malicious, biting, unfair, grossly dis guring, or even deliberately falsifying (cf. 39). But above all, they are single pictures and are not arranged as sequences to narrate (cf. Knieper; cf. Grünewald, Karikatur im Unterricht: Geschichte - Analysen - Schulpraxis 14). While illustrated journalism is not entirely new, the consideration of the medium is indeed (cf. Duncan et al. x). Since Joe Sacco’s publications about Palestine, Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Gaza, an industry of comics journalism has rapidly sprung up, inspiring new artists and journalists to explore the genre and medium. Sacco’s work alone has been a proli c source for many critical and theoretical essays on the Nazi-narrative in general or the presence of narrating trauma in comics (cf. Friederich; cf. Kupczynska; cf. Rosenblatt and Lunsford). Both Spiegelman and Sacco have received much attention and probably remain the two most thoroughly analyzed authors at the intersection of autobiography, documentary, journalism, and comics. However, what makes the eld of non ction comics so unique and exciting is its ever-increasing multifaceted character. Comics used to be a medium associated with humorous stories for children but have developed more and more into a genre for information and knowledge transfer. Recurring sub- 41 genres are notable. For comics which rely on the believable rendering of the author’s self and her 1 own testimony, and which portray the life and experiences of the author, labels are “graphic memoirs” (cf. Pedri; cf. Schröer), “autobiographical comics” (cf. Refaie, Autobiographical Comics ; cf. Chaney; cf. Hirsch), “biography” (cf. Adams), “life writing” (cf. Adams), and “autobi ctionalography” (cf. Kirtley). In contrast, comics which focus on other people, subjects, and their witness accounts can be approached with studies of history (cf. Witek), documentary (cf. Adams; cf. Mickwitz 9), and journalism (cf. Weber and H. - M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism”; cf. Weber et al.). They are sometimes also referred to as “documentary crisis comics” (Chaney 68-69) and “alternative comics” (cf. Hat eld). “Comics reportages,” for example, are sometimes wrongly equated with “documentary comics.” But while documentary “is about the presentation of evidence” (Chute, Disaster Drawn 2), the journalistic form of reportage negotiates between “artistically reshaped journalism and journalistically legitimized art” (Ludewig 26). In my view, the di erences between documentary comics and journalism is in the degree of openness with which non ction authors present their work and production, and in the degree of transparency their work exhibits, as well as in the author’s representation of the visual and narrative voice. Looking at the title of this study—“Authorship in Comics Journalism”—one can deduce that this research project has two foci—authorship and comics journalism. However, one could also read the title as consisting of three nouns— authorship, comics, and journalism—all of which are concepts that demand a closer examination in the following. In particular, the latter is necessary because there is not yet a book-length study on comics journalism. However, before presenting my hypotheses, I consider it necessary to introduce the two most important terms of this study, “comics journalism” and “comics journalist,” and highlight their di erence in the following section. 1.1 Comics Journalism and the Comics Journalist “Comics journalism” and “comics journalist” require a closer look. Every comics journalist creates comics journalism, but not each piece of comics journalism must necessarily be created by a comics journalist. This depends on single and collaborative authorship, which will be elaborated upon in more detail throughout this section. 1 For reasons of diversity, this work uses the female form in the singular case but refers to men and women and transgender alike. 42 Combining comics and journalism creates the contemporary generic hybrid of comics journalism. Even though comics journalism is becoming increasingly important and visible in academia and feuilleton alike, it is still a niche due to signi cant national di erences and the often widespread lack of knowledge about this genre. It is an “under-investigated topic in academic research” (Weber and H.-M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 4). “It’s a hybrid of journalism, historical research, and art” (Williams n. pag.). It is “long-form non- ction comics using journalistic techniques” (Neufeld, “Adventures in Comics Journalism” n. pag.). Kristian Williams stresses that comics journalism’s “inherent subjectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom’s dispassionate prose” (Williams n. pag.). Also called “journalistic comics” (Worcester), “graphic journalism” (Archer, “Graphic Journalism on Human Tra cking in Nepal”), “sequential art reporting” (Dubois et al. 120), “graphic non- ction” (Hart), “long-form cartoonis[m]” (Neufeld, “Adventures in Comics Journalism”) and “gezeichneter Bildjournalismus” (Pfei er 156), this phenomenon has turned into an academic eld which stayed rather unexplored until the mid-2000s. For the time being, no matter how one de nes it, what generally holds true for comics journalism is that it can be assigned to “visual journalism” (Lester and Harris), which is the practice of strategically combining words and images to convey information from reality. It is the telling of stories with words, pictures, and designs and has evolved from the individual histories of typography, graphics design, informational graphics, photojournalism, motion pictures, television, and computers coming together within various print and screen media. However, comics journalism is not “graphics journalism” (Stovall). The latter is “a specialized form of journalism that uses graphic forms to present information” (7). This means that this type of visual journalism exclusively works with infographics such as diagrams, cards, or statistics—and comics do not fall into this classi cation (cf. Weber et al. 349). The term “non ction” incorporates journalism and documentary. As such, it is an umbrella term for working with visual images and information content. In a more general sense, it is about visualizing data (“data journalism”), or using graphics such as maps or charts to explain stories. In the more recent elds of digital journalism, it may be highly multiand transmedial. Visual journalism can e ectively help to understand and access a story better. A simple map or graphic can convey a story that can be immediately grasped. That is why one should keep in mind that “non ction” and “journalism” are not the same. These observations and the distinction between the terms “comics” and “graphics” are necessary for terminological, semantic, and formal reasons. To anticipate the thesis, I rst argue that visual journalism shall function as an umbrella term for any journalist working with visual data of any form 43 including, but not limited to, word-picture-illustrations, colorations, graphics, and any other sort of visual images such as maps, statistics, infographics, and lines. Comics journalism shall, then, be understood as a eld of study on its own. It can, of course, be situated among graphic journalism because the panel, as one of the main features of comics, can also be seen as a graphic. However, this relationship does not function the other way round, because, for example, a drawing (which is also referred to as a “picture”) can be a panel (or an arrangement of panels on a page), but it generally cannot count as “comics.” Contrary to my view, comics journalist Dan Archer, who spent some time at Stanford University working on ways to promote comics journalism as a legitimate, innovative way of news storytelling, does not distinguish between these two terms: Comics or graphic journalism is an umbrella term that covers any approach to reporting using both words and images together, as opposed to the conventional model - text with separate illustrations. The main di erence is that stories are led as few pages of artwork with text inside speech balloons or captions. [. . . ] The main challenge is tying a journalistically rigorous story to a visual narrative thread that combines drama with a pleasing aesthetic. At the end of the day the goal is to give the reader a unique reading experience while simultaneously moving, informing and entertaining them in equal share. (JSK n. pag.) A comics journalist is not a journalist who reports about (non ction) comics. A comics journalist is a person who is based in the real world and who draws and investigates her journalistic stories along with journalistic methods and ethos in the medium of comics on her own. A comics journalist takes responsibility for all steps of the production, which is the reason for a strong notion of single authorship. Additionally, a comics journalist is either a person with professional journalistic training and the talent of drawing/ illustration/ graphic design (Susie Cagle and Joe Sacco) or a person with professional training in cartooning/ graphic art/ art design who tries to work journalistically. The latter occurs more frequently in contemporary journalism (Dan Archer, Kate Evans, Sarah Glidden, Olivier Kugler, and Josh Neufeld). In contrast, a person who is a real-world journalist and who appears in the comic panel as a journalist is not per se a comics journalist as long as the person is only researching and not drawing. In short, regardless of the medium, journalists who are portrayed as such in comics remain journalists and do not become comics journalists. This is particularly important in the case of collaborative authorship because of the division of labor. The real-world cartoonist draws the real-world journalist. In other words, a journalist who 44 Figure 1.2: Page, David Axe Is a Journalist but Not a Comics Journalist ( War Is Boring 5) is only responsible for the journalistic investigation in the project but who is drawn by an illustrator into the comics panel cannot be called a comics journalist. For example, in Fig. 1.2, David Axe is the journalist in the real world. He does the investigation and writes the text, but Matt Bors draws the panels. There are di erent terms to describe the person who authors, which means in the majority of cases writes and draws, comics journalism. I am working with the term “comics journalist” here, but Maureen Ramsden, for example, uses the word “reporter-novelist,” which stands in the tradition of American novelist Ernest Hemingway and French philosopher and journalist Albert Camus (cf. Ramsden 42). Whitlock, in contrast, has proposed the term “autobiographical avatars” (Whitlock 971) to characterize the drawn personae of cartoonists in graphic memoirs. While Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott use the term “author-illustrator” in the context of picture books (Nikolajeva and Scott 29), Achim Hescher suggests the terms “author-performer,” or “authorpresenter” (Hescher 159). Nevertheless, the comics journalist who is situated in the external communication system is responsible for the narratorial script and the pictorial track. 45 Even if the terms “journalist,” “reporter,” and “comics journalist” might suggest the same meaning at rst glance, they do not mean the same. Instead, they refer to di erent functional embodiments and responsibilities. While a “journalist” is a person who gathers material, writes, transforms, analyzes, contextualizes, explains, digests, and nally distributes the (current) information to the public, a reporter is a type of journalist who collects facts by researching, making reports, or conducting interviews on the ground, but who does not edit stories at the desk or tell stories in their entire complexity. Some researchers even say that journalism is “not a job—it’s a mentality, it’s a lifestyle” (Ho elmeyer n. pag.), which implies that people without journalistic training can call themselves journalists, too, if they behave and practice like one. Similarly, the professional title “(comics) journalist” is not legally protected. Indeed, anyone could call herself a journalist because there is free access to journalism due to freedom of opinion and freedom of the press, according to Article 5 of the Grundgesetz. Compared to Germany, the situation in North America is similar because in September 2013, the US Senate Judiciary Committee drafted a media law that is closer in spirit to the idea that journalism is an activity rather than a job. Thus, it works as a kind of protective shield for a wide variety of people considering themselves journalists (Kent n. pag.). Furthermore, I do not use the term “comics artist,” because, in my view, allthough art always subliminally plays an important role in comics, the label “artist” frames the responsibilities of a comics journalist too much. The word “artist” comes with too high a degree of cognitive and conceptual baggage because it neglects the important aspects of the journalistic claim and style. Having elaborated on the term “comics journalist,” I will now introduce the concepts of “authorship” and “author,” because they are crucial for this study and mutually dependent. While the idea of authorship has been su ciently discussed in literary theory, Matías Martínez criticizes its underrepresented value for other disciplines, such as the ne arts, lm studies, music, and new media (cf. Martínez, “Einführung: Autor und Medien” 433). Martínez shows that the abandonment of the author is factually untenable. The author cannot be dismissed from the interpretation of the text (cf. Martínez, “Autorschaft und Intertextualität” 466). Trying to contribute to a renegotiation of “authorship,” this study starts from the hypothesis that—against the widespread opinio communis —“author” is the most relevant concept to categorize, interpret, and approach texts—and thus also comics journalism, with “authorship” becoming a growing eld of research (cf. Berensmeyer et al., “Introduction” 1). For a more holistic approach to authorship, the consideration of cultural developments, social contexts, the development of the media and technology, as well as the borders between the private and the public author’s sphere 46 seems to be crucial, as Ingo Berensmeyer et. al posit (cf. Berensmeyer et al., “Introduction” 1-2). This is where this study takes up the thread in order to continue the research. More recent approaches such as gender studies or cultural studies often already presuppose knowledge about the author and authorship—what gender she is, her origin, her educational background, etc.— and, accordingly, treat the author openly as an instance of evaluation and interpretation (cf. Jannidis et al. 11). Furthermore, Jaron Lanier remarks that in our world full of information and visuality, the concept of authorship stands for “the very idea of the individual point of view” (Lanier 47). As such, “authorship,” with its di erent concepts and models in di erent disciplines and in di erent areas of society, may be regarded as a “travelling concept” (cf. Berensmeyer et al., “Introduction”). Hence, I want to renew the understanding and combine literary and journalistic approaches to the following question: who is an author at all? The term “author” refers either to a person “whose occupation is writing books,” or to an “inventor, founder, or constructor of something,” which means that an author is equal to any creator of artistic work (“Author” n. pag.). Depending on the artistic eld, one speaks of painter, photographer, or lmmaker. In this sense, a writer of a non ctional text for a journal, magazine, or newspaper can also be called an author, even though it seems to be more common to speak of a journalist or a reporter in journalism. In this project, an author is a person who originates or gives existence to something. Hence, “author” is the umbrella term for all originators of any creative works. Additionally, the word “work” is not restricted to a verbal-narratorial understanding of the meaning of a “text” but also describes the visual and creative aspects. Thus, journalists, comics journalists, reporters, and artists (also lmmakers and sculptors) of any type are classi ed—unless stated otherwise—under the more neutral umbrella term “author.” In comics journalism, one can distinguish between works that are written by one author and those written by many authors. I refer to them as works with ‘single’ and ‘multiple authors,’ or ‘author collectives.’ ‘Collaborative comics journalism,’ or ‘collective comics journalism,’ as I label it, consists of at least two individuals or a group of people. 2 Sometimes, it may comprise collaborations not only between persons 3 , but also across media borders, as practiced by the German-French broadcast station ARTE practices. In their Refugee -project, photographers, cameramen, comics journalists, and poets contributed to the creation of a so-called “news game” (see Ch. 3.1.1). A 2 Kai Mikkonen has pointed to the question of the relation and work-sharing functions between two or more authors in graphic novels (cf. Mikkonen 102). 3 In EXTRACTION! , Frédéric Dubois, Marc Tessier, and David Widgington function as editors, while there is collaborative authorship either in pairs or in larger groups who work on one piece of comics journalism. 47 further case in point can be found in The Photographer by Guibert et al., where authorship is multiple because di erent aspects of the visual images (the photographs, the illustrations, and the comic’s layout) are all produced by di erent people. 4 The Photographer presents photographs of Afghanistan by the French photographer Lefèvre who joined “Doctors Without Borders” on their mission in the mid-1980s. The book is contextualized as having been lived, photographed, and told by Didier Lefèvre; written and drawn by Emmanuel Guibert; and laid out and colored by Frédéric Lemercier. In this case, the role of the person responsible for the story is even more special—Lefèvre, who experienced life in Afghanistan, died in 2007 and told his experiences orally to his friend Guibert shortly before his death, who eventually wrote the story down. Regarding the notion of authorship, one can postulate that similar to genre theory, the understanding of authorship is subject to historical change. While in the Middle Ages, the terms “author” and “authority” referred to each other, because authors were those people who had acquired a high reputation and gained broad recognition. It is not until the Sturm and Drang era that a concept of the autonomous writer who ruled over her work on her own emerged. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries form the peak of this idealized concept of the author. Since the introduction of the Copyright Act in 1709 in England and since the disconnection from patronage, authorship started to become more professionalized. With the introduction of the concept of “genius” in mid-eighteenth-century England and Germany, authorship reached its peak. Authors are honored for their genuine, distinct, personal, and aesthetic writing style. Their works are praised for their originality and are eventually canonized, which marks the ‘Olympus’ each and every author strive for (cf. Assmann 76). All in all, the concept of the author-genius and the glori cation of the in uential author have characterized the reading and writing habits for a long time in the twentieth century. In our twenty rst-century-eyes, the situation seems to have changed. The authors have been given a greater say over time. In particular, comics journalists without a permanent institutional connection decide on their own where to go, which country to visit, which topics to cover, what they want to tell, and how they represent it verbally and visually. In the context of comics journalism, this means that—besides the journalistic investigation and writing process—they have a strong connection to the publishing house and its editor/ s, yet, they alone are responsible for the visual and verbal work, which includes 4 I have written about this piece of comics journalism elsewhere (cf. Schlichting, “Formen und Funktionen von Fotogra e in Graphic Novels”). 48 the panel layout, the panels’ arrangement on the page, as well as the overall design, such as the choice of colors and the drawing style (see Ch. 4.2.2). 5 As German SPIEGEL-author Isabell Hülsen puts it, “no medium today takes full credit for claiming the truth by itself ” (Hülsen 70, my translation). 6 Wolfgang Hallet rightly points out that a “truth claim” is associated with all journalistic formats (Hallet, “Be your own fact checker: Informationen überprüfen” 8). “At the same time, journalists and their personal view of things have come to the fore” (Hülsen 70, my translation). 7 Thus, the “author” as one prominent gure in the concept of “authorship” seems to be central and essential when approaching journalism and thus comics journalism, especially regarding narratological issues which may e ect the reliability and trustworthiness of a journalist. Accordingly, Hülsen suggests that the journalist and her personal view of things have to become more emphasized and transparent—a statement that surprises concerning the widespread claim to “objectivity“ of journalism, which intends to cover the news as neutrally as possible. Even if literary studies distinguish between a narrator and an (implied) authoring instance, journalism most likely will not challenge the fact that the author of a journalistic work can be equated with the person who does the research, or the archive work. 1.2 Hypotheses, Key estions, and Aims Bringing comics, authorship, literature, and journalism together necessitates considering several points. First, comics journalism is a genre. Like all genres, it, too, is subject to historical and cultural change, as well as to discursive negotiations. Generic borders are uent and might change over time, because a genre is a discursive pattern in society and seldom xed. If comics which are produced along with the standards and ethical rules of journalism highlight the genre’s claims to accuracy and trustworthiness, the medium, by contrast, challenges these claims against the set of authorial promises. The author and her way of the production process must then necessarily take on a more signi cant role and reveal strategies of authentication. Second, comics journalism is characterized by an intended subjectivity by the author. The image-related self-thematization is a central pattern of postmodern society. Visual media in uence and change ourselves and so does 5 Collaborative authorship can be di erentiated into “precursory,” “executive,” “declarative,” and “revisionary” authorship (cf. H. Love). Because I mainly discuss works of single authorship, I will not pursue this any further. 6 The original reads, “Kein Medium nimmt heute noch für sich in Anspruch, die Wahrheit gepachtet zu haben [. . . ].” 7 The original reads, “Gleichzeitig sind Journalisten und ihre persönliche Sicht auf die Dinge in den Vordergrund gerückt.” 49 photography when it is used as a visual medium for self-staging. Moreover, photography is everywhere in our “sel e culture” (Reichert 86). However, in a diachronic historical perspective, drawing which used to be the standard way to illustrate information is becoming the new old trend. A constitutive structural element of a medium is that it is de-personalized, which means that any personal intervention in the given mediation is excluded (cf. Kiefer 56). 8 However, the de-personalization of the medium does not hold for comics journalism. The trace of the handmade and the drawn comic is in itself a personal statement. Subsequently, it means that a new type of journalism replaces the illusion of objective journalism with attitude and personality and this is precisely what comics journalism does. Third, on a textual level, comics journalism is characterized by a striking overlap of the concepts between the author, narrator, and character. Hence, comics journalism collapses three distinct analytical levels into one. The narrator, which has been a “strictly textual category” (Margolin n. pag.) until now, can no longer be clearly distinguished from the author. This does not invalidate the analytical distinction of these levels, but instead highlights the intriguing nature of comics journalism as a hybrid genre between journalism and literature. The answer to this question seems to be found in a personrelated, namely author-centered approach to comics journalism. Hence, one has to readjust, adapt, and renegotiate narrative mediation to incorporate the concepts of author and narrator properly. That said, comics journalism is seen as a new borderline genre which oscillates between art, literature, culture, and journalism, and which cannot be clearly classi ed into one category. What is needed is a shifting of the boundaries between the literary and the journalistic sphere, particularly concerning authorship. Fourth, comics journalists uphold the importance of standard journalistic models for reporting, but they also embrace a more subjective form of reporting, which allows them to be more critical of powerful institutions, and more transparent about their own production process. “If objectivity means being fair to the truth and reporting facts accurately,” Wibke Weber and Hans-Martin Rall state, “comics journalists strive for objectivity. If objectivity means being unbiased and impartial, then comics journalism does not ful l this criterion” (Weber and H.-M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 3). Many authors stand by their opinion and try to re ect on what they have seen with their eyes. There has to be a translation between what is seen and what is drawn because this rupture is primarily caused by the time lag between the experience and the writing/ drawing of comics journalism. Hence, the process-oriented side of 8 The original reads, “ein Medium ist ent-persönlicht [. . . ] jede persönliche Intervention in das zu Vermittelnde ist ausgeschlossen.” 50 news making has to develop strategies of veri cation and authentication in order to disclose a transparent process to the nal product. Fifth, the role of the reader is pivotal in approaching comics journalism. The comics form allows a unique representation of multiple, yet simultaneous time levels and competing, yet coincident ways of seeing, knowing, happening, and being. For example, Scott McCloud, who is meanwhile named by the press as “the grandfather of comics” (McCloud, “An Interview with Scott McCloud” n. pag.), has coined the term “closure,” which describes the act of mentally lling in the gaps of what the readers observes between the panels, in the “gutter,” and thus allows to comprehend the action and meaning between two seemingly unrelated panels. The gutter is the empty, mostly tiny space forcing the reader to imagine what happens between one panel and the next. “Comic panels fracture both time and space, o ering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments,” posits Scott McCloud (McCloud, Understanding Comics 67). Nevertheless, closure allows to connect these moments and “mentally construct a continuous, uni ed reality” (67). The gutter, as he explains, “plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics” by enabling “the human imagination [to synthesize] two separate images and [transform] them into a single idea” (66). This means that readers understand the story by reading not between the lines but between the panels. As such, comics invite the reader to greater participation than traditional prose work (cf. Eisner 148). Against this backdrop, I wish to pursue three main objectives. First, I aim to give an overview of the numerous forms of contemporary comics journalism and highlight the unique role of the author and her authorship both on a text-immanent level and in the extratextual world. Second, until now, the heterogeneous works of comics journalism could not be examined systematically due to the lack of analytical categories of this relatively young eld of research. This is why I develop di erent possibilities of categorization, which help to systematize the phenomenon of comics journalism. Third, by considering the textual and extratextual level, I argue for a renegotiation of the literary concept of the author and, in turn, ask for the acceptance of comics journalism as a serious form of reporting. From this brief outline of central observations on comics journalism, the following research questions arise: • How is authorship presented in comics journalism? • What is the role of the author? • How do authors of comics journalism negotiate factual reporting, narrativization of content, and individual artistic presentation style? • Despite its claim to factuality, to what extent does comics journalism ctionalize? 51 1.3 Key Concepts and State of Research The term “comics” has to be used critically because, historically, one talks about very di erent things when thinking of forms. Over the years, the term “comics” has described an entire range of di erent cultural objects and opinions, including illustrated newspaper stories, comic strips, cartoons, underground comix, American style comics, or Franco-Belgian comics. Moreover, “comics” is sometimes used very broadly within both academic and non-academic discourse to refer to a considerable range of drawn media in combination with words. The discussion on the terminology—whether to speak of “comics,” “graphic books,” or “graphic novels”—is, after years of intensive debate, no longer of primary academic interest (cf. Thon and Stein 7; cf. Hescher 38; cf. Schlichting, “Formen und Funktionen von Fotogra e in Graphic Novels”). Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon suggest the label “graphic narrative,” which exhibits less connotations and allows for a more generic and content-related variety. It is thus more neutral when trying to discuss di erent new tendencies or phenomena, such as comics journalism. By intentionally using “comics” in this project, I want to contribute to establishing a serious non ctional status of comics and expand their thematic scope. By not using “graphic novel,” I agree with Jörn Ahrens who, in the context of media politics and contemporary culture, makes an argument for the “graphic novel” as a “term of cultural ennoblement” (cf. Ahrens, “Imagine Reality: Negotiating Comics with David B.’s ‘Epileptic’” 87) that was invented by the book industry’s marketing sector to increase sales (cf. Abel and Klein Ch. 8.3). For a rst impression and a grip on comics as a medium, I refer to The Power of Comics by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith. Moreover, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art explores formal, historical, and theoretical aspects of comics and is itself written in the form of a comic book. Because there are bookshelves of standard works on comics, two of the latest seminal works to be mentioned here are Comicanalyse: Eine Einführung (cf. Packard et al.) and Comics and Graphic Novels: Eine Einführung (cf. Abel and Klein). Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith’s publications The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture and Critical Approaches to Comics Theories and Methods are further references, including material for teaching. Because this study is located at the intersection of media, literary, cultural, and communication studies, it demands the use of multiple theoretical premises. In addition to comics and genre theory (cf. van Laak; cf. Zymner), journalistic concepts and intermedial approaches will be considered. With regard to “comics journalism,” questions of fact and ction, as well as objectivity and subjectivity, immediately arise. Thus, one can avoid neither these questions, nor mentioning concepts of truth and imagination. Moreover, as comics jour- 52 nalism works with di erent modes, such as semiotic, documentary, historical, and educational modes, concepts like “mediated authenticity,” “hybridity,” “mediation,” “witnessing,” and “self-referentiality” are useful and require further investigation throughout the study. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this project, it is necessary to de ne the underlying concepts, such as “journalism.” In contrast to “documentary,” in my research, “journalism” is in favor because it refers more precisely to what I consider as the most important aspects of news media—namely providing the public with relevant information about contemporary topics of social interest. Moreover, I also agree with Klaus Meier’s de nition, which summarizes that journalism researches, selects, and presents topics that are new, factual, and relevant (cf. K. Meier 13). Moreover, it creates a “public sphere by observing society, making this observation available to a mass audience via periodic media and thereby constructing a common reality. This constructed reality o ers orientation in a complex world” (13). 9 In compariosn, Matthias Revers states that the tasks of journalism are to gather, process, and distribute information to a broader public. Its power consists of conferring publicity to certain information and the actors providing or voicing this information (cf. Revers 5). Meier acknowledges that journalists understand, explain, and interpret topics while at the same time, they recognize and classify social e ects. Based on this understanding of journalism, Chapter 2.1 will explain further thoughts in length. The majority of comics scholars work with narratological instruments to describe the modes of narration and experiences in comics (cf. Ludewig; cf. Thon, “Fiktionalität in Film- und Medienwissenschaften”). However, one should refrain from imposing too much narratology, which would not do justice to comics journalism as a hybrid genre between several disciplines. That is why one should develop a more di erentiated toolkit to do justice to comics which are in uenced by literary criteria. Roel van den Oever is currently developing a comics narratology by expanding the often used narratological approach with theories from lm studies. He introduces three tracks—the verbal, the visual, and the spatial track (cf. van den Oever conference talk)— which allow a more speci c analysis of (non-) ction comics regarding their narrative mediation. Regarding non ction comics, Dirk Vanderbeke has published on “Comics as Political Journalism” (Vanderbeke) and discusses Joe Sacco’s pioneering works on Bosnia and Palestine. Although war zones are always also politically semanticized areas, Vanderbeke unfortunately does not elaborate on where 9 The original reads, “Journalismus recherchiert, selektiert und präsentiert Themen, die neu, faktisch und relevant sind. Er stellt Ö entlichkeit her, indem er die Gesellschaft beobachtet, diese Beobachtung über periodische Medien einem Massenpublikum zur Verfügung stellt und dadurch eine gemeinsame Wirklichkeit konstruiert. Diese konstruierte Wirklichkeit bietet Orientierung in einer komplexen Welt.” 53 non ction comics, journalism, and politics meet in those works and does not state why he thinks that Sacco does political journalism instead of something else. Furthermore, even if it is not limited to non ction or journalistic comics, Comics & Politics (cf. Packard, “Politisches im Comic und Comics in der Politik: Einleitung”) engages with the political sphere and politics in ctional and non ction comics. In particular, the genre of “reportage” plays a special role as a journalistic text type in comics journalism as well. Dietrich Grünewald, for example, intensively engages with the intersection of comics as an art form and as a historical document in Der dokumentarische Comic: Reportage und Biogra e . Grünewald treats comics as an art form of pictorial history (Grünewald, “Zwischen Fakt und Fiktion: Dokumentarische Bildgeschichten” 10). British comics scholar Nina Mickwitz published Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age and examines comics as documentary. This book challenges the persistent assumption that ties documentary to recording technologies. By using twenty- rst-century comics, she argues that these comics share a documentary ambition to visually narrate and represent aspects and events of the real world. In addition, the publication Disaster Drawn is seminal (cf. Chute, Disaster Drawn ). Hillary Chute analyzes how comics can function as documentaries for war, disaster, and trauma. Chute argues that comics—similar to historical writings and documentary lms as well as photographs—should be considered a serious form of communicating information and should not be underestimated. Despite, and because of their handcrafted character, the comics’ medium can express disasters of all kinds. In her mind, especially comics have the strength to express trauma and other catastrophes through drawings (cf. Disaster Drawn 33; cf. Schlichting, “Review. Disaster Drawn”). Furthermore, she emphasizes that drawing is not a modern phenomenon but a long-established form of historical observation (cf. Chute, Disaster Drawn 5). In addition, Annessa Ann Babic collects essays examining the role of comics as portals for historical and academic content (cf. Babic). Jörn Ahrens presents nine theses on the possibility of recon guring history in comics (cf. Ahrens, “Neun Thesen zur Möglichkeit einer Rekon guration von Geschichte im Comic”), which proceeds the tenth conference of the German Society of Comics Studies (“ComFor”) in 2015. Last, Bettina Severin-Barboutie and Sylvia Kesper-Biermann hosted an issue on comics of history in Europe, Asia, and America, which is called Ver ochtene Vergangenheiten: Geschichtscomics in Europa, Asien und Amerika . Mostly, questions of objectivity and stylization, memory, trauma, autobiography, mediality, self-re exivity, and aesthetics are at the heart of the scholarly discussion that has accompanied the rise of comics journalism. However, only a few articles focus on the role of authentication and immersion. As 54 early as 2012, Elisabeth El Refaie writes about “visual authentication strategies in autobiographical comics” (cf. Refaie, “Visual authentication strategies in autobiographical comics by Elisabeth El Refaie” n. pag.). Wibke Weber and Hans-Martin Rall focus on the investigation of visual authentication strategies. By conducting qualitative content analyses, they show that comics journalists employ di erent strategies to appear authentic and reliable. These strategies include “the author’s presence, physical resemblance, stylistic devices, documentary evidence, and the meta-story of the comic” (Weber and H. - M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 1). Their work has been particularly in uential for research on comics journalism. Furthermore, Augusto Paim analyzed, among others, the special role of the author’s sketchbook in comics reportages, Ästhetik der Comicreportage - Theorie und Praxis des journalistischen Erzählens in Comicform (cf. Paim). A comparative and narratological “close reading” (cf. Hallet, Methoden kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansätze: Close Reading und Wide Reading) of four comic reportages by looking at mediation, mediacy, and immediacy in comics reportages can be found in “The Art of Comic Reportage” (cf. Ludewig). Meta-re ection and mediatedness also play a role in Johannes Schmid’s work on Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics , because comics not only make transparent how the authors lter their own experiences but commonly also acknowledges how their mediality frames their content (cf. J. C. P. Schmid). The use of graphic narrative to document actual events serves as a self-re exive problematization of what it means to represent reality. Three of the rst researchers who dedicated themselves to comics journalism and who provided important impulses were the following scholars: American author and journalist Kristian Williams talks about “serious non ction comics about current events” (Williams 52), Amy Kiste Nyberg, who characterizes comics journalism as an art that “foreground[s] the role of the journalist as narrator” (Nyberg 105, 111), and Benjamin Woo, who strongly criticizes the concept of “comics journalism” in general, saying that “[g]iven the dominance of the discourses of objectivity and veri cation in the journalistic eld, [. . . ] the label ‘comics journalism’ is misleading” (Woo 176). I do not share his opinion and would like to refute this statement in the following. 1.4 Corpus, Methodological Issues, and Outline This study mainly focuses on works by American authors which have been published since 2010. Most strikingly, a great number of pieces of comics journalism has been focusing on explaining global events to a North American audience. However, my selection is not based on national origin. Although the emphasis lies on works created in the English language, mostly from the United States, I will also refer to pieces of comics journalism which have 55 been written in other countries and other languages. As comics journalism occurs in all kinds of non ctional information from around the world, this overview should not be restricted by language barriers. And yet, large parts of the world’s corpus of comics journalistic corpus are left out; among these are countries that also have a rich tradition of visual text/ image narration, such as Japan and its mangas, and the entire Franco-Belgian tradition of the bande dessinée . Because one aim of this study is to provide a de nition of the genre of comics journalism, my case studies are mainly based on material from the USA, supplemented by examples from Europe, such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. The predominance of British and American works is because media technologies and trends have traditionally been implemented earlier in these regions. In German-speaking countries, these comics only came into focus when feuilletonists started to discuss works by Reinhard Kleist, Ulli Lust, mawil, and Nicolas Mahler in the ‘mainstream’ press. Nevertheless, the common feature of these works is that they are created by one author who is responsible for every step in the production—from the idea to the nal product. Because the corpus of comics journalism is extremely broad, I will select seven printed comics and ten digital comics for in-depth analyses out of many more primary works considered in the course of this study. Because a considerable body of research has already been devoted to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s pioneering works like Palestine or Safe Area Goražde , and although they decisively shaped the notion of what has turned out as comics journalism nowadays, I am intentionally working with other primary examples which Nina Mickwitz has nicely described as “post- Maus ” books (Mickwitz 9, emphasis in original). For example, Dan Archer has worked on a number of topics related to social justice, from homelessness and the nancial crisis to human tra cking; Matt Bors has written on the proliferation of weapons, war and the death penalty in the United States; Susie Cagle has published works on wild res and the e ect of climate change on droughts; Sarah Glidden travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other countries, to accompany the journalists she is friends with while creating a reportage about the war; Josh Neufeld worked on Hurricane Katrina, and Kate Evans voluntereed to help in the French refugee camp ‘The Jungle.’ This study consists of three thematic chapters, which, to a great extent, can be read independently of any other. The second chapter sets out the theoretical foundation of the project. It deals with the ve reasons I hold responsible for the growth of and the interest in comics journalism—the changing journalistic eld and profession (see Ch. 2.1), the dealing with truth (see Ch. 2.2), the impression of an authentic mediation of reality (see Ch. 2.3), the reinvigoration of drawings compared to photography (see Ch. 2.4), and the use of narrative 56 strategies in journalism following the New Journalism movement (see Ch. 2.5). In addition, Chapter 2.6 lists three categories to classify comics journalism—the way and medium of publication (see Ch. 2.6.1), the duration of production (see Ch. 2.6.2), and the journalistic genre (see Ch. 2.6.3). The latter adopts a model of journalistic text types and transfers their characteristics to comics journalism in order to arrive at what I call ‘features of comics journalism.’ Chapter 3 constitutes the core of this study and attempts to bring together concepts of narrative mediation and testimony to make them fruitful for comics journalism, without, however, privileging the discipline of journalism over literature. In the rst part, I will develop the ‘comics journalistic pact’ as a new approach to conceptualizing the author’s role in comics journalism. The pact is established between the reader and the author and is based on mutual belief and dependence. It looks at the role of the comics journalist on a textual and extratextual level. Hence, this study develops three constituents of this pact in more detail. I call them ‘voice,’ ‘face,’ and ‘hands.’ These are umbrella terms and stand for narrativization/ mediation (“voice,” see Ch. 3.1), point of view/ focalization/ witnessing (“face,” see Ch. 3.2), and action/ engagement (“hands,” see Ch. 4.1) of the author. The latter part is discussed in the next chapter because of the author’s involvement in the real world. The subchapter on ‘voice’ analyzes how voice occurs on the level of the storyworld. This also includes comics journalism’s aim of voice-giving to people at the margins of society (see Ch. 3.1.1). This thematic mapping leads to the development of new forms, such as ‘migration comics’ and ‘prison comics.’ In the following subchapter (see Ch. 3.1.2), I discuss the concepts of “author” and “narrator” in more detail, because literary studies—in contrast to journalism— strongly di erentiates between them. Eventually, I introduce my model of narrative mediation in comics journalism which distinguishes between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ narration, as well as ‘verbality’ and ‘visuality.’ This results in four possible narrative forms of comics journalism (see Ch. 3.1.3). Because self-re ection is one of the main features of comics journalism, the last part of this section will be about metaization, which can be assigned to the concept of voice and investigates self-references to content, form, and production (see Ch. 3.1.4). The latter subchapter particularly focuses on paratexts as means of authentication. The second component of the pact, ‘face,’ relates to the visual representation of the author in the storyworld. For this purpose, the term ‘cartoon-me’ is introduced (see Ch. 3.2.3), because the face plays a signi cant role in comics journalism and ful lls di erent tasks. Seeing and being seen is another characteristic of comics journalists. Therefore, this subchapter also deals with the concept of testimony and witnessing, and makes it fruitful for the journalistic aspect in comics journalism (see Ch. 3.2.1). Moreover, the visual (self-)presentation 57 of the author is reminiscent of the genre “autobiography.” Although comics journalism may contain personal references to the author in small numbers, the autobiography must be explicitly distinguished from comics journalism, because the author has many roles, but not that of the story’s protagonist (see Ch. 3.2.2). Last, the question of collaborative authorship in comics journalism is examined (see Ch. 3.2.4), because ‘collaborative authorship’ poses challenges to the ‘comics journalistic pact’ concerning the authorial view of experiencing, witnessing, telling, drawing, and general creating of a work of comics journalism. This topic leads to the next chapter, which deals with the author’s strategies for authentication and veri cation of content and person in the extratextual ‘real’ world (see Ch. 4). Hence, the third part of the pact analyzes the role of the author’s hands (see Ch. 4.1). ‘Hands’ is chosen as a symbol of the actual work, involvement, and commitment of the comics journalist to her subject and the topic of investigation. The focus lies on the comics journalist as a handicraftswoman (see Ch. 4.1.1), as a messenger (see Ch. 4.1.2), and as a (political) activist (see Ch. 4.1.3). One further characteristic of comics journalism is that an interpretation of this genre must take into account some of the author’s actions in the extratextual world. On the one hand, this includes an understanding of the working methods and conditions of comics journalists (see Ch. 4.2). On the other hand, it concerns the author’s handling and inclusion of the Internet for authentication measures, transparency, and fact-checking. In this context, the leading role of social media is analyzed in particluar (see Ch. 4.3). The comics journalist’s involvement blurs the boundaries between the textual level and the real world even if it does not dissolve them completely. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I will summarize the ndings of thsi study and discuss potential topics for future research in the eld of comics journalism and non ction comics. 58 Chapter 2 Theoretical Premises and Generic Constituents of Comics Journalism Over the last decade, there has been a renewed interest in comics. Comics studies face an increasing questioning of their theoretical base, predominantly through models from narratology, semiotics, and cultural studies. In particular, recent comics scholarship has started to place greater emphasis on non ction, analyzing the form’s graphic, material, and aesthetic dimensions. This was not always the case. Therefore, this chapter examines possible reasons which might have supported the rise of comics journalism in the last years. I suggest ve issues: First, I consider the changing journalistic eld and profession of Western journalism with some of its shortcomings that are responsible for the troubles established journalism has to cope with (see Chapter 2.1). 1 Second, sometimes it seems as if facts have lost their xed status in relation to reality and meaning. The challenge of the representation of facts and ction, as well as the impact of objectivity have to be discussed because comics are a ctional medium which wants to deliver facts to its readership (see Chapter 2.2). Third, the narrative mediation with the role of the author and narrator of a piece of work, as well as the knowledge about how news are made is essential to acknowledge the mediated character of the news despite all claims of authenticity (see Chapter 2.3). Fourth, the increasing popularity of drawings connects to the basic 1 I am primarily focussing on Germany and the United States and am well aware of the fact that the term “Western” cannot be left unre ected. In this context, it is to be understood in geographical and democratic terms only. 59 mode of showing in comics. Sketches and drawings are the basic constituents of this medium and foreground their indexicality and handmade character (see Chapter 2.4). Fifth, standing in the tradition of literary journalism, especially of the New Journalism movement, comics journalism is willing to leave the level of objectivity and permit the subjective representation of experiences and emotions (see Chapter 2.5). Eventually, the last section of this chapter o ers three possibilities to categorize comics journalism regardless of authorship (see Chapter 2.6). 2.1 Changing Journalistic Field and Profession Journalism is living through interesting times. Formats are changing, audiences fragmenting, the exchanges between quality and tabloid are accelerating. (Conboy, “Permeation and Profusion” 1) Journalism has sometimes struggled with speci c institutions in each subject it is involved with: “[w]hether politics, arts, business, sports—journalism makes truth claims in these areas” (Revers 5). Chris Peters argues that “the response to this supposedly ‘ ctional’ newscast nonetheless reveals a highly politicized skepticism about the actual news media and a corresponding—although fairly depoliticized and surprisingly uniform—nostalgic lament for the journalism of days gone by” (Peters 603). Experts agree that journalism has changed, that processes do not run as they used to only a few years ago, and that new models must be found in order to produce ‘quality journalism.’ Time and resources, according to Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, publisher of the 167-year-old New York Times , are the two factors that are most at risk in contemporary journalism. If journalism is given time, traveling equipment, expertise, lawyers, and fact checks, the idea of ‘quality journalism’ will not disappear (cf. Spiegel 70). If one understands journalism as an institution and the media as iterative links for providing the public with information, one must distinguish between journalism change and media change (cf. Kiefer 191). In this work, journalism change is understood as a reaction, as a kind of adaptation to and result of structural, especially mental change in society. Media change, in contrast, is the adaptation to the respective state of the art. However, the boundary is frequently not a clear-cut one due to back coupling. For example, media not only follow a technical, but also a social level of knowledge. Expectations of today’s journalism have never been higher. The bene ts that media can bring to a democratic system are widely agreed upon. But what are the standards that determine the quality of journalistic texts? How does journalism arm itself against accusations of what has become known as “fake 60 news? ” 2 Stephan Russ-Mohl, Heinz-Werner Nienstedt, and Bartosz Wilczek state that “[j]ournalism is under increasing pressure, due in large part to the phenomenon of media convergence“ (Russ-Mohl et al. 3). The authors are worried and bear in mind that if we do not support change and know how to make the best of the journalistic crisis, quality journalism will sooner or later “vanish in the Bermuda triangle of cyberspace” (3). Media involvement, political interests, citizens’ desire to participate—in short, change is being called for from every side, and journalists have to cope with it. Consequently, a concept of journalism is needed which takes into consideration current processes of de-di erentiation and the dissolution of boundaries without normatively excluding them (cf. Lünenborg 412). A more openly used concept of journalism does not restrict itself to discussing recurrent features of a text but sees itself as a cultural mediator between societies, institutions, and subjects, allowing people to express their opinion while also permitting a multitude of interpretations. 2.1.1 Defining Journalism I would like to start with a question that has been discussed over and over again ever since the rst forms of journalism emerged: ‘What is Journalism? ’ Everybody knows what journalism is. Readers, viewers, listeners, browsers and producers of journalism are all convinced that they know when they are in its presence. The problem is that [. . . ] journalism means many things to di erent audiences. (Conboy, “Global Literary Journalism” 395) According to Martin Conboy, professor of journalism history at She eld University, the answer is straightforward: journalism is everything or nothing, depending on the person one asks; journalism takes di erent forms and can be understood di erently by people. Hence, one could skip this question and switch to the next; but unfortunately it is not that simple. In his “Afterword: Between the Liminal and the Literary,” Conboy states that journalism lives through its “vitality, its dynamism, its protean qualities or re-birth or rebranding” (Conboy, “Global Literary Journalism” 395). He goes on to argue that this is the reason why it is essential to continue a steady discussion of what journalism is or is not, or what it should be or not, because this is the way “we continue to expand our understanding of the borders and the contours of the journalistic eld” (395). Yet, the question of how one can separate the journalistic from the literary eld remains to be answered? What is journalism? 2 The term describes an accusation to the press of spreading false news and requires the reader’s awareness about the sovereignty of interpretation of media representations. 61 Because this study also supports comics as a serious medium for writing in science and history, the following quotation from a primary work that is of outstanding relevance to this project is worth mentioning here: “One de nition people are using that I like is: anything that is informative, veri able, accountable, and independent” ( RB 26), explains Sarah Stuteville to Sarah Glidden in Rolling Blackouts (see Chapter 3.1.4). Glidden also summarizes her answer to the question “What is Journalism? ” (see Fig. 2.1). The answer to this question is anything but straightforward and easy, because journalism means di erent things to di erent people. Perhaps, one could rephrase the question about journalism and inquire about its purpose: ‘What is journalism for? ’ (see Fig. 2.1). There are many ways to characterize journalism. In journalism studies itself, a bundle of de nitions is circulating, which is not that surprising because it is a key term (cf. Neuberger and Kapern 25). Depending on the aim, each theory discusses journalism and its functions di erently (cf. Lö elholz; cf. K. Meier; cf. K. Meier and Neuberger). Some scholars examine journalism as a system; some consider it a profession; for some people, it is equivalent to speci c media like newspapers, radio, or TV, while others may see journalism as the entirety of people producing texts for a public. Furthermore, journalism can also be seen as a “complex social practice that assumes a variety of guises, from banner headlines and celebrity pro les to investigative reporting and cable punditry.” What Kent Worcester is claiming is that journalism should not be reduced to “dutiful, impersonal, fact-laden prose” (Worcester 127) and that in its “ideal form, journalism serves the public interest by informing readers and viewers about the world at large” (127). Still, this de nition is not su ciently precise because it does not answer the question of who decides what is interesting to the public. While many de nitions share the acknowledgment of journalism as an integral part of modern society, journalism can also be approached as a speci c mode of writing. Maureen Ramsden writes in her article (“The Reporter as Artist”) that journalism is “commonly seen as a largely objective form of writing which deals with the noteworthy events of the world of actuality and may appear totally opposed to ctional works” (23). This de nition has the advantage that it is very connectable to current comics research. Nina Mickwitz, for example, speaks of a “documentary mode” in the eld of non ction comics which permits the representation of a multitude of occasions—based on actual events and facts—in non ction, without always having to separate the terms journalism and history (cf. Mickwitz). I want to come back to the de nition by Klaus Meier quoted in the introductory chapter to this project, because it is one of the most in uential and detailed explanations—journalism researches, selects, and presents topics that are new, 62 Figure 2.1: Page, “What is Journalism? ” ( Rolling Blackouts 296) 63 factual, and relevant. It creates a public sphere by observing society, making this observation available to a mass audience via periodic media and thereby constructing a common reality. This constructed reality o ers orientation in a complex world (cf. K. Meier 13). Based on this understanding of journalism, three di erent observations become obvious in comics journalism, which will be explained in the following. 2.1.2 Topicality and Relevance First, comics journalism can hardly ful ll the condition of “topicality” because of the dependence on the way and medium of publication (see Chapter 2.6). Topicality is a multilayered term and an essential issue in the news industry. The concept can be understood in di erent senses, such as the “novelty,” “factuality,” and “relevance” of the new and interesting information to be presented, as Meier argues. 3 Second, comics journalism cannot a ord an instantaneous publication and production process, as it is the case with the news distribution in newspaper, television, and radio broadcasting (see Chapter 2.6). Although there are platforms which publish news on speci c topics on a regular—but not daily—basis, comics journalism is not published periodically for the most part. Thus, comics journalism cannot be equated with daily news coverage. In other words, the format can be chosen depending on the urgency of a topic. Third, whereas established journalism addresses a mass audience, comics journalism— although its readership increases—does not claim to be written for a mass of readers, but ekes out a niche existence. 4 Concerning “relevance,” one can state that di erent theories of knowledge have di erent implications for what is considered to be relevant. It comes as no surprise that this criterion is di cult to de ne, highly subjective, and can only be answered in relation to what matters and to whom. “Relevance,” thus, might be explained as follows: that which concerns the majority of citizens at a speci c point in time is relevant and thus covered by the news. Alternatively, it can be de ned as that which is necessary for the functioning of a sociopolitical 3 Regarding topicality in local newspapers, Jörg Kleine di erentiates between “Ereignisaktualität,” “Themenaktualität,” and “Aktualität durch exklusive Beiträge” (Kleine 96). The events and topics to which the news refers happened only a few minutes, hours, or days ago, depending on the way and medium of publication (print or digital). By “actuality of events,” he means the editorial o ces’ practice of inserting local news from the late evening such as, for example, reports about car accidents, and sports or cultural events, into the newspaper, for example, reports about car accidents, and sports or cultural events. “Thematic actuality” refers to the adoption and explanation of national stories of a day for a local readership on the part of editorial o ces (cf. Kleine 96-97). 4 One has to acknowledge that this is only a hypothesis and needs to be veri ed because empirical data on the reading habits regarding comics journalism—and thus also information on the readership—is still a desideratum. 64 system in order to keep its members and subsystems informed, and as that which matters most to them at that time. Hence, one has to de ne a target group, a speci c point of time or time span, and the reason why something should matter when speaking of “relevance.” Before I introduce the de nition of “crisis,” I want to brie y explain the “news value theory,” because it is still used in journalism training today. The rst study on news value goes back to Walter Lippmann in 1922, who coined the term “news value,” and who identi ed ten elements of it. The news value de nes small reportable characteristics of events. Over the years, researchers have identi ed further factors that they understand as “culture-independent” (valid in all cultures) and “culture-dependent.” A di erent theoretical approach was provided when considering constructivism. The reorientation consists in the fact that news factors are not seen as features of events, but as journalistic hypothesis of reality (cf. Schulz). This means that it is not the characteristics of an event that determine what the media publish, but that the journalist ascribes certain characteristics that she considers as worthy of publication to an event and thus actively gives them news value through her selection. This means that an event with characteristics XY is not automatically published. Only the editor or the publisher can in uence whether XY is published at this time. In comics journalism, as we will see, journalists have a much greater (instrumental) role in the construction of news. The question of news factors must also be asked anew on the recipient side. Due to increasing digitalization, however, new challenges arise for news production and are in uenced, for example, by search engine optimizations, social media performances, and the nancing concept. Nevertheless, “relevance” is a criterion that also matters in comics journalism, but in a way that is markedly di erent from established media. In principle, there is no thematic barrier. However, topics that cannot be classi ed as daily or breaking news, but which are of general contemporary relevance covering a more extended period, or that constitute ongoing and often pressing concerns are frequently the main focus of long-form comics journalism. For instance, sociopolitical topics, such as human tra cking (Archer), poorness (Warner), homelessness (Paim et al.), the war over water against large companies in South America (Corsio et. al), the e ects of the Middle Eastern con ict (Glidden, Rall, Sacco), or migration and ight (Evans, de Jongh, Kleist, Nieuwland, Vanistendael) are topics that take some time for research, investigation, and the production process. Therefore, one could argue that both macrostructural geopolitical problems that cannot be solved overnight and timeless topics, such as love, sex, education, housing shortage, and work, are relevant to comics journalism (cf. Lust et al., alltagsspionage: Comicreportagen aus Berlin ; cf. Lust et al., Operation Läckerli: comicreportagen aus basel ). 65 Indeed, the withdrawal of the media does not suggest that the problem or topic has been solved or disappeared. In more signi cant geopolitical and socially critical matters, news media would need to continue reporting, such as in the reporting about the refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, which was the preferred entry point into the European Union in 2015 for nearly one million Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis. Although Lesbos might not have received as much attention by established media in 2017 as before, comics journalists still went there, among them the Dutch comics author Aimée de Jongh as well as her colleagues Judith Vanistendael and Mei-Li Nieuwland. They visited the two main camps on Lesbos from 17-24 October 2017. De Jongh and Nieuwland went for an investigation to the camp Kara Tepe, while Vanistendael visited camp Moria. 5 They went there at the end of summer when the harsh winter months were slowly approaching. As de Jongh says in a short interview I conducted with her via email in September 2018, all three authors drew their experiences from the same week and wrote about the same circumstances. Their visit resulted in three works of comics journalism: “Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room,” “One Day in Kara Tepe,” and “Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos.” On 10 September 2018, the detention center on the island of Lesbos was declared “dangerous for public health” and faces closure due to more than 9,000 people living there and due to a lack of sanitary systems. 6 Often, media outlets cannot a ord a long-term accompaniment and constant observation by their sta , even if larger institutions are still doing better than nancially weaker ones. The reporting about long-term topics is less a question of a lack of will on the part of the journalists than one of simply not being able to go on reporting, which is due to various factors that contribute to the current situation of the journalistic eld. Therefore, the following section gives an overview of the challenges and changes in contemporary Western journalism. 2.1.3 Crisis Although access to information journalism has probably never been as easy and widespread as nowadays, journalists and journalism scholars have often been speaking of a “crisis of journalism” since the mid-2000s (cf. Cottle). However, they often refrain from explaining what exactly they refer to and what they criticize, because not everything is struggling or in ux in journalism. The term “crisis” originates from Greek “ ϰρίσις ϰρ΄ ıσις ,” and, among other things, originally means “opinion” or “judgment” (cf. Krise n. pag.). Because each 5 Moria is a former military compound consisting of shipping containers and tents. It has long been criticized by the United Nations and other human rights organizations as being overcrowded and un t for humans. 6 In January 2020, the camp still existed, with 19,000 refugees living there. 66 judgment requires “decisions”, another way to read “crisis” is to consider it with regard to decision-making. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2019/ 2020 is by far a good example of a situation in which governments have to decide how to cope with the crisis that tremendously a ects all aspects of our lives worldwide. In the journalistic context, “crisis” means di erent things and can refer to various reasons for the situation we are facing nowadays. I understand “crisis” as a critical time span or the result of a decision which—if it was not handled in an appropriate and timely manner, or if it was not solved at all—may turn out to deteriorate the overall situation even further. Thus, crises occur whenever chaotic situations result in disorder and thus have become a topic of discussion in society. Not only in times of the Corona virus is the term “crisis” a frequently used word and describes an even more signi cant period of a society’s state. Ansgar Nünning once has designated this phenomenon as a “crisis in ation” (A. Nünning, “Steps Towards a Metaphorology” 239). In the context of his research on metaphors (cf. “Steps Towards a Metaphorology” 243), Nünning exempli es the power of metaphors by the case of “crisis.” In his view, metaphors are “mininarrations,” which are narratives that are compressed into a single word (cf. “Steps Towards a Metaphorology” 229-230). By claiming that a speci c situation is a “crisis,” a repeating plot pattern can be found—active crisis managers, crisis management plans, and purposeful actions (cf. “Steps Towards a Metaphorology” 243.). “For this reason a crisis diagnosis is always already more than a speci c de nition of the situation, and, in retrospect, oftentimes appears as a self-ful lling prophecy” (243). Hence, to be more careful, it seems to be more appropriate to use rather neutral terms, such as “development,” “troubles,” and “challenges,” and to discuss the negative as well as positive aspects of the situation at hand. Applied to the analysis of today’s journalistic eld, I suggest to be careful when speaking of “crisis” because—especially through digitalization—many processes, techniques, and products have changed for the better and are no longer technically comparable to the past, but have improved indeed. Moreover, the term “crisis” is acquiring more and more negative connotations. It does not do justice to the entire development that results from digitalization and the rise of the Internet , although there are good reasons to speak of a “crisis,” as Martin Lö elholz posits when speaking of a ‘deep crisis of meaning’ of the entire journalistic sector (Lö elholz qtd. in Weischenberg 1997, 171). 7 However, instead of using generalisations of an entire branch, I think it makes more sense to examine this supposed crisis from various aspects. Helge Matthiesen, editor in chief of the German newspaper General-Anzeiger in Bonn, argued that if one speaks of a “crisis,” it is not a crisis of journalism, but of the 7 The original reads, “tiefe Sinnkrise der ganzen Branche.” 67 nancing of journalism, which has been triggered by demographic change and changing reading habits (cf. Gesprächsrunde 10 October 2018, Bonner GA’s newsroom). In the United States, for example, journalism is said to be “at a transformational moment,” “the economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers, long supported by advertising, is collapsing, and newspapers themselves, which have been the country’s chief source of independent reporting, are shrinking—literally” (Downie and Schudson n. pag.). According to Michael Schudson, [f]ewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the twentieth century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending. Commercial television news, which was long the chief rival of printed newspapers, has also been losing its audience, its advertising revenue, and its reporting resources. (Downie and Schudson n. pag.) Whereas Schudson limits his criticism to television, Roß stresses various points, for example, the rapid ood of an excess of information, the mixing of facts and entertainment, the selection of the importance and urgency of the information, as well as a lack of accuracy of the news presented in the media: Heute und erst recht in Zukunft drohen Deformation und Bedeutungsverlust des Journalismus [. . . ] von einer Beliebigkeit, die alle zuverlässigen Gestaltungs- und Wahrnehmungsparameter des Journalismus aufheben könnte: eine o enbar unaufhaltsame Ausuferung der Kommunikationstechniken; eine total kommerzialisierte Industrialisierung der Medien; die wachsende Unüberschaubarkeit und Kurzlebigkeit aller Information; die allgegenwärtige Symbiose von Wichtigem und Banalem, von Ö entlichem und Privatem, von Politik und Entertainment, von Publizistik und Werbung. . . Gemessen an diesem Potential von Unwahrhaftigkeit und Verzerrung bleiben alle möglichen Übergri e der Literatur auf den Journalismus denn doch eher harmlose (und oft: an- oder aufregende! ) Randerscheinungen. (Roß 98) The last sentence takes up a thought that is of particular relevance for this project but that does not do justice to the subject of this study because the in uence of literature on the journalistic content is framed as “Übergri .” It can be translated as “encroachment,” but this term seems to be too harsh and inappropriate here because, rst and foremost, this word is used to describe sexual assaults or legal attacks. Choosing this noun with its rather negative connotations indirectly suggests a negative attitude towards any attempt on 68 the part of literature to intersect with journalism. Roß goes on to argue that the introduction of literary elements and strategies is still the least important factor contributing to the crisis of journalism, acknowledging that it is a harmless, marginal, though inspiring and exciting phenomenon. 2.1.4 Change Every crisis involves change, whereas not necessarily every change must end up in a crisis. Similar to “crisis,” “change” is an omnipresent term in various research elds of communication and media studies nowadays (cf. Kinnebrock et al. 12). Journalism changed, sometimes dramatically, as the nation changed—its economics (because of the growth of large retailers in major cities), demographics (because of the shifts of population from farms to cities and then to suburbs), and politics (because early on political parties controlled newspapers and later lost power over them) (Downie and Schudson n. pag.) Jürgen Wilke, for example, speaks of a ‘total phenomenon’ (“Totalphänomen”) of media change (cf. Wilke 29), because communication scholars deal with “change” in almost all areas in which society is involved to some extent. Here, communication studies look at change occurring in a medialized and mediatized communication environment, and at change in society concerning social and cultural phenomena. Friedrich Krotz observes a two-way dependency— media change is the requirement for mediatization, and vice versa. They in uence each other and cannot be treated separately (cf. Krotz 132). Additionally, “change” is often analyzed with regard to political and democratic issues, such as the question of how current politics is communicated to citizens (cf. Esser and Stömbäck; Kepplinger). Furthermore, it is also discussed in the context of the participation of citizens and non-journalistic experts in a social dialogue between politics and media institutions (cf. Mattoni and Treré). With this, “change” can apply to di erent parts, as Wilke observes. For example, it can refer to the media system as a whole, to media technologies and media institutions, media production and products, that is, media content and media formats, as well as media audiences and media impact (cf. Wilke 29). 8 This project is particularly interested in the change of media content and formats, its institutions, as well as its production. Traditional print journalism has to cope with the demographic change of society because the readership is getting older. According to the Institut für 8 The original reads, “Mediensystem als Ganzes, die Medientechnologien und Medieninstitutionen, die Medienproduktion und die Produkte, also die Medieninhalte und Medienformate, ferner die Medienpublika und die Medienwirkung.” 69 Demoskopie Allensbach , 54 percent of the Germans have the feeling that our society is strongly changing, while 22 percent say it is very strongly changing (cf. F.A.Z . am Sonntag, 9 July 2017). One reason for this is that the numbers of the young and the old are not balanced in the statistics. The second point is that the readers of the news are aged 50 or older (cf. Kleine 96). The following questions remain to be answered: ‘How to attract young readers? And how to make the news interesting for them? ’ Although the understanding of “change” in media studies is decisive for the understanding of change in sociocultural discourses, it is impossible to nd the one de nition of and the one way of coping with “change.” Instead, one should accept as many heterogeneous perspectives on and approaches as possible to discussions of “change” with regard to di erent questions, because the “change” of culture and society directly depends on “media change” (cf. Kinnebrock et al.). The term “media change” is often referred to and used in the sense of a “new media” change of technologies and technical innovations. 9 With their publication Theorien des Medienwandels , Kinnebrock et. al provide a substantial overview, and theorize as well as systematize media change by approaching the diachronic nature of change. The authors, too, observe that “change” is di cult to de ne (cf. Kinnebrock et al. 13). As a result, “change” often remains unde ned; as John Postill admits, “[b]efore we know it, the mind boggles and we have added ‘social change’ to our mental list of esoteric concepts that are best left unde ned, along with ‘culture,’ ‘society’ and the like” (Postill 7). Crises often cause people to rethink and to nd creative solutions. In 2013, Amazon boss Je Bezos bought the Washington Post for 250 million US dollars and invested much money in the operation and modernization of the newspaper. Furthermore, billionaire John Henry, owner of the baseball team Boston Red Sox, purchased the Boston Globe , and biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times for 500 million US dollars in 2018. All newspapers had been a ected severely by the decline in print advertising revenues and were thus forced to look for new ways of nancing and nding a readership. This dependency and making dependent can be discussed, but this will not be pursued here. Mathias Döpfner, German manager and president of the Association of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV), has become particularly famous for his media management with the repositioning of the Axel Springer publishing house (15,000 employees and 3.3 billion euros in sales) even beyond Germany by reacting to the development of digitalization not only passively but also proactively. Döpfner, for example, bought digital display portals, promoted start-up programs for small companies, and successfully implemented a paid 9 For further reading, cf. Ribeiro. 70 content model as one of the rst big publishing houses in the German-speaking community. As one of the leading thinkers in the eld of journalism, Döpfner notes: The future belongs to journalists and publishers who make journalism technically progressive, aesthetically new, and di erent, but and this is essential radically quality-oriented in terms of content, by retaining old qualities [...]. The young generation has become more critical, more challenging, more media-oriented. 10 (Döpfner 64-65, my translation) Neither in the United States, nor in Great Britain, nor in Germany, one cannot deny that journalism is undergoing rapid change. The ‘new’ and the ‘old’ methods and media have to be cleverly connected. One tries to keep the approved journalistic qualities and techniques while implementing new technical processes and ideas. Interestingly, Döpfner not only speaks of lagging behind, but also of becoming “new and di erent” and “technically progressive.” Similarly, Robert G. Picard, who is the research director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, claims that change, variation, and modi cation are necessary to survive in the media business. Moreover, news agencies should follow up on developments in the media world at once (cf. Russ-Mohl et al. 4). 11 The question of whether speaking of a “crisis of journalism” frames the current situation too narrowly and remains to be answered, however. Only a few days before the opening of the world’s largest book fair in Frankfurt am Main in October 2018, the magazine Tagesspiegel published an article in which it speaks of an “existential crisis” in the book industry (Bartels n. pag.), building its claim on three observations. The crisis is caused, rst, by the decline in book consumption 12 ; second, by the consequences of digitalization, and third, by the failure to award the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, which—as a 10 The original reads, “Die Zukunft gehört Journalisten und Verlegern, die Journalismus technisch progressiv, ästhetisch neu und anders, aber - und das ist essenziell - inhaltlich radikal qualitätsorientiert gestalten, indem sie an alten Qualitäten festhalten [. . . ]. Die junge Generation jedenfalls ist kritischer, anspruchsvoller, medienkompetenter geworden.” 11 Yet, there is the question of what good journalism is because it can mean di erent things to di erent people. “Good journalism” is connected to the concept of “quality” and creates a vivid debate because the adjective and its meaning are highly subjective. However, profound local knowledge and expertise, in-depth investigation, and the contextualization of facts might be the most critical constituents of so-called “quality journalism.” 12 According to a study by “Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung”, which was presented by the “Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels” in 2018, six million readers did not purchase a book at all within the last ve years (cf. Kaube 15). However, the fact that the British and American book markets have recently experienced considerable growth in the non ction genre is a further aspect of the overall picture (16). 71 once prestigious institution—symbolically stands for an entire ‘book crisis.’ Jürgen Kaube, a journalist by profession himself, concludes that one cannot speak of a ‘crisis of reading’ per se. Instead, statistics depict a change in the recipients’ leisure behavior (Kaube 16). For the USA, the challenge is to turn the current moment of transformation into a reconstruction of American journalism, “enabling independent reporting to emerge enlivened and enlarged from the decline of long-dominant news media” (Downie and Schudson n. pag.). He goes on to say that what is paramount is “preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or pro table, and regardless of the medium in which it appears” (n. pag.). However, the common sense is that traditional journalism—print, TV, and radio—is in trouble and faces challenges that I will examine in the following section, and comics journalism can overcome them by o ering alternative ways of production and reception. 2.1.5 List of Challenges Because I consider Rolling Blackouts 13 to be ‘meta-comics journalism’ (see Chapter 3.1.4), which is journalism about journalism in comics form, I quote from it to show what journalists themselves say about their current job situation. That issue of people thinking journalism is unethical. . . it enrages me so much, but I also know what they’re talking about. Well, there are so many things that are contributing to the decline of journalism as we know it. And much of it has to do with the Internet and economic models and so forth. But a lot of it has to do with elitism and arrogance and people losing trust in journalists and news outlets. [. . . ] And the rise of cable news and their style of gotcha journalism, and journalism being really politicized so there’s Left outlets and Right outlets . . . There are a lot of reasons it fell apart and most of them don’t re ect particularly well on the industry. But I feel like that’s the industry, not the profession. It’s hard for people to make that distinction, but it’s important. ( RB 273) In this quote from RB , some problems journalism faces nowadays are already mentioned. Almost every sentence corresponds to a di erent thought by Sarah Glidden, who is the author of the book. In her opinion, journalism’s decline is in uenced, among other things, by some economic models and issues of commercialization, by the rise of the Internet, and the speed of the news culture, by politicized editing and publishing policies, by journalism’s willingness to 13 I will use RB as abbreviation of Rolling Blackouts . 72 facilitate a truthful debate (cf. also Peters 603), and by people losing trust in how the media work. It has now been recognized that something has to change. The following incident might be responsible for the change in thinking in Germany as well: In February 2018, it was a small sensation when the magazine DER SPIEGEL received almost 2,500 letters-to-the-editor in response to the article “Die Wut der klugen Köpfe,” which searches for possible reasons for and answers to why even among the educated people the displeasure at so-called “mainstream media” seems to be growing rapidly. The article con rms media scholar Bernhard Pörksen’s observation that mistrust towards the media seems to have reached a new level. Some weeks earlier, Pörksen wrote the article “Das gefährliche Raunen” in ZEIT Online and illustrated his experience of the current media situation. There, he also introduces the term “Lügenpresse-light-Milieu,” but leaves the readers puzzled with the question of what the di erence from nonlight is at all (cf. Pörksen, “Das gefährliche Raunen”). 14 According to him, criticizing the established media seems to become popular in the mainstream itself. In contrast, Isabel Hülsen remarks that part of the anger has nothing to do with the quality of journalism, but with the social circumstances, such as bitterness, social rise, the threat of exclusion, and a competitiveness in society (cf. Hülsen 73). 15 Gujer criticizes some of Germany’s most popular magazines, claiming that nowadays all German magazines use similar writing styles, such as those of Stern and DER SPIEGEL . The separation of facts and opinion seems to have been lost, so does the readers’ trust in the media (cf. Hülsen 70). 16 The change from objective to subjective journalism is often cited as the reason for this development. But as Gujer postulates, subjective journalism and a personal stance are not the real problem, but, rather, the attempt to pretend to act as if one was neutral and objective (qtd. in Hülsen 70). Based on the previous thoughts, the following list—which does not claim to be complete—sketches the challenges I consider to be most in uential on 14 The German word “Lügenpresse” came into being due to demonstrations by the Pegida movement and the far-right party AfD in 2016. It is an abusive term for situations in which citizens think that the press takes opposite positions on emotionally charged, and refrains from reporting on speci c issues as well. 15 In German print media, it is called “Vertrauenskrise des Journalismus” (Brauck et al. 14). Mostly, right-wing populist parties accuse the news media of being a “Lügenpresse,” but the German book Lügen die Medien? : Propaganda, Rudeljournalismus und der Kampf um die ö entliche Meinung by Jens Wernicke might be classi ed as a rather left-wing media critique, and it informs about how the media functions. It also provides valuable insights into the current news landscape to a non-expert mainstream audience. 16 Gujer has started the newsletter “Der andere Blick” to o er news beyond the established media coverage. 73 journalism and which, in total, subliminally contribute to the rise of comics journalism because the weakness of one eld is the strength of the other: Challenge 1 Journalism depends on the means of distribution of the media system, as well as on nancial contributions (cf. Dernbach 307-309). Economic pressure has led to cutting costs in human resources and technical equipment, which, in consequence, forced many (small) media outlets to economize. Subsequently, reductions in personnel are carried out. As a consequence, this bears the risk of a loss of quality. 17 Challenge 2 Interestingly, despite substantial e orts at cutting costs, time and recipients call for investments in new(s) formats and in the qualitative improvement of existing products. 18 “The development of new genres,” as Gunn Enli states, “is often a result of dated and over-used conventions, combined with a need for an adjustment to the existing genre system, even when this causes tension among the stakeholders” (Enli 17). This forces publishing houses to be steadily as innovative as possible because of a erce competition among the various media companies and formats. Challenge 3 In order to create new(s) formats, governments need to invest in technological progress, high-performance telecommunications systems, and broadband expansions. Especially in rural areas, Internet connections are very slow, a ecting the daily operations of small and medium-sized enterprises sometimes negatively. Hence, media technology and the respective equipment lag behind. Challenge 4 A steadily increasing number, of young people (aged 18-35) in particular, abandons the o ers of the print press, which is all the more problematic in light of demographic change and the aging population. Consequently, fewer people have less spending power. Some journalists do not speak of a 17 Bernhard Pörksen remarks, “Deutsche Tageszeitungen haben in den letzten zehn Jahren Millionen von Käufern verloren, diverse Magazine sind vom Markt verschwunden oder ächzen unter der Anzeigen aute. Es fehlt in vielen Redaktionen an Geld für investigative Geschichten und aufwendige Recherchen” (Pörksen, “Die fatale Stille” 12). Even if Pörksen refers to the German daily newspaper sector, this statement does not di er substantially from the situation in the US or the UK (cf. Newman n. pag.). In the UK, more than four in ten inhabitants (41%) use social media for news while smartphone usage is sharply up again, matching the computer (and not the printed newspaper) as the most important device for accessing news (cf. Newman n. pag.). 18 Weischenberg speaks of “Nutzung neuer, optischer Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten (Farbe, Layout) als Reaktion auf veränderte Lese- und Konsumgewohnheiten [. . . ] und zur Erhöhung der Verständlichkeit” (Weischenberg, Journalistik: Theorie und Praxis aktueller Medienkommunikation 36). 74 “crisis of journalism,” but of a “crisis of reading” (Kaube 15, my translation), a term that is based on the observation that people continue to read but no longer in print formats. Instead, they choose to read shorter Facebook entries, (re-)tweets, blog entries, and readers’ comments. Challenge 5 Generations X, Y, and Z demand new media formats. Often, the news consumer cannot choose what to read (or watch) and how much to pay for it. A signi cant number of young people wants to decide what to read and how much to pay for it. Challenge 6 We are living in an age marked by the prevalence of visuality and images. However, the increasing reduction of words in favor of pictures is criticized by many people. Attention spans have been declining for years, and the nancial means for valuable items of information decreased steadily. Additionally, so-called “soft news” become more and more popular (cf. Wallisch 366). The following excerpt from Rolling Blackouts is a dialogue between the real-world journalists Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville, who are discussing current developments in journalism. They highlight the challenge of how to spark people’s interest in a topic, “emotionally manipulating people, then simplifying their stories. It’s not the noble profession I wanted it to be” ( RB 99). This is the hard part about journalism from a moral standpoint [. . . ] And that’s the crappy end of our job: marketing. You have to gure out how to market these stories so people will be interested. When we rst got into this business I was like, “I’m going to tell all these compelling stories about people in these situations and everyone’s going to love them,” but people are looking for things they can already relate to. [. . . ] If someone were to ask me what the most common misconceptions about my [Stuteville’s] job are. . . It’s that journalist’s don’t care about what they’re doing. They just go in and look for the scoop and want it cheap and dirty. ( RB 66-68) Of course, the generalization that journalists want it “cheap and dirty” is an exaggerated accusation. Yet, soft news seem to sell more than hard news. Challenge 7 The digitalization and the overarching role of the Internet are pivotal. The Internet is a boon and a bane at the same time. First, on the one hand, anyone having access to the Internet can produce texts and messages. On the other hand, this bears the risk of losing journalistic professionalism 75 with regard to expertise, techniques, and quality. Second, digitalization is more susceptible to manipulation, especially also of visual imagery, such as photography. Despite a discussion of guaranteeing the privacy and copyrights, journalistic accuracy and veracity have become more important than ever. Challenge 8 Nowadays, a professionally trained journalist not only has to be able to write texts but also needs multimedia skills and social media knowledge (see Chapter 4). However, increased expertise should correlate with adequate nancial compensation; yet, never before have journalists been so badly paid that they are scraping by on a meager income (cf. Pörksen, “Die fatale Stille” 12). 19 Challenge 9 A seemingly massive amount of data necessitates the use of personal lters, even if it risks a life in so-called “ lter bubbles.” This term refers to the results of the algorithms that dictate what we encounter online. It means that people only receive the news they agreed to in their private lter settings. However, part of the truth is also that each time one clicks, watches, shares, or comments on something, search engines, and social platforms harvest information. Thus, these “ lter bubbles” may distort reality because one skims through articles one had subscribed to before, or articles that are shown because like-minded friends and followers have read them. Eva Schauerte and Sebastian Vehlken state that there is a subtle manipulation by social bots and the algorithmic distortion of opinion-forming processes by individualizing echo chamber e ects in the background. This is sometimes referred to as the dawning of a “post-factual,” or “post-truth era” (Schauerte and Vehlken 10-11), and is very likely to spread fake news rapdily (see Chapter 2.2.1). 20 Challenge 10 Another factor is that many people do not seem to know how the media work (cf. Gladstone and Neufeld; cf. Gladstone). This partly patchy 19 The original reads, “[Es lässt] sich nur noch mehr schlecht als recht [leben].” For the comics industry, the study by Anne Elizabeth Moore and Katharina Brandl is one of the few that has collected empirical data on various production methods among di erent comics illustrators. In November 2014, they designed a survey in cooperation with The Ladydrawers of Chicago and Femicomix Finland at Villa Salin to research the working and living conditions of people engaged in the comics industry. They found out that, for example, almost 70% of the respondents do not feel fairly compensated for the work they have invested in the comics industry; 58% of their respondents even indicated that their remuneration never amounted to more than what they had invested in (cf. Moore and Brandl n. pag.). 20 In the United States, for example, one can see and experience the e ects of a polarized and polarizing media landscape—the clash of opinions between Fox News and Breitbart on the right-wing side, and CNN on the other. It has already inspired violence and hatred among ethnic groups and is increasingly becoming emotionally charged, which makes a rational debate, for example about a possible impeachment of Donald Trump (November 2019), rather di cult. He was not found guilty. 76 media knowledge may a ect the trust in the news agencies and the journalistic reliability, eventually leading to a loss of con dence in the media in general (cf. RB 273). The fact that the current developments are subject to change is beyond question. Terms like “di erentiation,” “de-limitation” and “hybridization”, “deprofessionalization” and “de-institutionalization,” “economization,” and the decline of the division of labor attempt to grasp this change theoretically (cf. Kiefer; cf. Pörksen et al.). The change of media organizations must not be equated with a change or even with the disappearance of journalism as an institution. While journalism is mainly concerned with content production, media companies link journalistic content with other types of content, for example, from entertainment or advertising, and thus generate revenue and audience. The question of what constitutes the driving force behind this change remains a critical issue, however. The answer is anything but straightforward. Presumably, it is due to an interaction of several components—recipients, producers/ authors, and (media) institutions. The tendency towards mixed journalistic forms, such as comics journalism, is not only due to the journalistic agents who pick up di erent media, but also due to the recipients who seem to prefer certain news formats to others. Thus, one can identify not only a change in journalism and media but also—on the recipient’s side—a change in mentality which is forced by the learning process. This, in turn, is related to the journalistic eld and to steadily changing requirements and obligations of the journalistic profession. In this respect, it would certainly be more coherent to speak of a “change in behavior patterns” on all sides than of a “crisis” in general. To sum up, the factors listed above have led and are still leading to a changing news sector, a ecting the print news most dramatically. If one assumes that institutions and systemic trust are strongly interlinked, a process of change or even deinstitutionalization will necessarily have an impact on trust in journalism. (cf. Kiefer 207). In order to meet the new demands of technology alongside consumer interests and desires, ways of supporting journalism in its attempt to overcome the current situation must be found. If one speaks of a “journalistic crisis” or “crisis od reading,” it can also be seen as something useful insofar as new opportunities and possibilities for making the news have to be found. Picking up this thought, comics journalism could be seen as a serious form of news making and as an alternative form of information to attract new readers. As we will see, comics journalism learns from the mistakes of the formats of traditional journalism and intends to do a better job, especially with regard to the traceability of the working process and the authenticity of the author and her authorship. 77 2.2 Representation of Facts: Accuracy and Imagination Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. ( Hard Times , book 1, chapter 1) In the opening passage of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times , Mister Gradgrind, one central character of the story, is introduced. We learn about his philosophy of child-rearing and education style. Gradgrind’s emphasis on “nothing but Facts” reveals his adherence to nineteenth-century utilitarian thinkers. Focussing on rationality, reason, and quantifying human behavior to produce ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people in a society’ is the principle he aims at. What this quote already shows exaggeratedly is that human beings are not objectivity-driven machines but intrinsically perceive and process the world through ‘subjective prisms.’ The concern with the distinction between fact and ction is anything but new. On the one hand, the subject of facticity refers to the current situation in society. On the other hand, it has a long and widely rami ed discoursive history. As the words are used in both academic and everyday discourse, broadly speaking, “ ction” is understood as a made-up narration and “non ction” as a story of reality. The authors, to the best of their abilities, are encouraged to write as closely as possible about reality. In contrast to writers of ction, non ction writers are constrained to the accuracy of people, times, places, and events in their narration. In comparison, it is a literary convention that the additional phrase ‘as accurate as possible,’ or ‘to the author’s ability,’ or ‘as close to reality as possible’ leaves much space for literary creativity, historical falsi cation, interpretation, and literary worldmaking. Compared to the history of the documentary lm—a genre that is often contrasted with non ction comics—a strict distinction between fact and ction has been considered to be impossible (cf. Paget 107), even if Marie-Laure Ryan acknowledges that the play with these boundaries heightens our awareness of an epistemologically responsible distinction (cf. Lefèvre 31; cf. Ryan, Avatars of Story 58). However, it seems that ctional and factual elements in references from the ctional universe frequently overlap with the real world (cf. A. Nünning, “A Critique of Lars Ole Sauerberg”). The publication list of the last years shows that a dichotomy between “fact” and “ ction” in hybrid genres has of late been called into question (cf. “A Critique of Lars Ole Sauerberg” 282). In particular, postwar literature, that is, Holocaust literature with eyewitness testimonies, can no longer be distinguished by a simple opposition between ction and historical fact. This issue can be traced back to the beginnings of the 78 English novel. It “is by now a commonplace of literary history,” Nünning states, “that the novel has always relied heavily on the assimilation of a wide range of non ctional genres and of factual elements of empirical reality” (283). Like Mikhail Bakhtin, Nünning reminds his readers that the boundaries between ction and non ction are not written in stone (cf. Bakhtin 33). The role of facts in literary history has already been subject to many discussions about this genre. 21 There have been earlier endeavors to use ctionality not exclusively with regard to ctional texts; accordingly, proposals were made to connect the term “ ctionality” to the concepts of “make believe” (cf. Walton) and “as if ” (cf. Vaihinger). However, within the last decade, ctionality has been understood as an autonomous concept that can be described as a fundamental rhetorical communicative mode (cf. Nielsen et al.; cf. Gjerlevsen, “A Novel History of Fictionality”). Fictionality “is not just regarded a term attributed to ctional narratives such as novels and short stories; nor is it equated with broad or abstract categories or de ned in opposition to truth” (“Fictionality” n. pag.). To a greater extent, ctionality is understood as a means of communication. Following Werner Wolf, I conceptualize “ ctionality” as a cognitive framework that preprograms certain expectations and attitudes in the reception of an artifact (cf. W. Wolf, “Fiktion: eine relevante Kategorie der Metareferenz in Literatur und anderen Medien? ” 231). Thus, similar to the journalistic mode of writing, one can argue that ctionality is a communicative mode that transgresses the boundaries between ction and fact. In this sense, Zetterberg remarks that “ ctionality is not bound to any genre or limited to narrative representation” (Gjerlevsen, “Fictionality” n. pag.). Based on this, I expect that this understanding of “non ctionality” to harmonize best with my idea of the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ because on the one hand, comics journalism requires a certain writing style of the author, and, on the other hand, it requires a certain basic attitude of the recipient. 22 This, in turn, means that “factuality” is not bound to any speci c genre either and thus permits an adequate discussion from a nonliterary perspective. At a later point in this study, I will brie y discuss the “What-If ”-game, an imaginative game worked out by Gregory Currie, in relation to the author’s forms of visual self-representation (see Chapter 3.2.3). 21 Critical attention has been directed to the “New Journalism” (see Chapter 2.5), the “non- ction novel,” “ ctional biographies,” “antihistorical novels, or “historiographic meta ction.” For a discussion of “hybrid new genres” in the contemporary novel and the rediscovery of the documentary mode in the non ction novel of the 1960s, cf. Lars Ole Sauerberg’s 1991 publication Fact Into Fiction , which also brie y maps the merging of fact and ction in the journalistic prehistory of the novel. For a review of the strengths and possible weaknesses of “documentary realism,” which is meant as a particular narrative device rather than as a genre, in the novel (cf. A. Nünning, “A Critique of Lars Ole Sauerberg”). 22 For a profound overview and more approaches to ctionality (cf. Köppe and Klauk). 79 According to the Oxford English Dictionary , “non ction” is de ned as prose writing other than ction, such as history, biography, and reference works, that which is concerned with the narrative depiction of factual events. 23 It is worth stressing the phrase “narrative depiction of factual events,” which does not restrict non ction to language, or words alone, but which o ers room for another language, that is, the language of comics with pictures and images. This allows for a treatment of comics journalism as a serious form of journalism, with the conditions of “narrativity” and “factuality” requiring a more profound analysis in the context of comics journalism. However, the question remains about the value of truth in non ction, or to quote Oscar Wilde’s Algernon, “[t]he truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! ” (Wilde Act I, Part 1). Although it is insu cient to equate facts with ‘the true’ and ction with ‘the false,’ without the acceptance of facts there would not be a eld of ction that can be separated from literature. Fictionality is by de nition the quality possessed by ction and an intentionally signaled strategy in communication. 24 Thus, one cannot discuss the factual parts in literary contexts without looking at that which is not factual, or ctional respectively. 25 This is also the reason why “fact” and “ ction” are often mentioned in one breath, because not every depiction is ctional. Otherwise, one should treat lies as ction as well, which is not necessarily so. According to media scholar and narratologist Thon, “fact and ction” is still an explosive pair consisting of an “e ective distinction” for the handling of how ctional and non ctional representations are viewed and evaluated. 26 It is more appropriate to consider the overall context when speaking of the boundaries between fact and ction in contemporary literature, because “the traditional distinction between the empirical world of factual reality, on the 23 Christoph Neuberger speaks of a misapprehension when speaking of the oppositions “ ctional vs. factual” (cf. Neuberger, “Grenzgänger im World Wide Web” 420) because ctionality means that assertions do not claim for themselves a direct relation to their premedial reality (cf. Hickethier 133). Thus, the opposite of ctional is non ctional (and not factual) (cf. Köppe and Klauk). Jan- Noël Thon stresses, the distinction of the word pairs “ ction/ non ction,” “ ctive/ non ctive,” or “ ctional/ non ctional” and their terminological di culties are considered to have been clari ed in the realm of the theory of ction (cf. Thon, “Fiktionalität in Film- und Medienwissenschaften” 379). 24 Here, I am using a broad de nition of ctionality and refer to written texts in journalism as well. 25 According to Frank Zipfel, there are di erent “Fiktionalitätssignale” a texts can consist of, such as textual and paratextual signs of ction (cf. Zipfel). In the context of documentary lms, the audience considers the presented content as real only due to the paratext (cf. Bordwell and K. Thompson 43). 26 The original call for papers reads, “wirkmächtige Unterscheidung” ( June 2017, Tuebingen University). 80 one hand, and the ctional realm of literature, on the other, is no longer taken for granted” (A. Nünning, “A Critique of Lars Ole Sauerberg” 300). Among other things, literary scholars have pointed out that a “disintegration of the dichotomy ‘real vs. ctive’ has become one of the major characteristics of contemporary culture” (300, emphasis in original). Nowadays, the discussion must be extended to fact, ction, and manipulation; and yet, there is no easy and straightforward distinction between reality and staged reality. Hence, what does this fact- ction debate reveal about the state of the media in terms of such issues as trust and truth? Fictional representations in lm and television present an idealized version of the real world (cf. Peters 604). Television, for example, is naturalized as a visual medium, which makes the distinction between ctional and non ctional programming “blurry for audiences in terms of engaging with real-life issues, a situation reinforced by the commonality of production conventions and storytelling techniques across genres” (604); and former dichotomies seem to be slowly dissolving. Apart from that, one has to analyze how facts are connected to reality. As US media expert Brooke Gladstone observes, one part of the problem of reality “stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality” (Gladstone 2). In her second book on the media, The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time , Gladstone asks whether reality is what a signi cantly large group of people thinks to be true (2). She notes that there is no simple answer to this question because “the reality is more slippery than a pocketful of pudding” (1). While the English language suggests only one word for “reality,” the German language di erentiates between “Realität” and “Wirklichkeit”—two terms that vary in their meanings only slightly. This distinction seems to be particularly helpful for constructivist theories because in constructivism, reality only exists through its meaning to human beings; reality does not present itself as it is but only in parts with speci c individual knowledge that requires contextualization. Contextualization is thus a necessary condition to make up one’s mind. While “Wirklichkeit” may be understood as the world, which can be perceived by human beings, “Realität” is the real but not the actually perceptible world. Compared to “reality,” “Wirklichkeit” is then a less critical term because nobody doubts the existence of a ‘perceived reality.’ Following Gladstone, “reality” is “what forms after we lter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions” (Gladstone 2). In this sense, “reality is personal” (2). 27 27 I do not aim at answering the question of the philosophical aspect of reality. Yet, the statement by the science ction master Philip K. Dick might be helpful for a start, “[r]eality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (Gladstone 3). 81 2.2.1 Fake News and Alternative Facts Until now, it has been common sense that facts are the essential constituents of both journalism and making sense of the world at large. They play an integral role in private and public communication. Facts are the raw material of journalistic work, which rst need to be shaped and edited before they turn into information to be distributed to people around the world (cf. Klaus 110). 28 However, since Donald Trump has declared that the media are the public enemy who produces “fake news” 29 (Feldenkirchen 76), many journalists around the world have started to ght for the freedom of the press and for a liberal media system in a new post-Obama democracy. The ‘media-is-the-enemy-virus,’ as postulated by Trump, a ects the sphere of global geopolitics and the American tradition of journalism, which has always been credited with an outstanding history of a liberal mediascape and with a leading role in the Western media culture. 30 At least since Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016, one might get the impression that human logic and the unimpeachable power of facts have started to be shaken up in Western culture, causing a lot of confusion and indignation, not least due to the rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe (cf. Pauly). What would have been unthinkable a decade ago is now known as “fake news” and “alternative facts”—terms that have become part of today’s standard vocabulary. 31 Kellyanne Conway, who was Donald Trump’s adviser back in 2016, coined the term “alternative facts,” which is symbolic for a new era in which the basic principles of believing in and speaking the truth have been agitated. 32 Nowadays, a strong hybridization appears across various disciplines and mostly leads to the removal of allegedly rmly established boundaries be- 28 The original reads, “Fakten [. . . ] sind für den Journalismus nur das Rohmaterial, das erst noch gestaltet werden muss, damit es das Wissen der Menschen über die Welt, in der sie leben, erhöht und ihre gestaltende Teilhabe daran ermöglicht.” 29 The concept of “fake news” is nothing new and reminds one of the “canards” which go back to the French newspaper tradition of the early seventeenth century. Canards occasionally occurred in popular news sheets and depicted events that were somehow related to everyday incidents. They addressed private individuals, especially “the lives of ‘outsiders’ such as criminals, the sensational and the monstrous” (Ramsden 31). The origin and de nition of the term “Zeitungsente” have not been fully explored yet. However, the underlying message of this concept is similar to the term “fake news” which also describes hoaxes in newspapers. 30 What is referred to as “objective reporting” in the USA can be understood as the adequate representation of aspects of reality (cf. Neuberger and Kapern 158). 31 “Fake news” was awarded the “ugliest word of the year 2017” in Germany. 32 She used these words to describe the size of the crowd of people actually watching the president’s inauguration in front of the Capitol in Washington D.C. in January 2017; she argued that the crowd had been the biggest ever—which was wrong. Many publications on “fake news” and “alternative facts” have followed since (Levitin, Weaponized Lies ; Kritisch denken im Zeitalter der Lügen ; Siegert and Engell; Strohschneider et al.; Zimdars and McLeod). 82 tween fact and ction. It is the blurring of the neat categories of “ ction” and “non ction,” which makes a clear distinction between these terms impossible (cf. Hauptmeier and Berning). Applied to comics journalism, this means that features of literature and journalism intermingle with each other. 33 Figure 2.2: Page Excerpt, Walter Lippmann ( The In uencing Machine 101) For journalism, I agree with Walter Lippmann (see Fig. 2.2), who argues that there can be “no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth.” 34 Marion Hedda Ilse Grä n von Dönho once asked: “Where does the compass of journalists point at? My answer is: precise research, investigation of the facts, examination of conscience, and the common good” (my translation). 35 However, what is the author’s role in the relationship between individual interests and common good and what exactly do the terms “true” and “truth” mean in comics journalism? 33 These are texts in which ctional and non ctional narratives are closely linked, making it di cult to assign the texts to a single speci c genre. Literature and journalism form a symbiosis (cf. Berning). 34 Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator who was famous for being among the rst ones to criticize media and democracy, most notably in his book Public Opinion , which sometimes is seen as the pathbreaking book of modern journalism. 35 The original reads, “Wohin zeigt der Kompass der Journalisten? Ich würde sagen: auf präzise Recherchen, Erforschung der Tatsachen, Gewissensprüfung und das Gemeinwohl” (statement by Marion Grä n Dönho from the year 1987 presented in the exhibition at “Haus der Geschichte” Bonn, 2016). She was a German journalist who participated in the resistance against Nazism. After the war, she became one of Germany’s leading journalists and intellectuals, working, among other things, as the publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . 83 2.2.2 Truth, Essential Truth, and Emotional Truth Journalists do not pursue truth in a philosophical sense, as the journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel postulate in latest edition of their in uential book The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect . Rather, they pursue “the truths by which we can operate on a day-to-day basis” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 42). In their view, to get things right and to verify the pieces of information are the foundation of journalism. Journalists must make decisions based on comprehensible rules. Although they will never be entirely objective about their choices and preferences, journalistic methods of researching and writing can and should stick to objective standards, acknowledging that everyone perceives the world with a unique lter. Hence, the question about the core of the truth is a question that has been bothering philosophers, academics, and human beings for thousands of years. This project will not provide a new answer to it; yet, it brie y examines the ideas that I consider to be the most relevant in the context of comics journalism. But the other issues related to comics journalism are what continue to confront and sometimes confound me: the nature of visual truth, journalistic ethics, the question of objectivity, transparency. And maybe most impostantly, the sweet spot of where my impulses as both a non ction storyteller and a creative artist merge. (Duncan et al. xi, emphasis in original) Has the understanding of “truth” changed, or has the “fact” changed its relationship to “truth? ” Until now, a “fact” was characterized by its permanence and correctness. However, part of the overall picture is that, since the advent of the Internet, facts seem to move faster through digital spheres and beyond; they are quicker and easier to identify as such, or as fakes, respectively. Journalism does not create facts. It does not try to identify a factual situation; instead, it tries to accompany a process of information gathering. But because not all facts can be presented in newspapers or on digital platforms, journalistic codes of conduct have to set the rules for journalistic investigation and publication. In the above quote, Randy Duncan mentions “visual truth” and “journalistic ethics,” which sometimes confuse him, and which seem to oppose each other at rst glance. Like the ne arts and traditional journalism, (comics) journalism has to select those parts of the reality that it intends to present and mediate. In my view, “truth” is considered to be the correspondence of language or thought to an independently existing reality. Pragmatists like C.S. Peirce see some manner of essential relation between human practices of investigation and the “truth,” “[t]he opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all 84 who investigate is what we mean by truth, and the object represented by this opinion is real” (Peirce qt. in Thayer 125). According to Peirce, “truth” is the process of inquiry and investigation done to its limits by human beings. In contrast to, Martin Heidegger points at the origin of the term in his article “On the Essence of Truth.” The word originates from the ancient Greek aletheia and means “unconcealment,” which can be translated with ‘the bringing of something hidden into the public.’ Based on this, for Heidegger, the conception of “truth” is something like ‘correctness’ (Heidegger 6-7). To my mind, this is a kind of loophole and implies that facts are not written in stone forever but that the status of “truth” can also be withdrawn from something that was once claimed to be fact. In this sense, I think that fact has changed its status. One way to approach what many people consider to be a correct and true depiction of reality references is to dismiss the idea that there is one single literal truth. Rather, the reader has to engage in the genre’s own rules, which means that comics journalism does not claim to be a detailed description of reality and does not normatively prescribe the way in which the reader is supposed to understand the world either. Instead, one can argue that journalism in the medium of comics aims at something beyond the mimetic description of the truth of the real world. This is also the reason why Joe Sacco once used the term “essential truth” to describe what he strives for in his works (Sacco, Journalism XII). In other words, for him, truth does not depend on minute (visual) explanation and description of the world but on the core message of what is to be presented. Consequently, Sacco’s “essential truth” has to be understood as the ‘truth beneath the surface’ of what is visible to the human eye at rst glance. Due to his status as the pioneer of comics journalism, Sacco’s view plays an important role and has inspired other comics journalists evr since. To depict the core of the truth, therefore, also describes the basic attitude of comics journalists and the comics journalistic mode of working. As such, it also avoids any discussion on the representation of drawn facts because comics journalism never claims that its nal product is the same as a photo or a verbal text. Furthermore, some practitioners of comics journalism, among them Randy Duncan, equate “essential truth” also with “emotional truth”: 36 “this type of process [emotional truth] at the heart of the kind of comics journalism I practice” (Duncan et al. xi). Duncan thinks that the reader accepts a certain degree of artistic license because comics appeal to a broader “emotional set”—and possibly a smaller “face set”than a newspaper’s dry recap of yesterday’s news, 36 In his foreword to See Palestine: The Special Edition , Sacco explains that his “idea was not to present an objective book but an honest one,” as he thinks that the “Israeli government’s point of view is very well represented in the mainstream American media and is trumpeted loudly [. . . ]” (ix). This means that only an honest rendition of his subjective perception quali es as ‘essentially true.’ 85 for example (xi). However, this trust can be breached if the comic becomes too fanciful, as Josh Neufeld admits (xi). In comparison, German comics scholar Dietrich Grünewald notes that it can be not only about describing super cial facts but also about uncovering, communicating, and documenting the social truth hidden beneath the visible surface (cf. Grünewald, “Zwischen Fakt und Fiktion: Dokumentarische Bildgeschichten” 11). Even if Grünewald does not label this phenomenon like Sacco, his idea of an “essential truth” subliminally occurs in here, too. Hence, the challenge is how to nd a way of narrating between more factbased reporting and more ctional (visual) storytelling. According to Duncan, the common public perception “is that they [ ction writers] strive for fantasy, for escape from reality, while the creators of non ction comics are ethically bound to share and highlight reality” (Duncan et al. 6). On the one hand, comics journalism wants to convey accuracy, preciseness, and facts to ful ll the journalistic claim. To some extent, this ties in with the view held by alternative journalists “that reporting is always bound up with values (personal, professional, institutional) and that it is therefore never possible to separate facts from values” (Downing 18). On the other hand, what might be called ‘small bits of reality’ contributes to the criticism to which comics journalism is often exposed, namely that the time and e ort of production con ict with a drawing style that wants to show as many details as possible, as well with the claim of journalistic relevance and timeliness. It also happens that the comics journalists are inevitably just too slow. Then, they have to use their imagination while drawing (see Chapter 2.6.2) and may have to cut back on their type and manner of drawing. This is why the next section re ects upon the role of “imagination.” 2.2.3 Imagination and Informed Imagination The following quote by the British writer Jonathan Raban has been made in the context of literary journalism. In his opinion, a clear dividing line between fact and ction—not only in the literary system—does not exist. No matter how well journalists try to depict the real world, imagination and memory frame the way in which they perceive their environment. Because comics journalism stands in the tradition of literary journalism (see Chapter 2.5), Raban’s words are also applicable to comics journalism: [T]he generic line between fact and ction is fuzzier than most people nd it convenient to admit. There is the commonsensical assertion that while the novelist is engaged on a work of the creative imagination, the duty of the journalist is to tell what really happened, as it happened—to tell the truth and nothing but 86 the truth. That distinction is easy to voice but hard to sustain in logic. For imagination and memory are Siamese twins, and you cannot cut them so cleanly apart. Writing from memory, trying to re-create on the page as you remember them, and building them into the form of a story, is an act of imagination, however closely you try to stick to what seem to have been the facts. (Raban 165) Due to the comics journalist’s choice of a genre that disrupts the neat categorization of fact and ction, the recipients might be prompted to question the nature of the real event at hand as well. Raban stresses that even if one tries to stick to the facts as closely as possible, writing from memory is an act of imagination. Yet, this utterance applies not only to comics journalism but also to any other kind of writing. In addition, as Kovach and Rosenstiel postulate, “[a]ll truths—even the laws of science—are subject to revision, but we operate by them in the meantime because they are necessary and they work” (Kovach and Rosenstiel). Their approach to truth is similar to Heidegger’s conceptualization as ‘truth as correctness.’ Because comics also consist of mental images, one has to keep in mind that images are artifacts, and thus they have something inherently ‘created’ to their nature. The author uses images to address speci c feelings, attitudes, and understandings in the recipient, which are based each on the recipient’s own experience, interests, and background knowledge. Additionally, an image can be charged with emotional information through a speci c framing because of the comic panels that build the gutter. The gutter is the space between two panels and is often depicted as a blank space that creates a transition from one moment to the next within a story. As McCloud explains, the gutter is used to “take two separate images and transform them into a single idea” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 66). While a recipient cannot see what is happening within the gutter, assumptions can be made that something must have happened between the panels. Hence, the gutter causes a certain kind of “closure,” for which the recipient partly needs her own imagination. In comics journalism, Sacco speaks of “ informed imagination” (Sacco, Journalism XII, emphasis in original), which refers to a strategy during the production of comics. “Informed imagination” is necessary for all those situations the author did not see herself, or which had happened in the past before she went there. In these cases, whenever one has to rely on eyewitness testimony, Sacco tries to ask “ visual questions” in order to satisfy his imagination with a drawn representation of the eyewitnesses’ experiences (XII, emphasis in original). Asking this kind of “visual questions” requires a certain authorial know-how and a speci c attitude. By asking them, the author wants to obtain additional 87 information, for example, to get an impression of the environment because the background in the panels must also be lled with something. In contrast to traditional journalism, in which guidelines formulate journalistic rules, “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” (Sacco, Journalism XII). This is also one reason why comics journalism permits a variety of interpretations in order to accommodate a wide range of drawing styles. Moreover, this leaves room for the recipient’s imagination and interpretation, not least due to the design and layout of the panels. In Reading Comics , Douglas Wolk makes a strong argument that cartooning can be read as a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception. The artist will probably not say, ‘this is what I have seen’ but ‘this is what this has meant to me,’ namely, this is ‘how I have seen it.’ 37 Consequently, it is up to the recipient to bring the content of the static panels to live and connect them to a sequence while lling the gaps in the gutter. 38 That said, two cartoonists are not likely to draw a single object in precisely the same way. For example, a tree can be drawn more abstractly or closer to reality. The recipient, however, is still likely to identify it as a tree, irrespective of the author’s individual drawing style. By choosing a narrative form that usually belongs to ction, a journalist does not yet violate the expectation of the reference to reality and the norm of objectivity (cf. Neuberger, “Grenzgänger im World Wide Web” 421; cf. Renner). 39 According to the German literary critic, novelist, and essayist Christa Wolf, there is a truth beyond the important facts of the world (cf. C. Wolf 209). 40 , which corroborates Sacco’s concept of an “essential truth.” On the one hand, there is some truth beyond facts of whatever form. On the other hand, Wolf subliminally admits that truth and facts are not the same and that 37 While Art Spiegelman’s Maus is highly imaginative in the creation of a reality that serves as a metaphor for political despair, Sacco’s work sticks more closely to the realistic mode, even if his pictures are artistic and frequently, as he calls it himself, cartoony (cf. Vanderbeke 76). In Maus , Spiegelman depicts himself interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs (cf. Spiegelman). Critics have classi ed Maus as a mix of genres, such as those of memoir, biography, history, ction, and autobiography. 38 Grünewald observes that decoding picture stories necessitates a highly active reception process. His statement reads, “der den Rezipienten nah an das Gezeigte heranbringt und Identi kation anstößt, der ihn partiell zum Co-Autoren macht und damit das Vermittelte hoch intensiv werden lässt” (Grünewald, “Zwischen Fakt und Fiktion: Dokumentarische Bildgeschichten” 13). 39 The original reads, “Durch die Wahl der im Bereich des Fiktionalen üblichen Erzählformen verstößt ein Journalist alleine jedoch noch nicht gegen die Erwartung des Realitätsbezugs und die Objektivitätsnorm.” 40 The original reads, “Es gibt eine Wahrheit jenseits der wichtigen Fakten der Welt.” 88 crucial facts can still be ‘wrong’ in that they do not fully depict the truth, which requires additional factual information beyond the con rmed facts. 2.2.4 Objectivity in Journalism Traditional tropes and aspects of the twentieth century’s ideal of objectivity in British and American journalism, such as balance, fairness, non-bias, independence, non-interpretation, neutrality, and detachment, tended to be lauded as “hallmarks of professionalism” (Peters 606). 41 “When other national journalisms enter into crisis,” writes cultural studies scholar Richard Kaplan, “objectivity is the proposed solution” (Kaplan 25). For the American press, he writes, objectivity functions as something like the “lifeblood of the US press” (26). 42 The notion of objectivity as a strategic ritual was coined by sociologist Gaye Tuchman. According to Tuchman, “objectivity refers to routine procedures [. . . ] which protect the professional from mistakes and from his critics. It appears the word ‘objectivity’ is being used defensively as a strategic ritual” (Tuchman 678; Zollmann 367). Figure 2.3: Page Excerpt, Three Apes ( The In uencing Machine 110) In the preface to his collection Journalism , Sacco criticizes the “slavish adherence” to balance. He calls it “[a]nother trap promoted in American journalism schools” (Sacco, Journalism XIII). This trap reminds one of the Japan-based 41 Platforms for balanced reporting are, for example, “mediamatters.org,” which “ ght[s] to stop right-wing lies from distorting the media,” and “newsbusters.org,” which is a project by the Media Research Center, America’s leading media watchdog in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias. 42 Schudson locates the emergence of an “independent and factual, news-oriented press in the 1830s Jacksonian revolution” (Kaplan 28). 89 images of the three wise monkeys (see Fig. 2.3), which is taken from the selfreferential piece of comics journalism The In uencing Machine . One monkey covers his eyes—which stands for seeing no evil; the second monkey covers his ears—which implies that he hears no evil; and the third one covers his mouth— which stands for speaking no evil. Although explanations of the meaning of ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ di er, the statement behind this image is often used to refer to a lack of moral responsibility of people who refuse to acknowledge impropriety, who look the other way, or who are ignorant (cf. Oleson). I have inserted this image here because it mirrors a dilemma: On the one hand, other than the monkey which looks away, a journalist has to examine facts very closely; she has to ask questions, reveal hidden facts, and report about them. On the other hand, journalists are also asked to physically and mentally stay out of things. They have to cover as many perspectives as possible on an issue because they also have a moral responsibility to narrate the truth; yet, they should not become too empathetic and emotional, though. A well-trained journalist should cover all aspects of the story, which is reminiscent of the literary concept of “multiperspectivity.” However, even if there are at least two perspectives to every story, it is not unlikely that journalists tend to prefer one side to the other, which results in an empty or incomplete depiction (E. S. Herman 58). However, this impartiality and balance, according to Sacco, should not be a smoke screen for laziness: If there are two or more versions of events, a journalist needs to explore and consider each claim, but ultimately the journalist must get to the bottom of a contested account independently of those making their claims. [. . . ] The journalist must strive to nd out what is going on and tell it, not neuter the truth in the name of equal time. (Sacco, Journalism xiv) The standard of objectivity and the practice of dealing with it are rooted in Anglo-Saxon journalism, in which this standard comes close to resembling scienti c methods; yet, journalism has developed a broader and more liberal understanding of “objectivity” than science (cf. Neuberger and Kapern 158). The idea of objective reporting in journalism may have reached its peak in the nineteenth-century turn to positivism but has gradually decreased in in uence ever since (cf. Ramsden 25). Objectivity (factuality) means that journalism creates a reference to reality—it does not want to represent anything invented, ctional. It deals with events that have actually taken place and endeavors to present them in accordance with the facts. Journalists are often not eyewitnesses themselves, but have to rely on 90 sources. Objectivity is at least the claim of journalism. 43 (Neuberger and Kapern 28, my translation) Neuberger and Kapern admit that journalism cannot be fully objective, even if it still sticks to the claim to be as unbiased as possible. Moreover, they connect the concepts of “objectivity” and “testimony.” The journalist’s reliance on sources also holds true for comics journalism. However, in comics reportage, one will observe that journalists have experienced and seen things by themselves, which is di erent from works that show an overt rst-person narration (see Chapter 3.1.3). Even though objectivity and separating news from opinion are working practices in German journalism as well, this di erentiation does not reach as deeply into the conception of professionalism as it perhaps should because “[t]he dignity of US journalists rests much more on these symbolic distinctions and their public display” (Revers 3-4). The American ethic of objectivity has often been seen as a role model to copy (cf. Kaplan 25) but things have changed under the Trump presidency. One can postulate that the ght between objectivity and subjectivity is a relatively modern one. “In the 1800s, journalism was underwritten by powerful people, the government or political parties. It was only when an economic incentive for information absent a political agenda took hold that an independent press also emerged” (cf. Carr). Moreover, the use of the term “objectivity” in opposition to the term “subjectivity” in journalism studies should not be mixed up with its epistemological use. Neuberger di erentiates between rst, objectivity as the rule and code (of conduct) of information journalism, and second, objectivity as the coherence of claims compared to the extratextual reality (Neuberger, Journalismus als Problembearbeitung 133-135). From the perspective of comics journalism, Sacco establishes a counterpoint to the traditional and widely acknowledged concept of “objectivity,” which he ironically calls “American journalism’s ‘Holy of Holies’” (Sacco, Journalism xiii). Objectivity, for him, means to approach a story without any preconceived ideas at all, and to report on actions and behavior as honestly as possible regardless of one’s own sympathies. Yet, “objectivity” is not among the ten fundamental principles of journalism as identi ed by the journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. Kovach and Rosenstiel, renowned scholars of journalism, do not talk about “objectivity” as a major objective of journalism. Instead, objectivity is about seeking the truth, being independent, and about exposing the facts 43 The original reads, “Mit Objektivität (Faktizität) ist gemeint, dass der Journalismus einen Realitätsbezug herstellt—er will nichts Erfundenes, Fiktionales darstellen. Er befasst sich mit Ereignissen, die sich tatsächlich zugetragen haben, und er bemüht sich, sie den Tatsachen entsprechend darzustellen. Dabei sind Journalisten oft nicht selbst Augenzeuge, sondern müssen sich ihrerseits auf Quellen verlassen. Objektivität ist zumindest der Anspruch des Journalismus.” 91 con rmed by methods of veri cation. They advocate abandoning the term “objectivity” altogether, arguing instead that journalism should be understood as a “discipline of veri cation” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 6). There are, however, systemic rules that are designed to come close to objectivity, but which may di er institutionally and depending on the politics of the respective newspaper, or magazine, etc. Objectivity standards, however, do not hold true for the choice of selection criteria. Depending on the preferences of the editorial sta , the public, or the journalistic at a given time, the question of what is important (or unimportant) can never be decided objectively. Thus, it is important to know which aspect of a person’s or institution’s aptitude is or is not reportable. Therefore, rules for intersubjective traceability are introduced. According to Neuberger and Kapern, objectivity rules and standards are the following (cf. Neuberger and Kapern 158, my translation): neutrality, dispassion (‘Sachlichkeit’), the separation of message and opinion, completeness, scale (‘Maßstabgerechtigkeit’), bias (‘Ausgewogenheit’), accuracy, importance/ relevance, and answering the “W-”questions (who, what, when, where, why). 44 The results and the progress of the monitoring and veri cation process should be communicated to the public so that people can form a critical judgment about the signi cance of the news or the report by themselves (cf. Neuberger and Kapern 166). A clear understanding might be helpful to de ne what such standards are. However, in the list mentioned above, it can be observed that a subliminal subjectivity still marks the points “importance, accuracy, bias, and completeness.” Who decides what is relevant? 45 Who, apart from the journalist herself, knows whether she has researched well? A list of normative descriptions will therefore always remain an attempt to describe rules that practitioners should adhere to in order to achieve the goal of the highest possible degree of objectivity. Kapern and Neuberger, therefore, conclude that only transparency enables inter-subjective veri ability by the recipients (cf. Neuberger and Kapern 166). 46 The following panel excerpt from The In uencing Machine points to the dilemma and summarizes that objectivity is essential but “impossible” (see Fig. 2.4). 44 The traditional inverted pyramid structure of journalism, in which facts must t into a formal and pre-determined pattern (the ‘5 Ws’) goes back to nineteenth century positivism that paved the way to a liberal structure of narration. 45 See “news value theory” Ch. 2.1. 46 In comics journalism, Lukas Plank has made a case for a transparent way of dealing with the journalistic production and research process (cf. Plank). 92 Figure 2.4: Excerpt, “Objectivity Is Impossible” ( The In uencing Machine 95) This view, which is shared by many experts and practitioners alike (cf. Emcke 107), symbolizes the necessity to get rid of the wrong and idealized assumption that contemporary news journalism is fully objective. In his famous essay, Niklas Luhmann argues that we do not have access to the world as it is; we have to be satis ed with assumptions of reality which depend on how the world is observed (Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien 26). 47 But who knows what an appropriate way to observe the world is? Moreover, Lars Ole Sauerberg has rightly asserted that neither the one eld (fact) nor the other ( ction) can do justice to what he has called “an endless range of critical problems a ecting general aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, semiotics, and linguistics” (Sauerberg vii). This amalgam of fact and ction is the unique mode of representation that comics journalism relies on to challenge and, as we will see during this study, also change notions of traditional journalism. To sum up, I have argued that the human being’s relation to facts and truth is highly complex, seldom straightforward, and depends on many di erent aspects. For one thing this is due to the fact that “truth” does not depend on a speci c medium; for another, “truth” is not restricted to any genre. In comics journalism, the narration of “truth” can only be successful if the recipient does not anticipate a single literal truth and full objectivity. Instead, the concept of “essential truth,” which entails a more emotional aspect and a higher personal perspective of the author, is a core premise of comics journalism, and a foundation of the ‘comics journalistic pact.’ 47 The original reads, “Welt, wie sie ist [. . . ] und [] [wie sie] beobachtet wird [. . . ].” 93 2.3 Narrative Mediation The fact that a story is a mediated presentation has become generally acknowledged in structuralist narratology. In the last years, the emphasis on di erent media that use narrative means has resulted in the term “mediation,” which describes the way in which a story is told. In comics journalism, the story is transmitted via text and pictures but sometimes also by means of other genres and forms of narrative. This is why this section is about authors and narrators as a fundamental prerequisite to understand their representation in comics journalism (see Chapter 3). 2.3.1 Author and Authorship Since the 1960s, criticism has pointed to the absolutization of the author’s personality, leading to some controversies about the concepts of the “author” and “authorship” (cf. Berensmeyer et al., Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies ), which can be traced back to Roland Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s in uential publications on the “death” of the author (cf. Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; cf. Foucault; cf. Burke, The Death and Return of the Author ). Barthes, for example, argues against the traditional practice of literary criticism to incorporate the intentions and the biographical context of an author; this view has led to a revolution of the literary eld. By stating that the author as a literary myth and a literary construct is dead, and by saying that writing and creating are unrelated, Barthes argues against a method of deciphering a text that relies on aspects of the author’s identity, such as her personal life, her political views, the historical context, religion, or gender (Barthes, “The Death of the Author” n. pag.). Additionally, in Barthes’ view, the (auto-)biographical voice of the author has become redundant and has thus turned the once strong author into a weak one insofar as the focus has switched from the author to the importance of signs that the text reveals. Barthes assumes that the death of the author is linked to the triumph of écriture , which results in new reading habits and paradigms of intertextual, postmodern, and deconstructivist ways of writing and reading because, since the 1970s, poststructuralists have increasingly questioned the concept of a comprehensible understanding of truth. Therefore, Barthes challenges the idea that a text can be attributed to any single author. In his view, the more covert and implicit an author is, the more open in the sense of free to interpretation a text becomes. Accordingly, readers should not be intimidated by a critical discourse that claims to know the one true meaning of a text because the critics know the author’s intentions. Instead, readers should stop listening to those who claim to know the correct meaning 94 of a text by referring to the author’s intentions, and rather start interpreting the text for themselves. In the 1950s, the German scholar Wolfgang Kayser has proven for the rst time that the author is distinct from the narrator in a literary text (cf. Kayser). Shortly thereafter, Wayne C. Booth’s theoretical construct of an “implied author,” which he developed in connection to his work on unreliability, displaced the real author (cf. Booth 78-79). However, those scholars who refer to theories of authorship when interpreting literary texts nd little support regarding methodological strategies, and are often exposed to the charge of naivety (cf. Jannidis et al. 3). As Fotis Jannidis states, even if the analysis of the author is still important and often used for interpretation, there is still some mistrust regarding its usefulness as a literary category (cf. Jannidis et al. 11). Nevertheless, Matías Martínez shows that the abandonment of the author is intolerable with regard to the meaning of the content (cf. Martínez, “Autorschaft und Intertextualität” 466-468). However, despite all this severe criticism, the academic interest in the concept of “authorship” has been refreshed in the last decades (cf. Woodmansee and Jaszi, The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature ; cf. Burke, Authorship ; cf. Boozer; cf. Jannidis et al.; cf. Berensmeyer et al., Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies ; cf. Moy). Many literary approaches require knowledge about the author. For gender studies, for example, it is crucial to know whether an author is female, male, or diverse; for postcolonial theory, questions of race and color in uence the reading alike. In her introductory book to the study of culture, Aleida Assmann explains the di erences between “weak” and “strong” authorship (cf. Assmann 72). In times of a strong commitment to traditions, one mostly encountered weak authors, who produced the texts and who were overshadowed by authorities whose texts have been narrated for centuries. For people of a speci c social rank, it was not even respectable to become an author. Only those people who had to earn a living and, therefore, needed to sell texts like goods became authors (cf. Assmann 72-73). With increasing professionalization, less dependence on patronage, and the possibility of direct contact to pressmen and publishers, the concept of authorship gained more importance, even if it still re ected gender di erences in society, thus privileging male authors over their female colleagues (cf. Assmann 72-73). In my view, a strong authorship is characterized by the fact that the author holds all the threads in her hands and is hardly bound by external instructions, such as those issued by donors, publishers, or other (media) institutions. She has the full sovereignty over her works. Strong authorship does not depend on gender, race, or religion; it is oriented towards 95 freedom of opinion and the moral code of the press (cf. Jacquette). The author accepts the copyright law and assumes responsibility for the content. A high degree of the author’s subjectivity is similar to a position of “auteur cinemas” and “auteur lms,” which originated in the 1950 and 60s (cf. “Auteur Film” n. pag.). The author can be identi ed in several ways, for example, through a di erent use of the color palette, lighting, or cinematography. “Auteur cinema” describes the perspective in which the director is regarded as the author of a lm. Then, this work is considered to be an artwork, re ecting a distinctive personality, vision, point of view, and aesthetic style. Auteur theory, which originated in French lm criticism, was seen as a way to counter the dominant opinion held at the time that lms—in particular by the Hollywood studio system—were industrially produced entertainment rather than art. Auteur theory has been criticized for its “romantic individualism, authorial determinism, and general disregard for sociological, economic, technological, and audience factors in lm-making” (Chandler n. pag.), but it is highly popular today. Furthermore, Bill Nichols stresses that “[c]ertain technologies and styles encourage us to believe in a tight, if not perfect, correspondence between image and reality” (Nichols xii). The e ects that are commonly known from documentary lms, such as “lenses, focus, contrast, depth of eld, color, highresolution media [. . . ] seem to guarantee the authenticity of what we see” (xii). They can all be used “to give the impression of authenticity to what has actually been fabricated or constructed” (xii). “Auteur lms,” and, therewith, also “auteur comics” (cf. Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean ) oppose this notion of an objective view, neutral tone, and separation between the author as the producer of the lm and the narrator. In 1978, Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature, coining the term, “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. He argues that one cannot grasp the world as such; one cannot even know whether there is one world or many di erent worlds. None of these worlds is more real than the others. One has to select one world as the point of reference, the ‘actual’ world, which I call ‘extratextual world’ in this study. Di erent versions of the chosen world can take several forms. They can, for example, be described and expressed by words, music, pictures, sculptures, dances, and any other form of visual representation. For Goodman, ction is not a counterconcept to reality but a condition for the production of worlds whose claim to the status of ‘reality’ is debatable. As we will see, this approach is to a certain extent also connectable to comics journalism. Journalists, and thus also comics journalists, literally make news and construct a speci c reality (cf. Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 184). 48 For 48 The German language o ers the term “Zeitungs macher .” 96 more than a century, journalists have been striving for trustworthy reporting. While up until the twentieth century in Europe, the majority of people believed that reporting facts was killing journalism and “taking the spotlight away from the discursive essays of political advocacy, theory, and philosophy that dominated much of the European press” (Schudson n. pag.), American journalism set the trend in professionally training reporters for gathering news, starting as early as around 1800. 49 Worldmaking and Events In comics journalism, however, artists and authors draw the world—or parts of it—into a panel, the so-called ‘window on the world,’ which shows the reality enhanced, reduced, recon gured, and rethought. Following Goodman, comics journalists create only one world out of many more possible and conceivable worlds. Hence, one could rephrase the idea of the ‘window on the world’ to ‘window of the world; ’ and these worlds are based on the raw material that makes these worlds come into being—events. An “event” is to journalism what “worldmaking” is to literature. Hence, one can also argue that comics journalism works with a double conceptualization of created worlds and events. As Ansgar Nünning points out, the quali cation of a speci c historical incident as “event” is already an act of worldmaking because it results from procedures of selection, deletion, and ‘weighting’ (in the sense of Nelson Goodman); procedures that “re ect, but arguably also yield or even generate, cultural hierarchies” (V. Nünning et al. 198). When speaking of changes of states, one inevitably has to deal with the outcome of such changing states, namely, the elementary unit of an “event,” or, as Ansgar Nünning conceptualizes it, the “building-blocks of narrative worldmaking” (A. Nünning, “Making Events” 192), which stand in contrast to mere “happenings.” The term “event” is widely discussed in literary studies and understood in di erent ways (cf. Hühn). It is groundbreaking for further de nitions, such as those of “narrativity,” “tellability,” and “eventfulness.” The concept of “event” is also linked to the concept of “timeliness,” which is in uenced by its sequentiality. In literary theory, an “event” is a “special occurrence, something which is not part of everyday routine” (W. Schmid 8). Schmid uses the term “event” in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s sense of the ‘unprecedented incident.’ 50 Following these de nitions, Schmid de nes an “event” as “a deviation from the normative regularity applying in a given narrative world and preserving the order of that world” (8). 49 If one begins to question this can shake up the whole system of “journalism,” and one quickly nds oneself lost in philosophical, existential, phenomenological, and constructivist debates on truth, belief, and conviction that I do not want to pursue here. 50 The original reads, “ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit.” 97 “Events” also play a role in comics journalism and require a de nition, which, however, is di erent from that in literature. The task of journalism is to decide which content and information might be important to a broad public. If one follows the rather modern interpretation of the Hamburg research group, sociocultural contexts play an essential role in the de nition of “events.” Here, the link to journalism can be made as well, because journalism is a system for preserving information accepted by society. States may change events, but all events change states. Journalists seek to cover changing states and inform the public about them. Journalists set standards but also act along their rules. Journalists do not face a de ciency of news events worth telling but are confronted with the problem of setting lters instead because it is neither possible for comics journalists to tell everything, nor for recipients to receive all news events. In communication studies, media scholars also work with the term “media event,” which was coined by the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin. Also known as a “pseudo-event,” this term describes events or activities that serve little or no purpose other than being reproduced through advertisements and other forms of publicity (cf. Boorstin). In Boorstin’s sense, a “media event” is a kind of planned event, which may be called inauthentic, in contrast to a spontaneous one. 51 According to Ansgar Nünning, “media events” are “the result of selection, abstraction, ordering, [. . . ] prioritisation,” and are “perspectivedependent, culturally speci c and historically variable contingent constructs which are produced by discourses, narratives, and media” (A. Nünning, “Making Events” 193). As such, “media events” are staged and may center on a news announcement, an anniversary, or planned events like press conferences, speeches, or demonstrations. Instead of paying for advertising time, a “media event” or “pseudo-event” seeks to use public relations to gain media coverage and public attention. These events are expected or announced in advance so that the media can prepare for reporting. Consequently, in Boorstin’s view, a “media event” points to the fact that the media have constructed the events they report on themselves. The media make events happen and, then, report on them as if they were real. As such, the construction of “(media) events” contributes to the notions one has of the construction of reality and news alike: the news are created. The change of state, which, among other things, is one approach to de ning an “event,” is also connected to “sequentiality,” which is a fundamental concept in comics studies as well. In Understanding Comics , Scott McCloud de nes his idea of comics and sequential art. In his view (which follows Will Eisner’s), a single-panel comic would not be a comic because, without juxtaposition (or 51 He says that a “pseudo-event” is dramatic, repeatable, costly, intellectually planned, and social, and can cause other pseudo-events. 98 sequence), there can be no narrativity because the comics lacks the change of state that only occurs in the gutter. However, this view has now become very controversial among scholars (cf. Gardner, “Play/ Time: The Long History of Comics and Games (and what It Can Teach Us about the Future of Both). Conference Talk”). Coming back to the question of what the media should cover and how journalists should choose their stories, literary theory on “event” research, as proposed by Wolf Schmid, o ers a toolkit to de ne “event” and “eventfulness.” What Schmid considers to be the most salient requirement for an event, which is agreed to be one of the constitutive features of stories and storyworlds, is that the change of state must be real. This implies that changes of state, “which are wished for, imagined, or dreamed are not events” (W. Schmid 9), with the exception that real acts of wishing, imagining, or dreaming can qualify as events (cf. W. Schmid 9). Additionally, Schmid proposes a second factor, namely that an event must be resultative, by which he means that the events reach completion in the narrative world of the text (cf. W. Schmid 9). Furthermore, there are varying degrees of eventfulness which Schmid identi es by means of ve features—relevance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility, noniterativity (ordered according to decreasing importance rst, with the rst two being equally important). 52 Underlying the question of what constitutes narrative is the concept of mediacy. Most narrative theorists de ne “narrative” in terms of event sequences. As mentioned before, the news is mediated. Stanzel coined the term “mediacy” (cf. Stanzel) and described the fact of a mediated presentation of the story, which has become a general foundation of structuralist narratology. 53 Regarding “relevance,” a change of state must be of interest and noticeable to many. In other words, it needs to be an essential part of the storyworld in which it occurs. Here, Schmid speaks of the axioms which underlie the storyworld. In comparison, many theories of journalism studies also de ne “social relevance” as one of journalism’s key features or key criteria for selection. Neuberger and Kapern speak of “social relevance” (Neuberger and Kapern 27), which demonstrates the meaning and importance of an event for the readership and society. 54 Interestingly, an event can become important just because it receives news coverage, or because a famous person starts shedding light on it. That is why, as initially mentioned, I am more inclined to agree with the position 52 The most vigorous item of criticism against Schmid’s ve categories may be that the features are subject to the in uence of interpretation. 53 Di erent models of narrative mediation that received much scholarly attention were put forth by Stanzel, Genette, Chatman, Fludernik, Wolf, and A. and V. Nünning. For further explanations, (cf. Alber and Fludernik, “Mediacy and Narrative Mediation”). To explain the a ordances of each model and point to possible disadvantages is beyond the scope of this project. 54 The rst criterion is “Aktualität,” which might be translated best into English as “topicality.” 99 advocated by the members of the Narratology Research Group in Hamburg, because their approach stresses the fact that eventfulness depends on cultural and historical contexts (cf. Hühn n. pag.). Although it is not about a single media event but about events over a period of time, Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden serves again as a poignant example of the still ongoing and relevant—in the sense of topical and newsworthy—issue of the con icts in the Middle East, including the transcontinental regions of Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Glidden herself traveled through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq and joined reporters investigating the impact of the Iraq War on the cultural memory of American citizens, US soldiers, and local civilians. RB serves as a “reality narration” because the majority of people are not able to visit those countries themselves for various reasons and thus have to trust the information they are given. Therefore, it is justi ed to assume that a large part of our society depends on journalistic reportages by people like Glidden. Some of them are often called “war reporters” or “war correspondents”—to gather information about con icts, their urgency and their in uence on global geopolitics. 55 Initially, the Iraq War was a protracted armed con ict which began in 2003 with the invasion by a US-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. However, since 2014, the war has turned into an armed con ict in the Middle East. The Iraqi insurgency escalated into a civil war with the conquest of Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit, and major areas of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS or IS— a group which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United Nations and many individual countries. 56 In other words, Rolling Blackouts does not thematize daily breaking-news events, but rather a sociopolitical topic in uencing Western politics and diplomacy in several regards, often because of IS terrorist attacks in the West. All in all, Rolling Blackouts does in practice what Nünning has described in theory; that is, it accomplishes a process of selection, con guration, and textual representation which becomes meaningful when it comes to so-called “narrative ways of worldmaking” (A. Nünning, “Making Events”). 55 Hillary Chute discusses documentaries and comics that deal with war, trauma, and other disasters visually. She argues that “comics can express life stories, especially traumatic ones, powerfully because it makes literal the presence of the past by disrupting spatial and temporal conventions to overlay or palimpsest past and present” (Chute, “Comics Form and Narrating Lives” 109). 56 IS is widely known for its videos of beheadings and other types of executions of both soldiers and civilians, including journalists and aid workers, and its destruction of cultural heritage sites; it also committed ethnic cleansing on a historic scale in northern Iraq. 100 2.3.2 Reality Narrations and Reality References In the last years, the boundaries between di erent media have disappeared or become blurry (cf. Weischenberg, Journalistik: Theorie und Praxis aktueller Medienkommunikation 55). 57 Hybridization has permeated all elds of human communication; biology, economy, culture, literature, journalism, and (political) activism are no exceptions. Current scholarship in literature (cf. A. Nünning, Hybridisierung und Medialisierung als Katalysatoren der Gattungsentwicklung ; cf. A. Nünning and Schwanecke; cf. Weigel-Heller) is characterized by a variety of synchronic and diachronic approaches which investigate the interrelation between literature and media from di erent perspectives, including certain forms of “intermediality” (cf. Rajewsky), “multimodality” (cf. Gibbons; cf. Hallet, “Non-Verbal Semiotic Modes and Media in the Multimodal Novel”), “plurimediality” (cf. Rajewsky), “cross-mediality” (cf. K. Meier), “media-fusion” (cf. Rippl), “media-convergence” (cf. Beil et al.; cf. Jenkins), and “hybridization” (cf. Basseler). As the German literary scholar Moritz Baßler states, the literature of the twenty- rst century is characterized by generic mixture, innovation, and hybridization (cf. Baßler 52). Common postmodernist techniques include intertextuality, fragmentation, meta ction, and pastiche—the latter two of which are often used to create irony. Ralph Cohen emphasizes that “postmodern writing blurs genres, transgresses them, or un xes boundaries that conceal domination or authority” (Cohen 11). One might claim that forms and functions of literature are changing whenever literature adopts issues from reality. Originating from biology, the key term “hybridization” has become a “travelling concept” (cf. Baumbach et al.), which is used in the natural sciences, the study of culture, media theory, and literary studies. The term denotes the mixing of two or more distinct elements to form something new. It covers the blending of cultures, genders, identities, discourses, technologies, media, and genres (cf. Fludernik, “Hybridity” 228). Many literary scholars have reinterpreted hybridization strategies by emphasizing the blending or mixing of genres, text types, and semiotic codes within novels. With regard to the hybridization of genres, several synonyms and similar expressions are in circulation, such as “generic mixture” (A. Nünning and Schwanecke 116), “genre hybridity” (cf. Cohen), “generic hybrids” (cf. Seibel), and “generic change” (cf. Basseler). Baßler also speaks of “Mischgattungen” (‘mixed genres’) and “Gattungsübergänge” (‘genre transitions’) (cf. Baßler). In the realm of comics, Jörn Ahrens argues that works such as David B.’s Epileptic should perhaps not be de ned as “hybrid” but as a “multilayered medium” (Ahrens, “Imagine Reality: 57 In 1995, Weischenberg already criticized that large information companies are growing beyond their traditional markets into other media and service sectors (cf. Weischenberg, Journalistik: Theorie und Praxis aktueller Medienkommunikation 84). 101 Negotiating Comics with David B.’s ‘Epileptic’” 87), because they combine text and image in varying proportions. Thierry Groensteen prefers to speak of a “polysemiotic nature” when it comes to comics (Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator” 1). The rise of hybridization in narrative and visual genres has often been linked to the crisis of news media organizations, the overlapping global socioeconomic crisis, and technological progress. Technical, economic, political, and social innovations in the information and communication sector, such as mass media, telecommunications, and the Internet, are causing wide-ranging structural changes in the media system. This development also in uences the functionality of the media. On the one hand, it contributes to a diversifying media economy, for example, by allowing for user participation and interaction, by spreading the news instantaneously, or by having new platforms spread the news, which also leads to changes in the program. On the other hand, the radical transformation of media usage, sta shortages, and journalistic professionalism, as well as the service of the advertisement sector, lead to a change of long-established models in media politics and the literary sector alike. As the authors Werner Früh and Felix Frey write in their book Narration and Storytelling , narrating is an ancient cultural technique; narrating enables us to explain problems, evoke emotions, in uence others, and represent issues in order to experience, in uence, and shape the world according to our wishes and needs (cf. Früh and Frey 9). In this regard, narration is regarded as a particular form of communication. Depending on the aim of communication, there are several essential narrative functions and crucial features, which have become prominent under the key concept “storytelling” in journalism in the last years (cf. Früh and Frey 10). Whereas in the last century, journalistic forms of narration were mostly restricted to reportage and feature, the authors observe that narrative strategies and means seem to encroach on other journalistic areas nowadays as well, including the ‘hard information journalism’ with news and reports (cf. Früh and Frey 10). 58 Früh and Frey warn against a mere and un ltered transfer of narratological concepts to journalism. Concerning economic aspects, they argue that it might be helpful when journalistic media not only inform but also edit information in a comprehensible and perhaps slightly entertaining way (cf. Früh and Frey 10). Therefore, in their book, they want to nd out whether such a tendency towards an increasing use of narrativization strategies in journalism creates some unacceptable side e ects. The narratives that supposedly only refer to reality also shape it in a signi cant way. For example, pan ctionalists would argue that one can hardly 58 They admit that there is no consensus about an appropriate de nition of the term “narrative” and “narration” in journalism studies (cf. Früh and Frey 11). 102 distinguish between ction and reality. Matías Martínez and Christian Klein, however, argue against this position, claiming that even narratives of reality are constructed. Nevertheless, their peculiar claim to validity is that they represent real facts—the latter, however, is often overlooked by the radical-constructivist views of pan ctionalism. Klein and Martínez call stories with direct relation to a nonlinguistic reality “Wirklichkeitserzählungen” (‘reality narrations,’ my translation) (cf. Klein and Martínez). A narrative of reality is de ned as “the linguistic representation of an event, for example, a chronologically organized sequence of events,” which occurs with the “referential claim” to refer to “real events” (6). They distinguish between three types of narratives of reality that reveal how far their conceptualization of the eld of ‘reality’ reaches. Their eld of investigation does not only include descriptive but also normative and predictive narratives of reality (cf. Klein and Martínez 6). I sympathize with their concept of “reality narration” for several reasons. First, the theory develops from a similar approach to mine to combining narrations from literature and journalism. Second, “reality narrations” permit a verbal and visual interpretation; they are not limited to texts in the narrow sense of the word. Third, this concept can be connected to the previously explained idea of “essential truth,” which is about the mediation of the factual core message. And fourth, the theory of reality narrations assumes that the author is also the narrator of the text—a point that is of particular importance to this study (Klein and Martínez 3). For the rst time, this idea of equating the author with the narrator breaks with purely narratological ideas of the literary concept of the author and allows for a generic renegotiation while also considering how journalism understands the questions of author and narrator. Even if there is a single truth, there are di erent manifestations of it. Di erent things in di erent elds can create di erent truths to di erent people. In order to expand one’s vision and to avoid a mistrust in facts, comics journalism requires a distinction between di erent kinds of ‘reality references’ with regard to di erent aspects. If one applies, for example, Heidegger’s view of “truth as correctness,” the question to what extent comics journalism can be corrected or is correct remains unsolved. (That it should be correct is without question if it wants to be journalism.) Roland Barthes argues that small details of persons, places, and actions contribute little or nothing to the narrative, but give the story its atmosphere (cf. Barthes, “The Reality E ect”; cf. Barthes, Das Rauschen der Sprache ). Hence, with this term, Barthes refers to descriptive elements, often details, that link the text to the extratextual real world and makes a story appear as almost real. 59 For ctional texts, Sauerberg, Nünning, and Bonheim suggest that these texts can be situated “along an increasingly ctionalizing axis” (Sauerberg 45). 59 Gunn Enli speaks of “authenticity illusions” (see Chapter 2.3). 103 For them, the parameters “ ctional” and “factual” do not constitute a binary opposition but form a scale of di erent degrees (cf. A. Nünning, “A Critique of Lars Ole Sauerberg” 299), which can be applied here as well. Matiás Martínez also states that every narrative text represents something. However, factual texts di er from ctional ones in that the reality presented in them claims to refer to concrete facts in our reality (Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 184) (see Chapter 2.6.3). 60 As Martínez further observes, the image of reality is in uenced by the selection of the information material, the use of speci c narrative techniques, and rhetorical-stylistic issues (cf. “Erzählen im Journalismus” 184). Thus, to adequately describe forms and functions of narrating in journalism, Martínez suggests distinguishing between ctional-literary and journalistic narrative styles by separating the constructed character of journalistic narration from the ctional character (cf. “Erzählen im Journalismus” 184). Subsequently, when reading comics journalism, the recipient expects an authentically narrated story based on real-world events, while still being aware of the fact that truth cannot be represented mimetically in a drawn medium. This is where Enli’s concept of “mediated authenticity” can support my argument (see Chapter 2.3). Comics journalism deals with factual content in ctional form. Even if it stems from the individual perception of the artist’s mind and eyes, even if it is created, even if artists have to remember and cope with much cognitive e ort in order to draw their images, there are reasons for speaking of factual representations. Besides its hand-drawn nature, one of the essential parameters to classify a text as ctional consists of studying the occurrence of referential and ctive elements. Resembling the “5W-questions” from traditional journalism, these are the following in comics journalism: • event (what and why) • place (where) • time (when) • character: a) visual representation, b) verbal representation (who), see Chapter 3 • method of investigation and drawing process (how), see Chapter 4. 60 The original reads, “Jeder narrative Text stellt etwas dar; doch unterscheiden sich faktuale Texte von ktionalen dadurch, dass die in ihnen erzählte Wirklichkeit den Anspruch erhebt, auf konkrete Sachverhalte in unserer Wirklichkeit zu referieren.” 104 2.3.3 Mediated Authenticity The concept of “mediated authenticity” is connected to the discussion on mediation. “Authenticity” is a central concept and must steadily adapt to changes, cultural transformations, and social trends, which makes it di cult to capture its meaning in a single sentence. In 2015, Gunn Enli introduced the concept of “mediated authenticity,” which explains “how authenticity is a currency in the communicative relation between producers and audiences. [. . . ] [It] is a social construction, but it tra cs in representations of reality” (Enli 1). 61 The media are normatively supposed to o er a balanced, unbiased, trustworthy, and somewhat objective coverage of world events. 62 At the same time, the complexity of our lives requires that one can rely on and believe in reports, which lie outside the majority of people’s experiences. That is why Enli’s concept builds on a paradox—our understanding of society is based on mediated representations of reality. On the one hand, most of our understanding of the world is based on selected and mediated representations of reality. On the other hand, the media and its various forms have the power to construct, in uence, and feign information (cf. Enli 1). As early as 2012, Mark Deuze coined a similar term—“media life”—which means that we live both in and through the media (cf. Deuze). Media and media technologies are omnipresent and profoundly a ect the way we live, think, communicate, and behave. Because of this great importance and the in uence that the media exert on human lives to various degrees, Gunn Enli stresses the concept of “trustworthiness” and considers it to be one of the “most urgent topics in contemporary society” (Enli 4). Accordingly, Enli argues that mediated authenticity is established through negotiations between producers and audiences in what she coins the “authenticity contract.” 63 Enli notes that her “ authenticity contract ” (Enli 2, emphasis in original) is “based on a certain irrationality [. . . ], in part because [the recipients] want or need the pleasure of believing” (17). For Enli, the “authenticity contract” refers to the relationship between the audience, the producers, the media 61 In contrast, comics scholar Elisabeth El Refaie refers to the truth claims of a graphic memoir as “performed authenticity,” a highly context-dependent process that is linked to the actual person of the author(s) (Refaie, Autobiographical Comics 137). 62 Correctiv is committed to more diversity in the media and a new type of journalism. 63 I had already written my chapter on the ‘comics journalistic pact’ when Wibke Weber introduced me to Enli’s work. I will stick to my own terminology throughout this study. While Enli discusses authenticity as appearing in several di erent forms in various media, such as the radio, (reality)-TV, or TV series, and summarizes “ authenticity illusions ” (Enli 1, emphasis in original) which are “both accepted and correctly interpreted by the audience,” my approach mainly focuses on the author-reader-relationship and genre expectations, but exclusively in comics journalism. 105 companies, and the regulatory authorities (cf. Enli 16). Terms such as reliability, trustworthiness, credibility, and truthfulness are very similar to each other. Mediation requires a re nement of the original and is carried out by means of information and communication technology (cf. Enli 3). The crucial point to keep in mind is that her concept is connectable to the extent that it strengthens the relationship between reader and author based on speci c generic rules that form the discourse about the text. Enli de nes this contract—which I call ‘pact’—as a “tacit understanding or agreement between producers and audience,” which, however, remains a “social construction, one that is based on a set of genre conventions” (Enli 2). For Enli, authenticity in the media is to be understood as a “communicative process” depending on “symbolic negotiations between the main participants in the communication” (3). According to Enli, the relationship between producer and recipient thus concerns aspects of “trustworthiness, originality, and spontaneity” (3). 2.4 The Popularity of Drawing(s) There have probably never been as many images as there are today. The world creates and shares them—more and more, faster and faster. It comes as no surprise that a rhetorical gure has emerged from this abundant supply. We often use a cognitive frame here and talk about a ‘ ood of images.’ However, drawing as a cultural technique that is as old as mankind itself opposes this trend. Nowadays, almost every person can take pictures. Photographs are omnipresent, but drawings have become the new old trend. They leave the context of pure art and its exhibition in museum, because they existed long before the invention of photography. This section will only discuss the role of drawings in relation to sequential art. It will not cover the history of drawing in general but focus on some aspects that contribute to the rise of comics as a drawn and handmade medium (cf. Kantrowitz n. pag.). It is impossible to refer to comics journalism without re ecting on its visual and aesthetic dimensions because drawings are its artistic foundation. One might consider drawing rst and foremost as a practice, but it is also a language, an expression, and as a form of visual communication. In the globalizing world, human beings tend to communicate more and more visually. Yet, children learn to read and write, but comparably little attention is being paid to visual literacy at school. 64 This is why students’ competencies have to be strengthened in 64 One of the leading scholars, who researches on the use of electronic media in the foreign language class is Wolfgang Hallet, whose foci are, among other, visual literacy and the use of new media in English language teaching (cf. Hallet, “Viewing Cultures: Kulturelles Sehen und Bildverstehen im Fremdsprachenunterricht”; cf. Hallet, “Umgang mit Texten und Medien”). 106 critical literacy, multimodal literacy, visual and digital literacy (cf. Leonhardt and Viebrock 6). Drawings are to comics what the heart is to the human body. As one of the oldest forms of human expression and a form of visual communication, the drawing can be regarded as the foundation of comics. It is not exaggerated to say that without drawings, comics would not exist. 65 As early as the nineteenth century, the relevance of drawing for educational purposes was supported by the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who thought that drawings are a general human matter (cf. Rees 20). 66 His modern and revolutionary principles of education followed the motto “learning by head, hand and heart,” and included teaching in calculating, language, writing, singing, and drawing. As art historian Joachim Rees explains, “Pestalozzi raised drawing to the rank of a fundamental anthropological fact supposedly preceding all ethnic, cultural, social, and professional di erentiation” (20). Thus, Pestalozzi was in a way a mastermind of his time. According to the Oxford Dictionary , the term “drawing” refers both “to the act of marking lines on a surface and to the product of such manual work” (cf. Bloom and Blair n. pag.); I will refer to both meanings. Drawing is used to express one’s creativity and, therefore, has been prominent in the world of arts. A drawing typically emphasizes the arrangement of lines and contours in order to depict a speci c object of interest. For this purpose, the most fundamental tools one needs are paper, a pen/ pencil, and one’s imagination. 67 In comics, drawing functions as a fundamental means of narration next to the written text. Yet, drawing is di erent from painting because the latter emphasizes the modulation of color surfaces. 68 This project separates drawings from ‘illustrations’ or ‘artistic attachments’ that appear in scienti c or children’s textbooks. Unlike comic panels, they are not the primary vehicle for storytelling but function as a visual surplus to the text. 65 Many scholars believe that drawings were used as a specialized form of communication before the invention of the written language. Examples of early cave and rock paintings created by the homo sapiens sapiens around 30,000 years ago prove their assumption (cf. Coen-Cagli 73). Early forms of sequential art can be found, for instance, on Grecian urns and the Bayeux Tapestry , which is a horizontal strip of linen depicting the Norman conquest of England in juxtaposed scenes, created circa AD 1100 (cf. Duncan and M. J. Smith 3). 66 The German translation reads, “eine allgemein menschliche Sache.” 67 Compared to drawing on paper, digital drawing works similarly. One needs an imitation of a sheet of paper and the technical equipment. For instance, drawing on graphics tablets works similarly to paper or other materials. An essential di erence here is that one looks at the screen while drawing and that the eyes may need to get used to this at rst. For a precise overview of (dis-)advantages of digital painting on PC, cf. Missfeldt. 68 This works di erently in digital images because the boundary between painting and drawing blurs in digital images. Even if one uses di erent brush or pen tips, the ‘physical resistance’ towards the screen as the background material will be the same during painting and drawing. 107 Drawings can have di erent forms, colors, and styles. Even if some drawings are more abstract than others, their form is essentially the same—they all consist of dots and lines that can be arranged and sketched arbitrarily. They may form shapes, surfaces, symbols, or icons that ful ll di erent functions for the drawing in each panel on the page. If the illustrator draws objects more naturalistically in the sense that objects are shown as close to their appearance in nature as possible, nature is reduced to the most basic level of the human eye’s perception. 69 In this respect, a line is an artistic means of expression located at one end of the scale of abstraction. It stands in contrast to a dot, which represents the other end of this scale (see Fig. 2.5). Abstraction and reduction of visual information to the bare essentials constitute a signi cant intellectual achievement, which comes to the fore even more in comics studies, as the following ideas by Scott McCloud visualize. 70 As McCloud illustrates, the symbiosis of simple lines and dots can form a drawing (see Fig. 2.7). Depending on the degree of abstraction, style of lines, and colors, these can function as symbols or iconic visuals. Reducing the complexity of realistic images through processes of ampli cation leads to a simpli cation which eventually creates cartoons (see Fig. 2.6). 71 Thus, drawing and its various levels of abstractness can, on the one hand, make complicated matters more clear, imaginable, and communicable. On the other hand, it can stay as it is—as dots and lines only. Moreover, drawing comics can also create meaning in a way that realistic art is incapable of (cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics 30-31). Additionally, drawing is generally associated with the artistic ability to watch objects attentively and precisely. It takes some time to get an idea of the shapes and features of the object one wants to draw. The ability of careful observation and artistic talent were especially necessary and helpful before the invention of photography by Louis Daguerre in 1839 (cf. Newhall; cf. Warren). 72 Even if the following forms of drawing do not 69 Unlike the German description ‘Zeichner,’ the English language does not provide such a straightforward term but o ers a variety of designations instead, such as “draughtsman,” “cartoonist,” “illustrator,” and “drawer.” This may cause confusion in the translation process because a ‘cartoonist’ is a speci c job title in Germany that is part of the broader and neutral umbrella term ‘Zeichner.’ For example, one would not call a “Technische Zeichnerin” an illustrator. 70 Scott McCloud used to draw superhero comics in the late 1980s before publishing his meta-essay Understanding Comics , for which he became famous. 71 The signi cance of the reduction of complexity does not pertain exclusively to comics studies. For journalism, it holds true that the central question discussed to this day is whether journalism can reduce the complexity of the world while remaining purely descriptive or whether it constructs a reality of its own (cf. Pörksen, Die Beobachtung des Beobachters ). 72 One might even say that drawing will always be an important resource that cannot be substituted by photography in particular when it comes to manuals, such as those for the assembly of furniture, or to security instructions in airplanes, or handicraft instructions, such as those knitting or folding origami paper. Here, drawn instructions can show the three-dimensionality of objects. Di erently dashed lines allow the user to ‘look through the object’s material’ in 108 Figure 2.5: Page Excerpt, “Words [A]re [. . . ] [A]bstract [I]cons” ( Understanding Comics 28) 109 Figure 2.6: Page Excerpt, “[A]mpli cation through [S]impli cation” ( Understanding Comics 30) Figure 2.7: Page Excerpt, “What [A]re [Y]ou [R]eally [S]eeing? ” ( Understanding Comics 31) 110 stand in a direct relationship to comics’ sequential art, they mostly ful lled the purpose of conveying information or visualizing facts, which—in the broadest sense of journalism—can be regarded as non ctional drawings and can thus be understood as ‘early illustrative journalism.’ For many artists up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, drawing had a privileged status within the ne arts whose ability of universalization formed the dominant paradigm of art. “The anthropological discourse of the Enlightenment opposed the subordination of drawing to the primacy of ‘art and mastery,’ which up until then had been widely accepted, with the “naturalization” of drawing” (Rees 20). It is not by chance that the occurrence of the rst modern American comic strip, Yellow Kid by Richard F. Outcault, or the illustrated works by the German writer and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch, such as Max und Moritz: Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen , overlap with the increasing popularization of drawings, because, traditionally, drawing enjoyed a high prestige within the cultural habitudes of the rich (cf. Rees 23). Journalists and cartoonists have to observe precisely before they start to draw (see Chapter 3.2.1). Therefore, cartoonicity and drawing seem to be particularly suitable for journalism, because journalists, too, have to observe with their eyes rst in order to be able to verbally describe something. As Hillary Chute writes, drawing seems “to be among the best instruments of witness” (Chute, Disaster Drawn 2) and points to the earliest form of drawn testimony of disaster (cf. Schlichting, “Review. Disaster Drawn”). In other words, “[d]rawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic,” believes subway artist Keith Haring (Haring n. pag.). Although drawn images are not factual artifacts per se due to their act of creation, drawings have always been used to support truth and served as a visual representation of actual events, in addition to their use in art. For example, from the eighteenth century onwards, reportages of travel, so-called “travelogues” (or travel literature), were very common (cf. Cuddon). 73 Traveling as a result of the empirization process has developed a highly di erentiated toolkit of observation and documentation skills that have been used in various elds (cf. Rees 21), such as press illustrations (Fritz Koch-Gotha), courtroom order to see, for example, where to plug in the boards or where to crease the paper. Additionally, the artistic depiction of the proceedings in a court of law is another eld in which drawings are used, because in many jurisdictions, cameras are prohibited in courtrooms in order to prevent distractions and preserve privacy. 73 A few random representatives of writers who have written about their travel experiences are, for example, Samuel Johnson in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Charles Dickens in American Notes for General Circulation (1842), Mary Wollstonecraft in Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) or Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). 111 drawings (Erich Dittmann) 74 , drawings of mines (Alfred Schmidt), lm drawings (Robert Weaver) or fashion illustrations (Constantin Guys). 75 Other forms of drawing for non ctional contexts are facial composites, facial composites, sketches of crime scenes, engineering drawings, and city maps 76 , nautical maps 77 , technical drawings, or biological/ medical drawings (Sir Joseph Banks). Although there are many elds of application in the real world, over the nineteenth century, the interest in drawing and its importance for daily applicability seems to have decreased dramatically. The increasing practicability of photography is one reason for this development. As Groos and Berg have observed, drawing was considered to be increasingly obsolete at art schools and only played a minor role in the world of exhibitions since the invention of photography (cf. Berg and Groos 6). Industrialization, the development of the press and the rst newsrooms, the possibility of a faster production process, the economic change within news o ces, as well as the zeitgeist favored and triggered the use of photography. However, comics scholar Hillary Chute observes a return to a tradition of drawing in order to tell a story (cf. Chute, Disaster Drawn 6). For her, this turn to creating drawn visual expressions and comics is part of a tradition of works connected to the visual depiction of eyewitness accounts. In her opinion, non ction mediated in comics has experienced a renaissance since the atomic age: “[i]t was not until 1972 that comics itself became a form for witnessing in any kind of non- ction context” due to two reasons (Chute 14). First, there was a saturation of the discourse and possibilities of technology that shaped the atomic age. Second, the news coverage of the Vietnam war with its constant stream of televisual images also led to a saturation (cf. Chute 6). Another reason for the trend towards non ction comics may be that (non-)governmental organizations and other institutions promote educational comics on speci c topics more by means of symbols and images, because some of them are universally understandable across languages. The Goethe Institute , for example, publishes instructions and rules for behavior in public space as comics. So do many public transportation companies. 74 Since 1964, §169 of the German Judicature law forbids the use of any visual or audio media during the court proceedings. Yet, the German illustrator Dittmann drew the key scenes of the “Auschwitz” and “Baader-Meinhof ” trials, both of which received global media attention. 75 Since 1845, Guys worked as an “artistic correspondent” for the Illustrated London News in London and Paris. Since 1853, he also reported on the Crimean war by drawing and writing. According to Roob, this was the rst time when a ‘drawn reportage,’ photography and a telegraphic ‘text reportage’ stood side by side and competed for authenticity and readership (cf. Roob 54). 76 Japanese city maps, for instance, do not need any street names but depict reality just by referring to symbols and icons. 77 Early nautical maps, for example, by captain James Cook in the eighteenth century were used as reference maps until the nineteenth century (cf. Rees 22). 112 It comes as no surprise that in an age of speed, drawing has gained popularity as a leisure activity. For example, the Urban Sketchers -movement meets to make drawings together on the spot. The innovative aspect is that these drawings are then distributed over the Internet and made available to the public. Furthermore, bookstores and discounters o er a variety of coloring books for children and adults. Besides economic interests of the publishers, reducing stress symptoms and treating mental illnesses are only two of many functions drawing ful lls in everyday life. To conclude, the creation of a picture can be ‘slow food’ for the eye. Drawing needs time; drawing is time; drawing is the signature of the author. The handmade original stands for human-made quality. People who draw want to visualize something. In German, this means ‘sich ein Bild machen von etwas.’ Taking this pun literally involves not only the cognitive and mental e ort but also the performative act of creating a picture (‘machen’) to eventually hold in one’s hands. The creation of handmade drawings is a process that cannot be imitated easily. As such, comics journalism appreciates this craftsmanship. Furthermore, the imperfection of a drawing or a sketch makes it authentic. Because drawing requires the observer to look at and watch things closely, a drawing is to some extent also an eyewitness report. Above all, drawing means knowledge—for producers and viewers alike. Drawings are said to re ect reality anew, to construct and create pictures in order to keep them in mind (cf. von Freyberg min. 38-42). To conclude, drawing can reduce the information of reality—or aspects thereof—to the essentials. The drawer’s translation of her experiences into lines and dots is at the heart of comics. 2.5 In the Tradition of New Journalism There are two ways of making this section reader-friendly—either by discussing the genre of comics journalism with its examples and then deriving similarities to New Journalism, or, second, by putting New Journalism rst and drawing the readers’ attention to the key characteristics of New Journalism before analyzing representations of comics journalism (see Chapter 3 and 4); I will pursue the latter way. Broadening the de nition of literature and journalism has immediate consequences. The boundaries between fact and ction begin to dissolve. Historically, this fuzziness is not a new phenomenon because a genre between literature and journalism has already started to gain attention in the 1970s in the USA—New Journalism. Due to many similarities, this project argues that comics journalism can be seen as a contemporary descendant of New Journalism. 113 Generic Change For literature, according to Ansgar Nünning, critical attention has been directed to such modes and genres as “New Journalism” and the “non ction novel,” “ ctional biographies,” “antihistorical novels,” “metahistorical novels,” “historiographic meta ction,” “documentary ction,” a revisionist type of “postmodernist historical novel,” “uchronian fantasy,” “parahistorical novels,” and “facti ction”’ (A. Nünning, “A Critique of Lars Ole Sauerberg” 282). This list, which is not even complete, clearly indicates that this proliferation of hybrid genres bears witness to the fact that a dichotomy between ‘fact’ and ‘ ction’ has been called into question, not only in literature but also in journalism. Following Frow, “genre” is a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning (cf. Frow 10) that is dynamically negotiated between authors and readers and presents “one of the ways in which texts seek to control the uncertainty of communication, and it may do so by building gures of itself, models of how it should be read” (4). What is most important is that the concepts of “journalism” and “genre” will not be understood as xed, normative, and stable entities but rather as di erent modes of approaching a text. The concepts of “journalism” and “genre” are dynamic, relational, and di er from time to time. As such, they also need to be as exible as possible to adapt to changes. In our culture, we have to deal with an increasing overlap between once distinct genres in literature—journalism/ non ction literature is no exception to this trend. There are debates within the media industry and among readers about the type of journalism. Previously convenient dichotomies between “elite” and “popular,” between “high” and “low,” between “they” and “us,” and between “fact” and “ ction” often no longer apply. 78 According to Je rey C. Alexander, the series editor of Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany , “[t]he boundaries of professional journalism are porous, the lines separating it from outside pressures and organizations uncertain” (Revers viii). Dieter Roß asks whether we have to deal with a “Journalisierung der Literatur” 78 The search for reasons for the popularity of comics journalism necessitates keeping in mind the speci c national cultural repertoires. As Revers states, one main contrast between the US and Germany “revolves around the contrast between pragmatism and intellectualism; practical solutions contrast rigid principles” (cf. Revers 23). In 1992, sociologist Michèle Lamont concluded that the United States is a “loosely bounded culture” (Lamont 115). It consists of less clearly coded classi cation systems and has more tolerance for transgression and exibility for cultural innovation (cf. Lamont 115). In 2010, a similar study came to the same conclusion, namely that Germany has more rigid boundaries of aesthetic evaluation that favor high art, compared to less rigid boundaries between high and low culture in the US (cf. van Venrooij and Schmutz). Regarding cultural habits, Revers generally indicates three signi cant national di erences in total, the other two being a stronger emphasis on collectivism in Germany than in the US as well as a higher ‘mode of civil religious discourse’ in the US than in Germany (cf. Revers). 114 (‘journalization of literature’) (Roß 77), or with a “Literarisierung der Presse” (‘literarization of the press’) (87). Journalism is said to become more literary and to generate new and hybrid forms of knowledge production and information distribution, because “[w]e live in a culture of blur and hybrids” (Lawson n. pag.). “Narrative journalism,” for example, is regarded as “the highest achievable goal for journalists, but that its practice comes with dangers and risks. It tempts journalists to abandon the traditional principles of objectivity and factuality, which can ultimately cause journalism to lose its credibility and authority” (van Krieken and Sanders n. pag.). “Narrative journalism” o ers stories “that are closer to ctional narratives than to conventional press stories” in their writing techniques and in the kind of truth they intend to convey (Vanoost n. pag.). Often, part of the de nition is that the story works on more than one level, so that the speci c subject matter leaves openings to other, more universal themes. And it usually tolerates and makes plain to the reader a greater range of uncertainty about what the writer knows and how s/ he knows it. (Greenberg, “Poetics of Fact” n. pag.) This willingness to acknowledge the subjectivity and uncertainty that exist in factual discovery helps to allay suspicions of an audience which has come to mistrust the language of traditional “neutral” reporting, and arguably helps anchor the story in external reality in a more persuasive way (cf. Greenberg, “Poetics of Fact”). One might talk about ‘literary sphinxes’ here. On the one hand, they are literary because they insert the majority of elements from literature. On the other hand, they are sphinxes because they play with the generic conventions; something is mixed and eventually gives birth to new forms. In historical terms, the origins of journalism in terms of personnel and structure can be traced back to literature (cf. Haas, Empirischer Journalismus: Verfahren zur Erkundung gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit ). Accordingly, the journalization of literature begins with renowned authors such as Ernest Hemmingway in the anglophone world and Heinrich Heine in the Germanspeaking community (cf. Roß 78). Roß goes on to argue that the growing dominance of news journalism has marginalized what is known as “author journalism” nowadays (86). These are some of its characteristics: • the contemporary, the current, the concrete, and the situational dominate • the claim to be art remains • a self-con dent subjectivity by the publishing actors • an idiosyncratic, often playful approach to reality • the texts are deliberately arranged and dramatized 115 One can say that the growing news journalism in the nineteenth century has contributed signi cantly to the alienation and separation between literature and journalism (cf. Roß 86). What has become known as ‘writer-journalism’ (“schriftstellernder Journalismus”), rst found its form of expression in magazine literature, but then owed into newspapers and contributed to their literary re nement (cf. Klaus 103). 79 Many journalists wrote and still write novels, just as some novelists write journalistic pieces as well. Writers, like André Malraux, often adapt passages from journalistic texts in their ctional works. Also called “the new non ction” (Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 44), “alternative journalism” (44), “journalism reviews” (44), and “neuliterarischer Journalismus” (cf. Haas, Empirischer Journalismus: Verfahren zur Erkundung gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit ), the term “New Journalism” is the one that is widely used. Speaking of New Journalism mostly refers to the kind of journalism that Tom Wolfe pursued. Although he did not found this movement, Wolfe is associated with it and was its pioneer in many regards. 80 The editors Joan Kristin Bleicher and Bernhard Pörksen provide a profound de nition of “New Journalism” in their handbook Grenzgänger: Formen des New Journalism , referring to New Journalism as an uncomfortably working label that cannot be ultimately de ned (cf. Bleicher and Pörksen 10; cf. Bleicher). In their mind, it is a pole of attraction for a variety of inspiring and contemporary thoughts of di erent social, political, and literary discourses (cf. 10). Pörksen states that New Journalism is a “hybrid phenomenon” that can only be explained by drawing on interdisciplinary theories and terminologies (Pörksen, “Das Problem der Grenze” 23). The hybridity of the movement and impossibility of reducing it to a single form connects it, among others, to comics journalism. As we will see, one can argue that comics journalism stands in the tradition of New Journalism. Like comics journalists nowadays, New Journalists and their opinions and attitudes formed a small minority in their profession, practicing an alternative way of journalism (see Chapter 4.2.2 and 4.3): Sie leisteten sich einen Sonderstatus, waren entweder - selten - von der Redaktion für ihre Recherchen freigestellt oder arbeiteten als freie Autoren. Bis auf die wenigen Stars bescherte ihnen dieser Status ökonomische Unsicherheit. Umso wichtiger waren Au agen, Erfolge und ö entliche Wertschätzung [. . . ]. Literarische Journalisten recherchierten ihre Geschichten zumindest ebenso 79 The original reads, “Der schriftstellernder Journalismus ‘fand seine Ausdrucksform zuerst in der Zeitschriftenliteratur, oss im Weiteren aber in die Zeitungen ein und trug zur literarischen Veredelung der Zeitung bei.” 80 The original reads, “Sprachrohr, Theoretiker und Promoter” (Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 62). 116 genau wie nicht-literarische, oft genauer und fast immer intensiver, aber darüber hinaus legten sie Wert auf eine adäquate sprachliche Präsentation der recherchierten Ergebnisse. 81 (Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 53) The original ideas of New Journalism can be brie y summarized as follows: The focus is on the narrative instead of reproduction; it is intuition instead of rational analysis; people are in the focus instead of things; and style opposes stylistics (Haas and Wallisch 298). 82 Moreover, New Journalism provokes questions of genre theory insofar as it has been using ways of ctionalization in journalism ever since (cf. Reuss 22). Additionally, like comics journalism, it raises epistemological questions of objectivity and truth in the journalistic realm (cf. Pörksen, “Das Problem der Grenze” 20). In particular, Wolfe’s concept of New Journalism is characterized by the author’s subjectivity and intensive investigation, dramatic composition, and dramatization of the narration. Further features are the attempt to depict dialogues and multiple perspectives in length instead of short quotes, as well as a detailed description of gestures, facial expressions, and behavior (cf. Wolfe 3-4). But what were the reasons that led to the rise and success of New Journalism? Research suggests three major explanations: First, it was the zeitgeist, the way of life and lust of the late 1960s and 1970s. Second, it was the deliberate act of breaking with the rules of traditional ways of objective reporting. New Journalists criticized the journalistic claim of objectivity, which they regarded as an illusionary aim of traditional, old-school information and scouting journalism, because, in their view, there was no ultimate certainty (cf. Pörksen, “Das Problem der Grenze” 20). Instead, the journalist with her observations and experiences is present at any time in New Journalism (cf. “Das Problem der Grenze” 20). And third, this style of journalistic writing is a critique of the increasingly objectivity-driven character of the press that triggered the separation between journalism and literature in the press. 83 This is why many New Journalists tried investigative reporting with sometimes dangerous investigation processes. They often preferred reporting about 81 My translation reads, “They a orded themselves a special status, were either—rarely—exempted by the editorial sta for their research or worked as freelance authors. Except for a few authors who became successful, this status brought them economic uncertainty. All the more important were the requirements, success, and public esteem [. . . ]. Literary journalists researched their stories at least as accurately as nonliterary journalists, often more precisely and almost always more intensively, but beyond that, they also attached importance to an adequate linguistic presentation of the researched results. 82 The original reads, “Erzählung statt Wiedergabe, Intuition statt Analyse, Menschen statt Dinge, Stil statt Stilistik.” 83 The original reads, “Vernachrichtlichung des Pressewesens.” In this regard, the growing dominance of news journalism marginalized “author journalism” (cf. Roß 86). 117 sex, drugs, and violence—topics that the white American middle class had never paid attention to before (cf. Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 47). New Journalists were good at discussing minor topics before moving to the more signi cant and complex questions of life. Additionally, they knew how to deal with world events by reducing them to smaller news issues (cf. Haas, Empirischer Journalismus: Verfahren zur Erkundung gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit 345). Moroeover, New Journalism quite often dealt with complex issues that are depicted in long articles or even in book-length forms (cf. Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 54), which is another similarity to comics journalism. Many literary journalists have spent their lives switching between literary and journalistic foci. Truman Capote, who is famous for the true-crime novel In Cold Blood , and Norman Mailer, who is popular for his non ction novel The Armies of the Night , changed from literature to journalism and back. Other authors started in journalism and later moved to literature in their careers, like Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre ( taz , FAZ ), Christian Kracht ( Tempo , DER SPIEGEL ), and Navid Kermani ( Morgen ist da ). However, as David Abrahamson observes, journalism made those authors learn to observe and to appreciate facts, which turned out to be useful in literature as well (cf. Abrahamson 55-57). Other prominent representatives who melted literary ction in fact-based journalism are, for example, Hunter S. Thompson (the founder of the “gonzo journalism movement”), Joan Didion (author and journalist for The New Yorker ), Louis “Studs” Terkel (he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non ction in 1985 for The Good War ), the Swiss Tom Kummer (in 2000, he triggered a media scandal with invented interviews.), Gay Talese (journalist for The New York Times who helped to de ne literary journalism), and Jimmy Breslin (American journalist and author who was awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary). There is an extensive body of research on New Journalism, and one could go on writing about many of its aspects. However, regarding the topic of this dissertation, the questions of the role of the author and authorship are of particular relevance. Hence, what relationship does New Journalism have to the author? Heiner Bus has identi ed some major aspects—the author tries to convey immediateness and the concrete reality; she strives for emotional involvement (cf. Bus 280). These observations coincide with the following narrative strategies: • the construction of the text through the succession of single scenes (cf. 280) • the complete reproduction of dialogues (cf. 280) • the entire depiction of all details with symbolism in a scene, depiction of all details which contribute to the status of a person (cf. 280) 118 In addition to immersion, accuracy, and symbolism as the hallmarks of New Journalism (cf. Sims), the concepts of storytelling, immersion to provoke (dramatic) tension and reader attraction, emotionalization, as well as dramatization are further strategies of New Journalism (cf. Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 54; cf. Renger 425-427). Immersion is connected to ethical questions and moral responsibility and it is a way to arouse people’s interest. Their play with onomatopoeia and sound is an approach to create immersion, emotion, and to raise authenticity. Haas and Wallisch remark that a bizarre, very colorful language, rich in neologisms, unusual punctuation, onomatopoeia, a systematic use of dialogues in the text—even if they are far from the standard language—and a real scenic structure are characteristics of the new journalists’ writing style (cf. Haas and Wallisch 301). What this brief outline has shown and what will be exempli ed throughout the next chapters is that New Journalism can be seen as a predecessor of the style of comics journalism inasmuch as the latter adapts, transforms, and develops elements of the former. Apart from being a genre, New Journalism can also be treated as a mode of writing. Pörksen concludes that New Journalism is a pattern of coverage and, in addition, to that, a pattern of knowledge of the world which consists of speci c rules to order this reality (cf. Pörksen, “Das Problem der Grenze” 17). Furthermore, one can postulate that the pattern of coverage of New Journalism is a blessing and a curse at the same time due to its ambiguity and internal mixture (cf. “Das Problem der Grenze” 19). Consequently, comics journalism, too, cannot be assigned to either genre. Similar to texts from the eld of New Journalism, it is both—a ‘borderline genre’ between the literary and the journalistic eld, or, in Haas’ words, a ‘bastard’ in the no-man’s land between literature and reportage (Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 48). 84 Moreover, factuality is an omnipresent concept in comics journalism. Even though people seem to be well aware of the fact that they receive a mediated authenticity (see Chapter 2.3), there are more general questions, such as ‘How can one fact-check journalistic content in comics journalism? How can the correctness of the content be proven? Or, what can the author do to support her credibility? ’ Scott McCloud’s central point is that there are no neutral visual decisions. Every visual display we see is meant to communicate something, and every artist who creates one has a speci c intention. Nevertheless, comics journalists can still depict and verify facts regardless of their unique way of seeing things. I can only try to clarify de nitions and provide means for reading and interpreting comics journalism, as every piece of comics journalism is still a human-made artifact. Individual or collective experience will always show 84 The original reads, “ein ‘Bastard’ im Niemandsland zwischen Literatur und Reportage.” 119 ruptures, will behave nonlinearly, and may seem inconsistent. Yet, the giant puzzle of polyphony and reality is based on facts, truth, and for narrative reasons, also on ctional elements. Studies have also already shown that the knowledge of the genre is determined to a great extent by the prior knowledge and the expectations of the readership, which a ect the reception of the work as such (cf. Zwaan). 2.6 Classification Categories for Comics Journalism Depending on one’s focus, there are di erent possibilities of classifying the forms of representation in comics journalism. While comics journalist and media expert Dan Archer distinguishes between three di erent forms of comics journalism— rst, feature articles, second, illustrated reportage, and third, explainers (JSK n. pag.)—I suggest broadening the view and going beyond journalistic text types. The aim of this part is to examine the criteria and categories according to which comics journalism can be classi ed for the purpose of analyzing the genre’s manifold forms and features. I propose the following three categories: way and medium of publication of comics journalism (see Chapter 2.6.1), the duration of the production (see Chapter 2.6.2), and, most importantly, the investigation of those journalistic text types that constitute comics journalism’s features (see Chapter 2.6.3). By having reality as its basis of narration, literature changes its forms and functions (cf. Roß 78), and comics journalism is an outstanding example of this. The term “form” has a long history, and its meaning di ers widely across disciplines (Spörl, “2.3 Form als Bestimmungskriterium” 33). Despite its richness and variety, the central commonality of all de nitions of form is the recognition that, in a literary context, the form is crucial for the determination of genres (cf. “2.3 Form als Bestimmungskriterium” 33). Caroline Levine observes in her monograph on literary theory that academic works on “form” have become increasingly omnipresent within literary and cultural studies in the last few years and that “[f]orms are at work everywhere” (Levine 2). In this sense, a classi cation of di erent forms of comics journalism is essential, because it has to be recognized as a new journalistic genre—a gap I try to ll in with this study. In this context, “form” refers to “all shapes and con gurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and di erence” and is necessary “to make order” (Levine 3). Levine borrows the concept of “a ordance” from design theory. She develops a new formalist method that promises to address the re- 120 lationship and points of intersection between culture, literature, and politics. 85 Levine argues that forms can have ve functions—they may contain, di er, overlap and intersect, travel, and operate politically in particular historical contexts—especially when they become hybrid mixtures. Likewise, journalism, of course, also works with forms. According to Bernhard Pörksen, patterns of coverage (“Berichterstattungsmuster”) are forms of order. They are responsible for framing the representation, for directing the access to the so-called reality, and ultimately for scanning and patterning this reality (cf. Pörksen, “Das Problem der Grenze” 16). In the course of this project, it is also necessary to ask the question of why the form of the comics is chosen for a combination with journalistic techniques. What is the added value of this format? The comics form is exible, restless, and of polysemiotic character—there is no single way for creating a comics page. As Hat eld writes, the “relationship between the various elements of comics (images, words, symbols) resists easy formulation” (Hat eld xiv). Its underlying grammar has to adapt to changes regularly. Advanced readers are guided in their reading by expectations born of habit, and artists by their experience or conventional usage by others. In the reading of a page, di erent people are likely to stress di erent elements. Perhaps this is why—within the wider eld of word and image studies—comics are a “wandering variable” (xiv) and can be approached from various perspectives. Comics journalists have a vast amount of di erent formal opportunities at their disposal, even though readers and artists always face challenges. “[O]n the one hand, the nigh-on irresistible urge to codify the workings of the form; on the other hand, a continual delight in the forms’s ability to frustrate any airtight analytical scheme” (Hat eld xiv). Even if ‘form’ always indicates “ an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping ” (Levine 3, emphasis in original), Hat eld points to the resulting dilemma; the non-prescribed codi- cation of forms, and the question of how comics should and could function are both a blessing and a curse for recipients and artists alike. If there is no strict rule regarding the question of what to depict and how, it must be theoretically possible to separate the content from its form. 86 How can one identify, for example, the documentary value or non ctional dimension in a comic? One might recognize this by its intent, and its aims, but not by its form. In other words, the form is not dependent on the content, which justi es that non ction can also be presented in—what is mostly regarded as—a ctional medium, the comic book. 87 85 She focuses on four abstract forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—in case studies from literature, visual art, mass culture, and everyday experience. 86 “Form” is a multi-level term and may refer to di erent elements on di erent levels. 87 All pictures that depict something, all so-called ‘representational pictures,’ are “inherently ctional, because they pass as something that they are not” (Ryan, Avatars of Story 36). As 121 Since the last decade, one can notice what German communication expert and sociologist Siegfried Weischenberg calls a ‘ exibilization of the forms’—an utterance that holds true not only for journalism studies but also for the literary realm. 88 “Hybrid forms” in journalism increasingly consist of informing, commenting and, above all, entertaining elements (cf. Pörksen, “Das Problem der Grenze” 26; cf. Bosshart). In literature, one encounters a tendency towards studies analyzing the e ects of new media triggered by medialization and digitalization processes, for example cf. Kusche; cf. Schwanecke. In this context, the impact of the Internet on literature is of particular interest, because the Internet has altered the way we live, behave, and communicate (cf. Weigel-Heller). Anna Weigel-Heller observes that [m]ore and more twenty- rst-century writers invoke new media in their literary texts and explore the ‘limits of the novel as a medium’ [. . . ] by using intermedial and transmedia storytelling techniques. Because the media landscape and the book market are changing rapidly, new literary experiments are cropping up nearly every day. (Weigel-Heller 12) Similar to Weigel’s observation in the literary realm, a media-related development and improvement leads to new forms but may also ne-tune existing structures which might become more attractive and technically appealing. By making reality the content of a piece of work, texts can alter generic forms and functions. Why do we need forms of representation and genre classi cation at all? One answer might be because of routine. Perhaps, one of the worst enemies in the newsroom is time pressure. If the journalist already knows the patterns and generic structures with all features, she is more likely to get the work done on time than without any schemata. Another reason addresses the readerfriendliness of a text. Because of (generic) standards, the recipient already knows what to expect. For example, a reader will not look for a feature article on the title page of a newspaper. However, in the case of comics journalism, it is most likely that many recipients do not know what to expect. 2.6.1 Way and Medium of Publication Probably the most obvious criterion is the classi cation of comics journalism on the basis of the way and thus the medium of publication. Then, the rst Kendall Walton, who de nes ction as a “prop in a game of make-believe” claims, “[p]ictures are ctions by de nition” (Walton 351). 88 The original reads, “Flexibilisierung der Formen” (Weischenberg, Nachrichten-Journalismus. Anleitungen und Qualitäts-Standards für die Medienpraxis 13). 122 question is whether the publication occurs digitally or in print, because digital comics allow a di erent handling and usage than printed works due to the latter’s materiality. With regard to printed works, the question of the exact nature of the medium in which they appear then arises. As a printed medium read page by page, “comics have long been regarded as a variant of literature, in both their public and their academic reception” (Ahrens, “Imagine Reality: Negotiating Comics with David B.’s ‘Epileptic’” 66). Although printing is still a regular and often found method for publishing comics, since the advent of the Internet, Ahrens’ statement can no longer be taken for granted. Etymologically speaking, the term “medium” means “middle” or “intermediate” (“Medium” n. pag.). Being a polyvalent and multifaceted term, “medium” involves a plethora of meanings that can vary according to di erent contexts and professional backgrounds (cf. Weigel-Heller 30). Although many scholars have tried to approach the umbrella term from di erent perspectives, the de nition of “medium” is still highly debated (cf. Rippl and Etter 192). According to Marie-Laure Ryan, scholars from research perspectives other than narratology, for example, lm, game, cinema, and music, de ne “medium” di erently, although they might be interested in the same media-related phenomenon (cf. Neumann and Zierold 103). Werner Wolf, for example, suggests a de nition of medium that can be productively applied to literary studies. According to Wolf, a “medium” is a conventionally and culturally distinct means of communication, speci ed not only by particular technical or institutional channels (or one channel) but primarily by the use of one or more semiotic systems in the public transmission of contents that include, but are not restricted to, referential ‘messages.’ (W. Wolf, “(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature” 20) For this study, a broad and exible understanding of medium is appropriate because a medium can operate on di erent levels and in di erent modes. That is also why media scholar Siegfried J. Schmidt refers to the medium as a “compound term” (cf. S. J. Schmidt 94-95). According to Schmidt, a medium is determined by four aspects (cf. S. J. Schmidt 94-95). These include semiotic instruments of communication (such as written or oral language, sounds, and visual images); second, media technologies or technical media apparatuses (such as print, lm, or television technology); third, social contextualization and institutionalization (such as the production, distribution, and reception of media as practiced by publishing houses, editorial o ces, or broadcasting stations); and, fourth, concrete media o ers and products (such as TV series, books, lms, and images). 123 In comics journalism, a useful distinction can be made between newspaper, magazine, and novel-length format. 89 Hence, one can already deduce that the category of the medium is strongly dependent on the length and the available scope of the work. In this project, I understand “long” in the sense of available space in a medium. 90 Moreover, when I talk about the length of a text from comics journalism, I compare it with the novel and refer to it as a ‘novel-length’ format. 91 Examples of ‘novel-length’ journalistic comics are, for example, Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge , Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts , and Kate Evans’ Threads , which will be discussed in more detail throughout this study. 92 Additionally, one can remark that many works had been serialized before they were compiled into a single collection, like A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge , or they have become compiled to a collection, like Journalism . Digital Comics Journalism Determining the length of comics journalism is often based on a subjective notion, especially regarding “digital comics.” According to Lars Banhold and David Freis, webcomics are digital comics that are primarily published and distributed on the Internet (cf. Banhold and Freis 155). They are not only comics on the Internet but also a genuine product of the Internet (cf. 172). Banhold and Freis di erentiate webcomics from print comics which are distributed via the Internet and comics which were rst printed in analog form and later published online. The last way of publication constitutes what I call ‘digitalized comics.’ In my view, ‘digital comics’ are designed for online publication but refrain from animations and from embedding hyperlinks or other sources that require a di erent, sometimes higher level of interactivity (as webcomics do). Both digital comics and webcomics are less easy to de ne in terms of their length due to the in nity of scrolling even if restricted by a nite desktop frame. What Scott McCloud has called the “in nite canvas” (McCloud, Reinventing Comics 230) treats the screen as a window rather than as a page, profoundly in uencing design strategies and panel arrangements because of the huge advantage of putting panels together on a single canvas. The basic premise, 89 To my knowledge, there are no works of comics journalism speci cally designed for e-books. That is why I will leave it out. Moreover, plain paper would also be a carrier medium. However, because it is an essential constituent for the majority of works and because single sheets of paper are rarely sold, I will skip this, too. 90 The individual answers to the question of whether a piece is long or short will di er between recipients, because long and short are adjectives that describe subjective impressions. Thus, the length is always to be understood in relation to something else. 91 Often, the distinction can be made quickly because of the tendency that pieces published in newspapers or magazines are shorter than print stories. 92 The latter is a collection of his visual storytelling reports from the sidelines of wars and marginalized groups from around the world. 124 according to McCloud, is that there is no reason why long-form comics have to be split into pages when moving online. In other words, it is still not clear what measure of length should be used for an adequate description of webcomics. Does scrolling down the computer window once correspond to the size of a printed DIN A4 page? 93 It is not possible to this question de nitively here, but what can be noticed is that transmedia and multimedia projects are generally longer than digital comics journalism. Although both digital and print forms have their advantages and disadvantages, it is not within the scope of this project to trace and evaluate them properly. However, I would like to stress the potential of digitality and thus of digital comics (cf. Kircho and Cook). One can agree that the reading experience is quite di erent from that in print media. Recipients consume the content di erently on a computer, a smartphone, or a tablet. Print editions provide a more tactile human experience due to page-turning. Additionally, the sensory and haptic impressions that arise in reading paper pages are inevitably stronger than those in reading digital comics, for example, the smell of printer’s ink or the crackling of the paper pages when lea ng through the book have positive connotations for the pre-Snapchat-generations. The real challenge, however, is trying to maintain and build a readership as well as producing content that is heard, engaging, and (sociopolitically) relevant, because the reading experience of the so-called “digital natives” (Prensky n. pag.) has become increasingly more important as publishers are competing for the audience’s attention. In digital comics, the timing and ow of the story can be controlled in a more signi cant number of ways than in printed comics. One can argue that the combination of comics journalism and elements of multimedia storytelling seems to be very fruitful. Klaus Meier, professor of journalism at Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt and one of the leading scholars in German journalism studies, claims that “new forms of the Internet have not yet been fully invented” (K. Meier et al. 128). 94 In other words, the question of how multimedia storytelling changes genres, user behaviour, and media diversity has hardly been scienti cally investigated yet (K. Meier and Neuberger 124). Particularly in journalism studies, there is a considerable need for research on the topic of the crossmediality of content and a transmedia use for storytelling. 95 In particular, the advantages of the Internet make it possible to 93 The dimensions of a sheet in DIN A4 format are 21.0 cm x 29.7 cm. 94 The original reads, “[D]ie neuen Formen des Internets [sind] noch nicht bis zu Ende erfunden.” 95 Works in which at least two distinct media are used to narrate a story across multiple delivery channels are di erently referred to. Scholars from di erent disciplines are continually rede ning the still-emerging concept of transmedia (cf. Jenkins; cf. Thon, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture ). In the broadest sense, transmedia means “across media” and is often used interchangeably with the terms “plurimedia,” “crossmedia,” and “multimedia” (cf. Rippl; cf. Schwanecke). According to Henry Jenkins, “transmedia” represents a process 125 test the possibilities of the individual advantages of comics and journalism. With regard to the author, it can be assumed that she has an important role, also with regard to the possibilities of verifying facts and strengthening her credibility by digital means. Some of the most prestigious platforms to publish non ction comics and thus also comics journalism are Drawing the Times , The Nib , Cartoon Movement , Truthout , The Cartoon Picayune , The Nib , and Symbolia (2014-16). 96 Cartoon Movement , for example, describes itself as “the Internet’s #1 publishing platform for high quality political cartoons and comics journalism,” in contrast to The Nib ’s slogan, which reads “a daily publication devoted to publishing and promoting political and non- ction comics” (cf. Bors, “Website” n. pag.). All of them have in common that they contribute to illustrated journalism and combine (investigative) reporting and non ction storytelling with comics, interactive graphics, sounds, and comic style. Although the thematic and artistic breadth of digital comics is enormous and many works would actually deserve to be presented in more detail, I will only introduce Inside Death Row by Swiss Patrick Chappatte at this point. This work of digital comics journalism is an outstanding example because rst, it works with crossmedia references, referring and including reality; and second, Inside Death Row contributes to the cultural worldmaking by raising a discourse on what a nation thinks about the death penalty (see ‘Prison Comics’ Chapter 3.1.1). This piece of comics journalism was originally published as a non ction comics series in The New York Times (2014-15). It is based on the exhibition WINDOWS ON DEATH ROW: Art From Inside and Outside the Prison Walls and serves as an excellent example for an outstanding project of reporting about an issue with various media (see Fig. 2.8). 97 “We [Patrick and Anne] did a “where integral elements of a ction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels [. . . ]. Ideally, each medium makes its unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (Jenkins n. pag.). 96 When I started writing my research proposal for this project, the digital comics journalism brainchild of Erin Polgreen and Joyce Rice was one of the leading digital platforms for publishing non ction. When they started, the comics landscape was di erent. 2015’s issue on “The Future” marks the end of the magazine’s two-year run (cf. Polgreen and Rice, “Symbolia” n. pag.). 97 The exhibition gave birth to two separate artistic projects—the aforementioned work of comics journalism by Patrick Chappatte, and a documentary lm, “Free Men” (2018), by Anne- Frédérique Widmann. Chappatte created a series of ve issues which are entitled “The Last Phone Call,” “How to Keep Your Sanity In Solitary“, “Memories of Execution Day”, “How to Get on Deathrow Without Firing a Bullet”, and “When Art & Love Save an Innocent.” The exhibition rst took place at the University of Southern California on 22 October 2015. The touring exhibition then moved to several cities in Europe. Parts of the show were displayed at the Fumetto comics festival of Lucerne, Switzerland, and Germany’s Erlangen comics festival in 2018. 126 Figure 2.8: Screenshot ( Inside Death Row n. pag.) workshop inside a max security prison [in the USA], met a dozen inmates in 4 di erent states. [. . . ] But this project is not about the crime. It’s about what comes after [. . . ],” says the Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte (introduction Chappatte and Widmann n. pag.). The project has been initiated by him and his wife Anne-Frédérique Widmann, who is a professional journalist. 98 What makes it so special is the fact that this comics project led to the art and documentation exhibition “Windows on Death Row,” which presented death row inmates’ artworks about their daily life in prison. Furthermore, the project provides people with rst-hand information on the lives of a couple of death row inmates who are usually di cult to get in touch with. According to the authors, “[i]t’s an invitation to take a look inside prison walls” (introduction Chappatte and Widmann n. pag.). Fig. 2.8 is a screenshot of the website, which shows Chappatte’s comics panel, and a drawing by the death row inmate Arnold Pietro. According to the narratorial script, he had last spoken to Chappatte shortly before he was executed the same day. His drawing is 98 Among other major newspapers and magazines, Patrick Chappatte has been working for SPIEGEL and The International New York Times . His cartoons for The Times and several works of comics journalism can be found at <nytimes.com/ chappatte> and also at <graphicjournalism. com.>. 127 inserted in the rst panel in Fig. 2.8. The joint US and Swiss-project also aims at engaging the public in a discussion about the death penalty in the USA by also using a ‘non-mainstream medium.’ 99 The rst thing to be recognized in this context is that digital comics allow a transition between the individual panels by a mouse click. Moreover, they support the networking of artists among each other, the connection of comics to other media, the use of smaller animations, and the interactive participation of readers through hyperlinks. In particular, digital comics journalism allows for faster uploading and publishing procedures on the Internet. In addition to this, digitality allows for quick possibilities of fact-checking through hyperlinks and other online sources, which implies that the recipient can search herself on the Internet in a very short time. Subsequently, comics journalism’s claim to produce journalism for everyone is underlined because every person— regardless of her background knowledge of the topic at hand—is addressed and could understand and verify the content. Additionally, in an age in which recipients are simultaneously fans, consumers, citizens, and critics, digitality might provide the infrastructure, impetus, and conditions for the recipients to give them a feeling of participation in evaluating journalism as a social institution. This form of digital comics journalism goes beyond traditional theories of interand hypertextuality that have been developed for printed forms. It can be observed that comics journalists appear to be sociable authors who often directly communicate with their community. This happens mainly through the commentary function in the authors’ social media channels (see Chapter 4.3). Finally, I would like to address the connection between authorship and digital comics. First, until now it seems as if collaborative authorship occurs more frequently in digital comics, and, second, despite a few exceptions, one can argue that collaborative authorship depends on the technical complexity. The more interactive and multimodal a work is and the more it combines di erent media, the more human expertise is required for the technical mediation, practicability, and user application (see, for example, The Nisoor Square Shootings and Ferguson Firsthand , Chapter 3.1.3). Then, one encounters a division of labor between the journalistic, artistic, and technical sta , which is also not uncommon for journalism. In all these cases, the distribution of roles during the production process can be reconstructed because of its transparent and clear naming on the copyright page. The following section, however, brie y examines print comics journalism. 99 Update: Abel Ocha, a participant of this project, was executed by the state of Texas on 6 February 2020. 128 Printed Comics Journalism The interplay of the di erent panels and images on a page, the way a two-page spread can work to frame and augment the story’s drama, as well as timing, meter, and rhythm—all these aspects contribute to the comics’ a ordances (cf. Lefevre 14). However, if comics are published on the Internet—not seldom only in a digitalized form as one panel at a time—its typical style and form risk to get lost. 100 Hence, printed comics journalism also has advantages. Printed comics journalism can occur rst, in ‘novel-length’ books, second, in magazines and journals, and third, in newspapers. Then, a very important advantage is, for example, that the author can play with the materiality of the paper by inserting (visual) cli hangers. Eventually, page-turning leads to dramatic suspense and tension. This can be found in what I call ‘novel-length’ comics journalism, which means that the form or style in which non ction is represented occurs in comics and is from its outer appearance as long as a ctional novel; yet, the medium in which non ction comics are published is a book. 101 Examples are Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq , Threads: from the Refugee Crisis , and The In uencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On the Media , to name but two. Publishers such as Pantheon, Metropolitan, NBM, Drawn & Quaterly, and Hill & Wang increasingly publish non ction comics and build on a sector of long-form reportages. One can observe that ‘novel-length comics journalism’ often seems to follow a structure, even if there is no prescriptive rule of how to structure comics journalism at all. It seems as if a common pattern has developed among creators of comics journalism over the time, and a so-called “inneres Gesetz,” as it was called in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s time (Spörl, “2.5 Inhalt als Bestimmungskriterium” 36), becomes visible. Despite some exceptions, the majority of ‘novel-length comics journalism’ is structured as follows: • book cover with preliminaries and blurb • copyright page • table of contents • list of gures 102 • preface/ acknowledgement 103 • chapters 100 For example, Josh Neufeld planned A.D. as a book, although it originally started as a webcomic on SMITH Magazine . Pantheon Graphic Novels released it in an expanded hardcover edition in 2009. A.D. was a New York Times bestselling book, was nominated for the Eisner and Harvey Awards, and was selected for inclusion in The Best American Comics in 2010. 101 Here, the use of comics as a “medium” has to make way for comics as a “format” or “style,” as the place of publication is of more interest. For digital comics, one could also talk about the Internet as a carrier medium and go along with the medium of comics, even if the term “comic style” would t here as well. 102 This part is not obligatory. 103 The acknowledgement can also be shifted to the end of the book. 129 • epilogue/ introduction of concept or idea/ team 104 • appendix including bibliography/ sources/ futher reading Second, print comics journalism can occur in magazines and journals, which I combine due to the relatively small size of their primary corpus. 105 Hence, concerning the magazine as a medium of publication, one can remark that France plays a pioneering role because it has been o ering a variety of magazines for a long time. The magazines XXI and La Revue Dessinée , for example, are perhaps the most popular ones, which have specialized in long-form (visual) narrative journalism. Issue #17 Autumn 2017 of La Revue Dessinée focussed on French and German politics and a reportage about Uber. XXI Magazine is a print quarterly, dedicated to long-form journalism and reportage, showcasing photos and comics, and text and illustrations, with no advertising and sold exclusively in libraries or ordered online (cf. Vanoost and Sepulchre). It regularly gives authors their oftentimes rst opportunity to create longer pieces of comics journalism. For example, it published a 30-page story by Olivier Kugler on a week he spent in Laos, following a French veterinarian who was treating elephants that worked in the region’s logging industry. This work was later released as a book by the Swiss publishing house Edition Moderne . Additionally, magazines and journals sometimes publish special issues on non ction topics—so did STRAPAZIN: Das Comic Magazin . Its issue 131 ( June 2018) is entitled “Reportage” and issue 135 ( June 2019) “Wahre Geschichten.” Last, I want to mention that there are also cases in which content of a digital platform is converted into a print magazine. The Nib Magazine , for example, originates from The Nib under the supervision of Matt Bors and is proliferating in the comics scene all over the world. The third way in which comics journalism can be published is in the medium of the newspaper. Renowned newspapers like the The New Yorker or The New York Times , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Der Tagesspiegel , and Die Zeit are increasingly allowing room for the medium of comics, even if the acceptance is only progressing slowly and there are often signs of regression. The Swiss newspaper Der Tages-Anzeiger , for example, regularly employs illustrators to draw visual essays and to illustrate the news. Felix Schaad, Lorenz Maier, and Patrick Chappatte, among others, regurlarly contribute to this newspaper. However, a newspaper that is entirely printed in the medium of comics continues to be a great rarity, because rst, it is a time-consuming task, and second, because of the fact that the majority of the readership is unfamiliar with comics. Other than the production of (political) cartoons or short comics 104 Sometimes, this is also mentioned in the beginning or introductory panels. 105 Comics journalism can also occur in magazines and journals on the Internet, but then these works have mostly been digitalized and were not designed for the web initially. 130 strips, designing an entire newspaper or magazine in comics style contradicts the idea of daily news coverage because of its relatively long production time. Nevertheless, on 22 September 2017, the Schwerter local editorial department of the Ruhr Nachrichten dared to experiment with something that had rarely been done before by German newspapers; they published the local edition and the local sports news in the form of a comic. In addition to three completely drawn sections of daily news, there were two splash pages with comics and texts. The outstanding feature here is that everything was published in the traditional newspaper layout and in comics style with speech balloons, caption boxes, and panel frames. The extraordinary and pioneering character of this work in the German-speaking media landscape, as well as for academic discourse, is proven by the fact that Schwerte’s local editorial department was awarded the “Oscar” among newspapers in 2017, namely the European Newspaper Award , for an edition of a daily newspaper which had originally been planned only as an experiment (cf. Mühlbauer n. pag.). Once the local managing editor Heiko Mühlbauer was given permission, the participating artists of the Schwerter local newspaper dedicated many hours to the project and “especially leisure time.” The artists illustrated the news stories the local journalists had researched in advance. Due to the drawing style, most of the stories of the comics edition had to be planned beforehand. For this purpose, the editors had to learn to reduce the number of researched stories in order to transform them into drawings. In his editorial “Guten Morgen,” Mühlbauer points to two di culties they had to face during the production— the topicality and the size of the stories. 106 Concerning the size and complexity of the narration, one can say that this is a typical challenge which many artists and journalists face, and which refers to the comics’ a ordance of telling with words and pictures, at best in equal shares. Furthermore, they found three advertising customers whose brands and advertising campaigns were transformed into drawings for this special edition, among them the Sparkasse Schwerte (see Fig. 2.9). The entire project required much e ort, but it was worth it, according to Mühlbauer (cf. Mühlbauer n. pag.). 2.6.2 Duration of Production Time and its representation have always been an interesting topic in comics. Even though an empirical study validating the following claim has not been conducted yet, many scholars and practitioners agree that the production process of long-form comics journalism takes longer than a written teext report. 106 They have not solved the problem of topicality, but have circumvented it by designing the newspaper page in advance. In other words, they take up contemporary topics which do not require an urgent, up-to-date time reference. For example, they report on the old house which has long been empty in the city. 131 Figure 2.9: Page Excerpt, Schwerter Zeitung, Ruhr-Nachrichten (Lensing-Wol et al. n. pag.) 132 Comics journalists often point this out themselves, whether in interviews, on their social media channels, or in the prefaces of their works. Therefore, the following section is not about investigating time at the content level but about emphasizing the duration of production from a practical side. 107 In general, a distinction can be made between fast and slow. However, because these are subjectively perceived adjectives, a black-and-white division is not purposeful. Speaking of ‘slower than’ the reference to which it is compared seems to be more appropriate here. Hence, how can a recipient know the duration of production for a work of art? How can one guess how much time researching and editing take? Normally, the reader is not interested in that. What this distinction is all about is the ‘big picture.’ It is contrasted with regular working hours in traditional journalism. Both literature and journalism can produce reading material slowly or quickly. 108 Among many other factors, the individual working speed of the author is decisive, too, and it di ers among colleagues. What ultimately distinguishes comics journalism is that it takes more time to produce a text for various reasons, such as the graphic implementation in the medium comics (panel arrangement), the author’s drawing style (degree of abstractness and cartoonicity, coloration), the chosen journalistic genre (report or reportage), and the available space in the respective medium (digital or print). Unlike traditional journalism, comics journalism subverts established models of journalism, for example, by producing such formats that accept and necessitate slowness to some extent. As comics journalism’s objective is seldom news immediateness and speed, I would like to argue that comics journalism intentionally accepts slowness and thus contributes to the contemporary phenomenon of the “slow movement,” even though some new drawing concepts have been tried out within comics journalism in the last few years. What one might call ‘time-consuming comics journalism,’ stands in contrast to ‘live-sketching’ and ‘sketch-like journalism’ as news formats. Live-Sketching and Sketch-Like Comics Journalism To me, ‘live-sketching’ means that the author makes the events available to the public in an unedited and unaltered form via various platforms, mostly via 107 Yet, an interesting observation is that especially in migration comics journalism, slowness refers not only to the production side but also to the content level. The titles, for example, in “Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room,” or “Breidjing - Warten aufs Leben” already allow for slowness and sluggishness. 108 In comparison, in lm studies, storyboards resemble a slow production process, too. Being mostly drawn, they depart from comics strips and consist of many technical and artistic decisions. Some comic books serve “as storyboards for their own lm adaptations” (Eisner 155). Storyboards are not meant to be read but rather bridge the gap between a screenplay and the nal photography of a lm. 133 social media channels, on the spot, and with only a (very) short time delay. However, in a strict sense, live sketching is actually not live. That is why “live” so far means that a photo of the nished sketch or drawing is taken afterward and uploaded to the Internet. In contrast to this, ‘sketch-like’ comics journalism can be time-consuming and lengthy in terms of the duration of the production process despite its sketchiness. ‘Sketch-like’ journalism refers to the artistic style of the comics journalist and not to the time it takes to create the product. ‘Live-sketching’ is also even used at conferences for visually Figure 2.10: Screenshot, “Graphic Recording Scribbles” (Edely n. pag.) summarizing scholarly research. 109 For example, the German-French graphic artist Anaïs Edely draws conferences and brainstorming sessions in real time to o er products or advertise events (see Fig. 2.10). According to her, 109 The platform livesketching.com o ers “to upload photos of the work on Twitter, with the appropriate hashtag, ready for you to retweet” (cf. “Livesketching”). 134 Live Visual Facilitation helps people with visualizing and keeping the focus on the topic during the talks. Placing the discussion in a new light. Graphic Recording naturally focuses the participants back to the topic through an illustrated résumé after the symposium. (Edely n. pag.) This raises the question of whether and to what extent such a medium has the potential to establish itself as a genre and to eventually replace the conventional conference report. This is an example of ‘sketch-like’ journalism by Olivier Kugler taken from his Escaping Wars and Waves (see Fig. 2.11). Kugler might be seen as one of the leading contemporary comics journalists, who goes to places that are di cult to access and who gives his interviewees a voice. His drawings resemble sketches and are often interrupted, not nished products. Coloration is sparsely used. The pages are full, which makes his drawings look chaotic, noisy, and irritating. There is no left-to-right reading line; a xed gutter is missing. Yet, Sacco thinks that by drawing and arranging bits of art and pieces of information, Kugler takes comics journalism “to a new level” (Kugler back cover). Another example is Archer’s Reporterskizzen aus Bangladesch , which is similarly sketchy in its style. Moreover, Dan Archer’s Facebook post from 3 May 2017 (see Fig. 2.12a) is interesting here for several reasons. 110 A spiral-bound notebook lies on the ground, and a ngertip of the cartoonist’s left hand touches a corner of it. Presumably, the author’s right hand is taking a photograph, while his left hand is pushing the page onto the ground in order to get the photograph taken. As one can see a part of the nger, one can infer the size of the notebook from its relative dimension compared to the ngertip. Hence, the sketchbook approximately seems to be of paper size DIN A5. Additionally, the caption in the lower part of the picture signals that the photograph was rst uploaded on Instagram. In a second step, Archer shared the photograph on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. The comment he adds as a subtitle to his Facebookentry is hashtagged as “Colombia.” Due to the context of the Facebook site, it becomes clear that Archer wants this picture to advertise and announce his next research trip to Colombia. Additionally, he wants to draw his followers’ attention to the latest piece he is working on; thus, this sketch functions as a kind of ‘appetizer.’ Fig. 2.12b is worth mentioning because it can be seen as a ‘meta-sketch’ for two reasons. First, the cartoonist comments on the drawing and says that it is a rather “quick and shaky sketch this morning en route to 110 Archer is a leading thinker leader in the VR/ AR/ interactive storytelling space. He was a 2016 fellow at the Tow Center at Columbia University, and he was a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow (University of Missouri) as well as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. 135 Figure 2.11: “Early January 2017 Simmozheim” ( Escaping Wars and Waves 76) 136 (a) “The [P]rison [S]ystem in #Colombia [. . . ]” (Archer, “#Columbia”) (b) “A [Q]uick and [S]haky [S]ketch this [M]orning [. . . ]” (Archer, “Granada”) Figure 2.12: Facebook Posts by Dan Archer Granada.” Second, it is to some extent a mise-en-abyme , because Archer draws how his left hand holds the sketchbook and his right hand draws. Time-Consuming Comics Journalism In comparison to this rather quickly produced form of drawing/ sketching, the time-consuming and edited version of comics journalism occurs more frequently. However, comics journalism as a “slow movement” comes not without disadvantages. Reinald Goetz, the winner of the Georg-Büchner award in November 2015, has stated that literature faces the world but slowly, in nitely slowly. 111 The point at which comics journalism reaches its generic boundaries is the impossibility to apply the concept of slowness to daily news journalism. Mike Loos, professor of graphic design at Augsburg University of Sciences, addresses this problem in the epilogue of Geschichten aus dem Grandhotel: Comic-Reportagen von Augsburger Design-Studierenden . He thinks that [i]t is impossible to use a slow medium (comic strip) to follow the rapid changes in political events of the day. 112 Sacco, for example, admits that his piece “What Refugees? ,” which appeared in The Boston Globe on 17 November 2002, “is perhaps the only occasion in which 111 The original reads, “Literatur stellt sich der Welt, aber langsam. Unendlich langsam.” 112 The original reads, “Es ist unmöglich, mit einem langsamen Medium (Comic) den schnellen Veränderungen des politischen Tagesgeschehens hinterherzueilen.” 137 [he] tried to respond to a real-time situation immediately” (Sacco, Journalism 72). Yet, this was done in the form of an editorial in the size of a broadsheet and nished within “a few weeks” (72). 113 One has to consider the fact that the duration of production varies from author to author. Sarah Glidden, for example, had been drawing How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less for ve years. It only took Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges two years to research in those areas of the USA which are said to have been robbed of their sources (cf. Hedges and Sacco xi). In contrast, it took Kate Evans only one year to draw nearly 200 pages of Threads . On the other hand, if issues are discussed and produced too slowly, this causes the danger of getting lost in society because the topic might have become less important. In contrast to that, the other extreme of the pole would be, as Dénes Tamás writes, that “[i]f information can be communicated in an instant from whatever distance, then the concepts of near, far, horizon, and distance have no meaning anymore. There is no more delay between event and reaction” (Tamás 8). As a result, the time that is needed for critical thinking and for making up one’s own mind might get lost. Another point in uencing the duration of the production is the precision of the drawing style. A promising and exciting study that is still to be written could discuss the intersection between drawing style and reality. If a piece is drawn in a very realistic mode, is it more likely to require particular attention to the composition of details, simply because one assumes that the author is accurately and precisely documenting what had happened at the time she went there? There is no straightforward answer to this yet. Nevertheless, one can note that comics journalism lacks motion and speed lines. Drawing movements, chaos, and rush, such as in No Man’s Land , is very seldom. The author Cyrille Pomès admits that it is nearly impossible to draw this speed. Comics Journalism and Slowness There is no duration without the measure of time. Comics have a particularly rich tradition of playing with time. What is of particular importance here is that comics journalism can be classi ed as a slow medium: “Slow Media ask for con dence and take their time to be credible. Behind Slow Media are real people. And you can feel that” (Blumtritt et al. n. pag.). “Slow” is an attribute describing pace; pace depends on time because velocity is de ned as the rate of change of position with respect to time. In kinematics, a branch of classical mechanics, velocity is equivalent to a speci cation of its speed and thus an important concept describing the motion of bodies. The reason why I am referring to it here is that the concept of time has been of 113 A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long vertical pages, typically 22 inches or 56 centimeters long. 138 interest not only for physicists, but also for theorists, philosophers, and literary scholars alike as long as anyone can remember, and that is has a great e ect on any human being in everyday life as well. 114 Besides, “slow” seems to be not only a popular concept in cultural studies but also a fashionable word nowadays in general, surrounding us more and more in our experience of reality and our perception of speed-dichotomies. There are proponents of “slow gardening,” “slow parenting,” “slow art,” “slow travel,” “slow fashion,” and rst and foremost, “slow media.” In particular, slowness occurs at di erent stages and in di erent situations during the reception and production processes of comics journalism. This section aims to claim a positive connotation of comics as a “slow medium” of our time 115 because, in comparison to conventional printed newspapers 116 , it takes time not only to produce these works but also to comprehend them. Therefore, the increasingly occurring phenomenon of comics journalism—and the interest in published non ction comics in general—might be seen as a space where media innovation is currently happening. As Jörg Blumtritt describes it: 117 Was ich mir in der nächsten Mediengeneration am meisten erho e, ist Vielfalt und Alternative, die Stimme der Marginalisierten zu hören, statt wie heute bei jeder Abweichung vom Mainstream vom Shitstorm niedergebrüllt zu werden. [. . . ] 2017 wird das Jahr der Slow Media, das ist jedenfalls meine Prognose. Wie so oft wird es auf den ersten Blick vielleicht keine totale Revolution sein, was wir in neuen Medienangeboten erblicken. Wir werden also genau hinsehen müssen, gerade auch jenseits der Orte, an denen klischeehaft Medieninnovation stattzu nden hat. (Blumtritt n. pag.) 114 The latest publication in comics studies touching issues of slowness and time is entitled What Happens When Nothing Happens? (Schneider), (cf. Schlichting, “Review. What Happens When Nothing Happens”). 115 Information comics are linked to the idea of “slow media” (cf. Leinfelder et al.). However, although Leinfelder et al. de ne their understanding of “slow media,” their justi cation of the possibility to classify comics as slow media remains rather vague, because it merely refers very brie y to a motivating motivating, visualizing, permanent, intermedial, and popular language of images (cf. Leinfelder et al. 45). 116 For example, the German weekly magazine DIE ZEIT is very lengthy and does not have a handy format. Despite all criticism, the print version of this magazine is still prevalent in the segment of the 25to 29-year-old readers. 117 My translation reads, “What I hope for most in the next generation of media is diversity and the alternative of hearing the voice of the marginalized instead of being shouted down by the shitstorm every time you deviate from the mainstream, as is the case today. [...] 2017 will be the year of Slow Media, or so I predict. As so often, it may not be a total revolution at rst glance, as we see in new media o erings. So we will have to look closely, especially beyond the places where clichéd media innovation has to take place.” 139 Having introduced the idea behind the “slow media movement” rst, I go on to explore the question of how this concept can be applied to comics journalism. I will then focus on the role and function of “time,” especially of slowness, in contrast to speed. Sabria David, the founder of the Slow Media Institute in Bonn, thinks that “[t]he Slow Media discourse is related to a phase of transition and fundamental change in societies that are linked to technological progress” (David 111). The question of the a ordance of a slow medium for readers and producers remains unanswered, however. Inspired by Carlo Petrini’s term of “slow food” (Petrini n. pag.), The Slow Media Manifesto is not about fast media consumption but about mindfully investigating, researching, choosing, and preparing media content. It also refers to the use of and dealing with media in general, addressing both the production and the reception sides. Slow media require an extensive engagement with the text and participative reader activity in assembling the information and topics in mind (cf. Leinfelder et al. 45). Comics Journalism and Deep Reading As already mentioned, comics journalism contributes to the “slow media movement.” They share a necessary and fundamental concept and practice—the ability of reading which, according to Wolfgang Hallet, “has always been a primarily linear, page-turning act of decoding alphabetic signs, of word-based imagination and of making meaning of letters, words and sentences” (Hallet, “Non-Verbal Semiotic Modes and Media in the Multimodal Novel” 637). In recent times, US-American schools have started to di erentiate between teaching “reading” and “deep reading,” because teachers observe an increasing gap between illiteracy and a sophisticated reading ability, even if reading is one of the most essential cultural techniques taught at schools (along with writing and calculating). 118 Therefore, the new common core in the curriculum of North America’s public schools is called “deep reading,” which means teaching children the ability to read long texts without getting distracted and to comprehend the text’s main messages. 119 Teachers and scholars alike explain this decision by a collapsing reading culture due to the Internet revolution and high-level digitalization in nearly every sphere in the USA. Although children can read and write, many of them cannot concentrate, focus on a subject matter without getting distracting, and they lack ease of mind, which results in devastating statistics. According to Nationale Kulturstiftung , 57 percent of US American adults did not read a book in their leisure time at all in 2015. Only one in 118 For example, (cf. Miedema; cf. Mikics; cf. Newkirk). Generally, one could say that ‘slow reading’ refers to how one reads habitually, rather than under the pressure. 119 In contrast, “power browsing” refers to a changed style of reading and describes how individuals rarely read the full text, but skim and search for information (cf. Baron; cf. Rowlands et al.). 140 ve American citizens reads a newspaper nowadays; the proportion of young adults reading newspapers is below 15 percent (Günther Politik 5). 120 Consequently, supporting comics journalism and acknowledging its slowness o ers many opportunities. Regarding the reception side, slowness means that one has to take time to engage with the text, its form, content, and the artwork. One is obliged to examine the meaning of colors and the question of how they t to the content and the storyworld, and one needs to interpret the panel layout about the story. Moreover, according to The Slow Media Manifesto , craftsmanship in cultural studies, such as “source criticism, classi cation and evaluation of sources of information are gaining importance with the increasing availability of information” (Blumtritt et al. n. pag.). This ts the statement that slow media “focus on quality both in production and in reception of media content” (n. pag.). Another opportunity that comics journalism o ers is to learn how to read (drawn) pictures, which results in the acquisition of multiliteracy skills because how one reads in uences one’s understanding deeply. Decades ago, for example, people used to know how to watch silent movies. They were more sensitive to details of movements, of background styles, or facial expressions and gestures. Unlike nowadays, watching the movie was monotasking. One quickly gets the impression that this ability has gotten lost during the last quarter of a century. One reason for this may be the incredibly shrunk attention span of eight seconds of human beings 121 and the general tendency towards speed in the age of the Internet. But, how does the mechanics of reading a comic work? Typically, one starts with the rst panel in the left upper corner of the page. Either one reads the text rst, or one takes a look at the panel image rst. Generally, our eyes seem to glide over the panels, steadily looking for new hints, the next speech balloon or caption box. Every now and then we stop to xate. Hence, comics readers form a familiar pattern of movements across the page. Unlike in texts, it is not possible in comics to merely read the rst sentence of a speech balloon in order to skip reading the rest of the panel. One has to read everything—captions, speech balloons as well as the drawn images—because there is no paragraph giving us clues about what will follow in the next panel. One hypothesis that cannot be veri ed within the scope of this project is that there are only a few chaotic, fully loaded, blurred superhero-like panels in 120 I would like to stress that this statistics is not uncontroversial. As in every statistics, numbers and results depend on the precise research question one asks. Of course, reading on electronic gadgets such as smartphones and tablets has been steadily growing. Yet, the questions of how careful and media-sensitive readers are and how much time they take for reception remain unanswered. 121 A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in 2000 (cf. Egan). 141 comics journalism. This may be due to the aim to keep the reading rhythm and the habit of reading a newspaper article. Reading with a steady speed brings about continuity both for the narration and for the reader. Additionally, a striking observation regarding the content level is that speed lines, commonly found in adventure and superhero comics, do also hardly occur in comics journalism. 122 This does not imply that comics journalism cannot be suspenseful or quickly moving forward in plot. Rather, there is a tendency of a ‘moderate tone’ to which both quickly changing panel sequences and single panel content would not be appropriate due to journalistic rules. Jessica Love has analyzed how the “speed at which our eyes travel across the printed page has serious (and surprising) implications for the way we make sense of words” (J. Love n. pag.). For many branches and areas in Western culture, slowing down is no longer disreputable and sometimes even a blessing with regard to one’s work-lifebalance. In education, for example, the speed of reading is linked to mnemonic functions, which means that the slower one reads, the more information can be stored in one’s memory. A further bene t of comics journalism as ‘slow journalism’ which is part of the slow movement addresses the production-oriented side. Having gained increasing importance globally for the last couple of years, the concept of “slow” seems to o er a high potential for ghting against the journalistic crisis. In particular, print media have been forced to deal with this challenge since the digital revolution, mainly because news can be accessed cheaply, on-air, online, and at any time. Tamás states that the experience of progress, of change, often goes together with “crisis” and “acceleration” (Tamás 5), basing his observation on Ulrich Beck’s expression of “risk society” to describe our rapidly changing and unpredictable society (cf. Beck). According to Tamás, “speed is becoming a social-philosophical category instead of an aesthetic one with which we can grasp the reality of our era” (Tamás 6). Susan Greenberg puts it more in the form of of a plea for “slow journalism”: “there should be a growing market for essays, reportage and other non ction writing that takes its time to nd things out, notices stories that others miss, and communicates it all to the highest standards: ‘slow journalism’” (Greenberg, “Slow Journalism” n. pag.). Ch. 4 will look at the more practical side of producing comics journalism 2.6.3 A Combination of Journalistic Genres The phenomenon of the mixing of fact and ction and of genre boundaries is part of the process of modernizing traditional genre models. This mixing is 122 There may be some exceptions when it comes to the depiction of the movement of vehicles in the storyworld, but not with regard to the representation of characters. 142 particularly evident on television and the Internet. “Infotainment,” “docutainment,” “docusoaps” and “infomercials” are just some of the hybrid forms of evidence. Comics journalism, too, is a very hybrid genre in which various journalistic genres come together, contribute to the genre discourse, and eventually establish comics journalism as a new phenomenon. In this context, journalistic categories from traditional news journalism are the basis that creates some of the generic features of comics journalism. In the following, I will also highlight the uniqueness of the genre of reportage, as well as Joe Sacco’s pioneering work, because he abandoned regular print journalism as a career path, though not out of skepticism. He “simply couldn’t nd a journalism job that was remotely gratifying” (Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition ix). Beyond that, he did not develop an “exact notion of what [he] was going to do or how” (ix). He had not developed a theory of what he would later call—“without much forethought”—comics journalism (ix). Although literature and journalism have often been characterized as separate elds, and journalistic virtues have rarely been considered in media studies, the journalistic and literary elds in the United States, Germany, and England have traditionally been intertwined. 123 The major di erence between these two systems is that journalists employ di erent forms of text. Christoph Neuberger and Peter Kapern have developed a model which shows di erent dimensions of forms of representation (see Fig. 2.13). By adopting their main points and expanding them, I intend to set up a more precise de nition of the features of comics journalism and where they originate from. Neuberger and Kapern’s model distinguishes between two dichotomies, each of which has two characteristics that form a continuum. First, they di erentiate between the level of facts and that of interpretation, and second, between the subjective and objective levels. The di erent dimensions of journalistic forms of representation are sorted into the four corners accordingly. One can see that Neuberger and Kapern assign nine di erent types of journalistic texts to four respective categories. For example, the reportage is assigned to the fact-based and subjective level. 124 123 Doug Underwood therefore asks for more scholarly attention to literary journalism and focuses on the journalistic in uence on literature (cf. Underwood). 124 Christian Klein and Matías Martínez also consider di erent text forms but classify them into “narrative” and “non-narrative” forms. Whereas non-narrative forms are, for example, essay, feature, commentary, cultural criticism, polemic commentary, or interview; the narrative forms are news, “Meldung”, “Bericht”, and reportage (cf. Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 180). The latter forms constitute what Klein and Martínez refer to as ‘reality narration’ (“Wirklichkeitserzählung”), acknowledging that journalism can be narrative and factual at the same time (cf. Klein and Martínez). In comparison, a report is a very short text in the newspaper that can be up to 25 print lines long and is written according to the inverted pyramid structure based on the ve “w”-questions—what, where, when, why, and who. The core of the message is already visible in its title (Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 180). 143 Figure 2.13: Overview of the Dimensions of Journalistic Forms of Representation (Neuberger and Kapern 44) Reportage Because the genre of “reportage” is the most important text form of comics journalism, I will analyze it in more detail in the following. Scholars in the study of culture have been observing a functional change of journalistic texts for quite some time. Long forms of journalism in the post-modern age often no longer describe reality, but re-tell reality in such a way that the text creates a world of its own in which the reader can easily immerse herself (cf. Assheuer 42). Furthermore, narrative forms, such as the reportage, are much more in demand nowadays. Even if comics journalism takes other forms as well, the journalistic text type of the reportage is very likely to be the most frequently used genre in comics journalism. By de nition, the reportage claims to report on the world to the best of its author’s knowledge and belief. The type of the text reportage, however, does not address the reader as a political subject, but as a person in need of consolation or of escaping reality. The synthesis of fact- ction and the blurring of boundaries between literarization and factualization seem to work like a therapy for all those who struggle with 144 reality as it is (cf. Assheuer 42). Due to its importance, I will brie y compare the reportage with the other types of expression in the following. Features and reportages are quite similar to each other. Feature articles are long-form pieces comprising several pages that introduce a topic and include interviews, on-the-ground-reporting, and some degree of comment and opinion. Feature stories are not de ned so much by subject matter as they are by the style in which they are written. These are the characteristics that distinguish feature stories from news reports. The beginning does not have to answer the ‘W’-questions in the very rst paragraph. Instead, a soft description or an anecdote can be used to set up the story. Regarding pace and length, one can say that features take time to tell a story, which means that they need more space. Features are designed to bring the human being and her emotions into the picture, which is why features are usually, though not always, more extended than so-called hard news articles. Feature articles also include more elements from traditional storytelling, such as description, scene-setting, quotes, and background information. According to Tony Rogers, “[a] good feature writer does anything she can to get readers engaged with her story, whether by describing a place or a person, setting a scene or using colorful quotes” (Rogers n. pag.). In contrast to features, the reportage belongs to one of the oldest journalistic genres, 125 and much research has already been done here (cf. Haller; cf. Pfei er). The reportage is a subjective journalistic discipline. Reporters achieve tension by dramaturgically editing their observations and experiences. This means that certain details are stressed and others possibly disregarded in favor of a particular point of view (cf. Pfei er 156-157). “Reportage” is an umbrella term for all large forms of reporting (‘Großformen der Berichterstattung’) in news media (cf. Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 181), and it is described as a journalistic mode of representation (‘Darstellungsform’) that aims at conveying facts in a straight way (cf. Blöbaum 42). Even if it belongs to the category of ‘information genre’ that serves the task of conveying situations to the audience as if the recipient experienced them directly, in seminal handbooks of journalism, the reportage is generally described as a ‘narrative’ type of textual genre. 126 In contrast to the “message,” which should be as short and concise as possible regarding language economy and nominal style, the ‘factor of comprehensibility ’ is decisive for the reportage, which is often relatively extensive. Yet, it does not aim at neutral information procurement because its 125 According to Pierre Thomé, there are di erent forms of the reportage, for example, the photoreportage, the drawn reportage, and the visual essay (cf. Thomé n. pag.). The term “visual essay” comes with less normative conceptual baggage than “reportage,” but it is also less frequently used (cf. Thomé n. pag.) because “visual essay” allows for other forms of multimedia. 126 Nora Bernings di erentiates between portrait-, event-, and milieu reportages (cf. Berning). 145 forms are more variable than those in shorter news formats. 127 Moreover, the reportage rst occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century and is mainly characterized by the fact that the journalist is gathering information from the place where the event took place (cf. Ramsden 31). 128 In contrast to other journalistic genres, the author thus does not report from her desk but from direct observation and experience (cf. Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 181). This means that background information can be dramaturgically edited and ctionalized; situations and atmospheres can be described in length by drawing on concrete examples, persons, events, or speci c circumstances. 129 One of the most crucial features of reportage is the focus on central impressions, observations, and statements. “The situations can, but do not need to be related to current events. If they are not, one speaks of ‘everyday reportage’ or ‘social reportage.’” 130 While the “news message” and the “report” maintain some distance, the reportage allows room for observations and other sensory perceptions by its author(s) (cf. Haller 167). Similar to the feature, the reportage is a personally colored report about individual experience. It allows room for re-experiencing similar emotions and feelings like the author-reporter. Like “gonzo journalism,” immersion is the concept at hand, working with individual experiences from a deeply personal perspective. It is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a rst-person narrative. Unlike “gonzo journalism,” the focus is less on the author’s life and more on her speci c experiences. Here, the reader empathizes with the journalist. The nal product tends to focus on the experience, not the writer. Often, the reportage considers an individual fate and makes no claim to universal validity. Similar to features, complex and abstract facts are illustrated by a generally valid, but concrete example supported by a descriptive background analysis. The reportage follows a certain structure—the text is characterized by a strong, symptomatic opening scene and a pointed ending. The focus is on the subjective experience of the main character. The concept of “witnessing” 127 The fact that the reportage can claim both a literary and a journalistic history for itself again raises a scienti c discussion on realism from di erent perspectives (cf. Wallisch 362). 128 Ramsden introduces the reader to the ‘grand reportage,’ which is di cult to de ne and a mixture of a more prolonged investigation and travel tale (cf. Ramsden 31-32). Moreover, although her text is entitled with “artist,” she does not talk about artists in the sense of talented people drawing journalism, but subsumes all kinds of authors under the umbrella term “artist.” 129 The reportage is perhaps the most frequently used journalistic genre of New Journalism (Haas, “Fiktion, Fakt & Fake? ” 49). According to Haas, the reportage allows a combination of huge amounts of research data, personal impressions, and observations in a narrative context (49). 130 The reportage is an information genre that serves the task of conveying situations to the audience as if the recipient were directly experiencing them. The situations can, but do not have to be connected to current events. If this is not the case, one speaks of everyday or social reportage (cf. Pöttker). 146 connects actions, scenes, and events with more substantial background information. Fact-oriented paragraphs alternate with scenic-descriptive paragraphs. It is a play of illustration with abstraction and description. Even though there have been more authors in recent years, comics reportage has so far been associated with one big name—Joe Sacco. It is widely acknowledged that Sacco is the man who has made comics journalism popular and has thus helped to bring this eld into social and academic discourse. Moreover, he is seen as the creator of visual war reportages because of his visits to Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Gaza. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, and his comics journalism has appeared, among other things, in The New York Times Magazine , Time , Harper’s , the Guardian Weekend , The Guardian , Boston Globe , and Details . Sacco’s work has already been discussed by some of the most essential scholars in comics studies. Je Adams and Nina Mickwitz have placed Sacco in the category of documentary comics. Amy Kiste Nyberg was one of the rst scholars to de ne comics journalism through Sacco’s style and techniques. Another in uential reading of Sacco includes Hillary Chute’s book Disaster Drawn . She has read Sacco as a representative of this medium’s ability to depict history, war, and trauma graphically. The rst novel-length study on Joe Sacco explores his themes, elements, concerns, and styles (cf. Worden). He is a Maltese-American journalist and comic book artist whose work is a compelling combination of eyewitness reportage and graphic art storytelling techniques. 131 Comics studies describe him as one of the most important persons in the histories of comics, art, and literature (cf. Worden vii). Feuilletonists and researchers discuss Sacco’s outstanding pioneering work (cf. Worcester 141) and describe him as one of the best practitioners using all the power of the comics format to do reportage journalism (cf. D. Thompson n. pag.). 132 Hence, Sacco is a “singular gure in the world of comics” (Pellitteri n. pag) and seems to belong to a rare species of comics journalists that has become popular by drawing non ction. One reason for his unique status is that he is a professional journalist with the talent to draw, or as he describes it, a “lifelong passion” (Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition ix)—a mixture that cannot be found very often in today’s corpus of comics journalism. Before succeeding in drawing comics, he tried to start a career as a journalist and earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oregon in 1981. However, Sacco was more interested in traveling the world, as the titles of his publications show and as he himself admits. 131 A list of Sacco’s primary works can be found in (cf. Worden 273-274). 132 Sacco is analyzed with regard to his impact on post-colonial studies (cf. Brister), and he is also widely taught at school and university (cf. Dunn). 147 Journalistic Text Types Modified for Comics Journalism Obviously, the diagram by Neuberger and Kapern introduced at the beginning of this section does not re ect the genre of comics journalism because di erent dimensions of journalistic text genres intermingle with and powerfully reinforce one another at the same time. Nevertheless, these di erent dimensions provide an important basis; they change and turn into the main features of comics journalism. This is my idea on what a model of these features could look like: objective level (intersubjective verifiability = “outer” circumstances) subjective level (accessible only through introspection = “inner” circumstances) level of facts level of interpretation report reportage feature facts as a basis for verbalnarratorial and visual-pictorial script; CJ does seldom deal with daily news coverage explanation and contextualization of facts; feature and report are often interwoven due to the medium, the way of drawing can already be a commentary on its own; glosse may be realized as visual satire, irony, or in a cartoony, caricature-like drawing style “portrait” is superfluous since it is the visual basis of figural dialogue and speech balloons Features of Comics Journalism visual and verbal commentary Figure 2.14: Overview of the Main Features of Comics Journalism The main observation is that on the one hand, comics journalism incorporates less types of expression than the model introduced by Neuberger and Kapern. Following Levine, forms “di er,” “overlap,” and “intersect” (Levine 4). For the generic de nition, it is not nine, but only four journalistic forms that have to be distinguished, which join together, work together, and mix in comics journalism. On the other hand, it adopts features from the outset due to the special characteristics of the medium. For example, the “portrait” is dissolved as a separate category because the comics journalist needs to base her visual representations on portraits. “News message” and “report” can be reduced to “report” because the concepts are the same in content, and because the two only di er in length. The question of whether one would call it a “news message” or “report” does not play a role then. Regarding features and stories in magazines, these two are very similar to me, so I do not distinguish between them. The portrait is omitted 148 because comics work with graphic drawings and are accompanied by high degree of visuality. What can be described with words is drawn—be it the characterization of persons, background information, or the design with details of the panels. Last, I do not list “commentary,” “review,” and “glosse” separately because the cartoonicity, the degree of abstraction, as well as the author’s drawing style already allow for a subjective (occasionally exaggerated and ironical) position while drawing. Instead, the fourth eld can be rephrased and reframed in “verbal and visual commentary,” which refers to a high degree of personal involvement. All in all, the features of comics journalism arise from a combination of all four journalistic forms of representation. To sum up, while comics journalism has been very brie y introduced in the rst chapter as “telling newsworthy non ction stories in comics form using journalistic techniques” (Weber and H.-M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 2), one can now analyze it more profoundly and summarize it as follows: Comics journalism is an informing, commenting, and explaining journalistic genre. It is the visual and verbal narration of serious non ction stories in the medium of comics by merging the journalistic genres of report, feature, reportage, and commentary into a hybrid conglomerate while sticking to journalistic techniques of investigation. Often, it appears like a mixture of di erent forms that coalesce in order to form a new piece of work, which is typical in genre theory because genres are not static. They need to be understood as guidelines that are exible enough to adapt to changes over time. The three categories of “way and medium of publication,” “duration of the production,” and “journalistic text types” provide the reader with further possibilities of approaching comics journalism. As has been shown and as Levine has rightly demonstrated, the categories sometimes overlap and intermingle. One can understand them as signposts that allow interchange and that is more appropriate to the genre, and it does justice to the very hybrid and interdisciplinary nature comics journalism. After these theoretical premises, I will now analyze the author on a textual level and examine the requirements for the ‘comics journalistic pact.’ 149 Chapter 3 The Author in the Storyworld: The ‘Comics Journalistic Pact’ This chapter analyzes various ways and means of the author to establish her authenticity and credibility on the text-immanent side of a piece of comics journalism. In this context, one conceptual innovation proves to be very helpful. I will introduce the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ which is also the heart of this project’s argumentation when approaching comics journalism with the concept of “authorship.” The ‘comics journalistic pact’ requires both a unique production and reception attitude because it is hypothetically concluded between the comics journalist as the author on the one hand and the recipient on the other. The rst part of this chapter lists elements that can be considered to be a set of rules of comics journalism and thus form speci c key characteristics of the genre. As will be shown in the following, I suggest that the ‘comics journalistic pact’ consists of three parts—‘face,’ ‘voice,’ and ‘hands.’ The latter is assigned to Ch. 4 because of its special thematic focus at the borderline between the levels of the storyworld and the extratextual real world. Regarding the structure of this chapter, this means that after the theoretical premise of the pact, which is inspired by Philipp Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,” the chapters on ‘voice’ (Ch. 3.1) and ‘face’ (Ch. 3.2) will follow—all of which analyze the author on the text-immanent level. In doing so, rst, parallels to autobiographies and life writing will be highlighted before the visual self-representation of comics journalists in the form of their ‘cartoonme’ is introduced. Subsequently, the focus will be on the narrativization, focalization, and metaization of comics journalistic works. These perspectives have been selected to validate and exemplify the conceptual attitude of the ‘pact’ 151 in order to combine journalistic and literary theory, as well as to authenticate the author in the storyworld. 1 Our business thrives on trust. There is nothing more important than the trust of our readers. 2 (Spiegel 73, my translation) The tendency that the journalist with her personal view of things has come to the fore in the last years subverts the idea of a strict separation between opinion and news coverage in journalism (cf. Hülsen 68-70). Even if literary studies distinguish between a narrating instance and an (implied) author, journalism studies do not challenge the fact that the author of reportage is often also the same person who does the journalistic research and the eldwork. 3 However, in comics journalism, the narratological approach from literary studies is, to some extent, obsolete and needs to be renegotiated and reconsidered in order to take the formation of this hybrid genre into due account. As such, comics journalism can be seen as a ‘counter-movement’ to both traditional journalism and a strong (post-)structuralist approach of the impossibility of equating the author with the narrating instance. However, why is a pact necessary at all? Because the reception of comics journalism rests upon a media paradox—a ctional medium wants to trustworthily present facts (see Ch. 2.2). This does not mean that this is not feasible, but it does require certain preconditions and contents from the recipient and the author. Comics scholar Ole Frahm is sceptical about this opinion and takes the other position. In his mind, authenticity can only be parodied because all perception is inauthentic. It has been a challenge for the last thirty years to try to depict truth beyond parody in serious forms such as reportage, biography and documentation (cf. Frahm 72). Frahm believes that if authenticity could be understood as the delity of the pencil, then the pencil would be as faithful as a dog. It must be kept on a leash at all times (cf. Frahm 72). 4 1 While the term “authentication” refers to a process that allows for the identi cation or con- rmation of the truth of an attribute of a single piece of data claimed true by an entity of a natural or legal person, “veri cation” is an auditing process and means ‘proving the truth’ or ‘con rmation.’ In my view, veri cation is usually conducted through the examination of existence, ownership, title, possession, and proper valuation. In contrast to identi cation, which refers to the act of stating or otherwise indicating a claim purportedly attesting to a person or thing’s identity, authentication is the actual con rmation of that identity. 2 The original reads, “Unser Geschäft lebt vom Vertrauen, es gibt nichts Wichtigeres als das Vertrauen unserer Leser.” 3 With the number of authors the complexity of the question regarding the authorial representation in the diegetic world, which is especially relevant in comics reportages, increases as well. The number of authors of a piece of work also in uences the question of the author’s/ authors’ authenticity and trustworthiness (see Ch. 3.2.4). 4 The original reads, “Wenn Authentizität sich als Treue des Zeichenstifts verstehen ließe, dann ist der Zeichenstift so treu wie ein Hund. Er muss immer wieder an die Leine genommen werden.” 152 Additionally, there is a widely accepted view not only in academic research that journalism does not produce an undistorted representation of reality. Gunn Enli conceptualizes this as “mediated authenticity” (see Ch. 2.3). Furthermore, as also elaborated in Chapter 2, one central problem our century faces is the waning con dence in the media. A growing mass of citizens seems to have lost trust in the way the news is mediated and selected. 5 The reasons are manifold, yet, sometimes it is because many people do not seem to know how the media work and how journalism is done (cf. Gladstone). All human-made things require trust, and so does journalism. The journalistic business “thrives on trust,” as Arthur Sulzberger claims in the introductory quote. According to Niklas Luhmann, trust can be characterized as a “risky input in advance” (Luhmann, Vertrauen: Ein Mechanismus der Reduktionsozialer Komplexität 30, my translation). 6 For comics journalism, this means that the recipient is supposed to show a certain openness and attitude towards the genre. In view of the genre’s characteristics, one has to start from the assumption that these texts correspond to the truth. They call for an open attitude and an expectation regarding the credibility of the author at the same time. Still, recipients are advised not to believe all media blindly—in whatever form and to whatever degree (cf. Dernbach 307). Instead, readers should become more critically engaged with the text. The medium of comics has always required a greater readiness for reception and skills concerning the reading of the gutter. That is why reading comics journalism also necessitates a speci c attitude of reading because it visualizes the constructedness of the news. Furthermore, it is just as important to keep in mind that images are artifacts. Accordingly, drawn images are an interpretation of reality by the author transmitted to the reader. Depending on the knowledge, the background, and the interest of the recipient, a new pact is concluded each time because the presentation is already a subjective and ltered depiction of our world. Accordingly, some comics journalistic panels are likely to evoke di erent emotional reactions in the recipient. Hence, comics journalism cannot and will not work with this bias of impartiality. Additionally, reading comics journalism is di erent from reading traditional news. It is no less factual and detailed, provided that the reader accepts comics journalism’s generic speci city and mode of action. Ultimately, when reading journalism, one always concludes a pact of trust which says that one can believe in the news institution with its executive bodies and its true and accurate dealing with reality. Because comics journalism, however, also combines literature and art, this belief and trust in the journalist 5 German YouTube star Rezo published a video on the destruction of the press (“Die Zerstörung der Presse”), in which he remarks that “ohne Vertrauen, Respekt und Glaubwürdigkeit [. . . ] auf Dauer nichts mehr von der seriösen Presse übrig[bleibt]” (Rezo 3: 10-3: 12min). 6 The original reads, “ riskante Vorleistung,” emphasis in original. 153 and the content is all the more crucial. That is why for comics journalism to qualify as a serious journalistic genre, the authors and recipients, as well as media institutions must enter into a moral and invisible agreement with each other. The transfer of an “authenticity pact” like Enli’s has not yet been made for comics journalism, as Weber and Rall note (cf. Weber and H.-M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 16). My project tries to ll in this research gap. The ‘comics journalistic pact,’ as I label it, is voluntarily entered into as soon as the recipient decides for this genre. 7 This already starts with the place of purchase or the place of access. Generally, the paratext is crucial and frames speci c expectations. The paratext can but does not have to include the cover, a typical website for comics journalism distribution, the institution, the editor, and the publishing house (see Ch. 3.1.4). The pact is established between the author and the recipient and relates to the following aspects: • the form: comics (narratorial caption script in prose and speech balloons as character dialogue); according to journalistic standards and methods • the choice of topics: not limited; ‘reality narrations’ and (multimedia) references to the extratextual world; no “fake news” • the main functions of the author: the comics journalist acts as the author, narrator, drawer, witness, and sometimes as actively engaged person 8 • the position of the author: the author as the journalist is not the protagonist of the story but can be a character; some autobiographical traces are accepted • the production: transparent and veri able strategies of authentication of content and authentication of the comics journalist, in particular the Internet and social media First, the pact acknowledges that comics, despite their comparatively timeconsuming production, can transport non ctional information in a ctional medium while guaranteeing journalistic rules and methods of investigation. To be more precise, comics journalism is a narration that is written and drawn in sequential art by a real person about a contemporary topic of interest. It is realized by journalistic means and methods provided that the focus is not on autobiographical live writing, but on the reporting and representation of actual events and stories of other people. Prose text in caption boxes and character dialogue in speech balloons create the verbal narratorial caption script. Even if written in the present tense, the reader must assume a temporal distance 7 The conceptualization of a “pact” is not untypical for describing a relationship between reader and author, such as “Fiktionspakt/ Fiktionsvertrag” (cf. Eco 103-105) or “le Pacte autobiographique” (cf. Lejeune 1975). 8 Even though the word “character” is also common in literary studies and might remind of a character in a ctional setting, I prefer this to, for example, the word “entity,” which sounds too unspeci c and inanimate to me. I am using ‘author gure,’ ‘author character,’ and ‘author person’ synonymously. 154 and, thus, a retrospective narrative perspective of the main character. What is visually and verbally told in the present tense of the comics panel evokes a process of immersion, as if the incident was taking place right now. Yet, it must be understood as a representation of situations that happened in the past (see Ch. 2.6.2). Second, if one treats a piece of comics journalism as a referential text that refers to extratextual world events, it has an obligation to reality and a claim to factuality. In other words, what is at the center of the entire concept of comics journalism is the claim to reality and “essential truth” (see Ch. 2.2) with its speci c function in society to deliver truth-demanding information (cf. Martínez, “Erzählen im Journalismus” 184). 9 The pact sets the rules for saying that recipients should not be eager for each mimetic detail that reality o ered, and that the author was not able to catch in that time. 10 Besides these two aspects, rst and foremost, there is a bodily identity between the narrator and the author, because comics journalism collapses three distinct analytical levels into one. It is a genre characterized by a striking overlap between the author as the verbal and visual creator , narrator , and character of the story. 11 More speci cally, there is an identity between the author, whose name refers to a real person and who is represented by a visual ‘cartoon-me,’ the author as the narrator of the plot and story, and the author as the producer of the work. Because journalism and literature work di erently, the reader must be able to rely on the fact that the narrating author is also the author in the extratextual world. The pact thus aims at intraand extratextual reality alike, trying to overcome some views on the separation of the author and narrator. Moreover, compared to traditional journalism, it is nothing new that the author has to adhere to high precision and journalistic quality rules regarding the methods of investigation and ethical issues. However, what is unique in comics journalism is the way in which the author deals with the production process and her sources. One can argue that she makes it more explicit and comprehensible, and thus also more trackable to the reader. Through various authentication strategies, attempts are made to counter and even reduce the ctional character and, by revealing the working process, to eventually inspire the reader’s trust in the author’s credibility. However, even if the recipient fully accepts the ‘comics journalistic pact’ and even if the author promises and keeps the highest transparency possible 9 The German original reads “wahrheitsheischende Informationen.” 10 Related to this, the drawing style does not correlate with reality. In other words, a more realistic style of the panel contents does not mean that they resemble reality more than those depicted in a more abstract style. Future studies could take up this observation. 11 This observation holds true for comics reportages but changes in more documentary-like mediations (see Ch. 2.3). 155 in nding sources and researching, there will always remain some aspects that are very likely to be changed, or, as Wolfgang Iser calls it, ‘feigned.’ 12 First, one has to acknowledge that factors such as the author’s memory gaps, moderate truthfulness, the chosen narrative technique, and the slower production process make it di cult to mimetically represent journalism. Second, the pact also states that the narration seems to be only successful if the recipient does not expect lengthy completeness. Individual authorial experience shows ruptures. As in autobiographies, the recipient cannot be completely sure whether the narrative is real at all and has happened the way it is told. The majority of readers will most likely not travel to, for example, war zones. This is also used as a strategy to disguise the substance of the narrative content, which makes the pact all the more important. Instead, one might say that the comics journalist uses personal experiences of what she has seen and thus challenges prescribed values of what society considers unbiased reporting nowadays. Subsequently, although one deals with one physical body, the pact allows the author to have di erent ‘selves.’ Yet, because comics journalism can be regarded as “auteur journalism” (see Ch. 2.3.1), the opinion of the journalistic narrator corresponds to the opinion of the author. Concerning the pact, one can note that both—author and recipient—can break the abstract agreement, but the e ects of the author’s non-compliance with the pact have a much more signi cant impact. If the reader breaks the pact, this will have little to no e ect on the author. If, however, the author does not adhere to the transparency she has announced despite a high degree of subjectivity, there is the danger that the fundamental trust in the genre of comics journalism and thus in the truth will become deeply shaken. In other words, the breach of trust by the comics journalist, if she disseminates false information, has drastic e ects. Beyond endangering her job, any institutional connection, and her reputation, the author gambles away the recipient’s trust. This is extremely dangerous because the pact follows a simple, but e cient principle—respect and honesty, because in a business that trades in truth and trust, lies are deadly. 13 12 Wolfgang Iser speaks of ‘feigning’ (“ ngieren”) (cf. Iser). 13 The fact that even traditional journalism is not immune to renouncing a ‘journalistic pact,’ and reader con dence is illustrated by the latest journalism fraud that was revealed in December 2018 as the most shocking a air in the history of the German magazine DER SPIEGEL . Even though there was a surveillance system with many fact-checking instances at the magazine, and even if this was not about trust by the reader in the author, the complete veri cation system failed. The responsible editors-in-chief blindly trusted Claas Relotius and his playful use of language and narration. The fake case of Relotius was not the only one. In 2004 at U.S.A. Today , star cult and favoritism led to the disregard of the most straightforward rules and made it possible that the reporter Jack Kelley ctionalized his articles, as Jayson Blair did until 2003 at The New York Times . 156 Coming back to the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ one needs to keep in mind that the recipient agrees to the genre’s features and the personal stance of the author. In turn, the pact also requires the obligation on behalf of the author to unconditional truth, and the assumption that truth is as vital as other journalistic obligations, especially regarding moral issues, as well as a pragmatic attitude towards journalistic decision-making and journalistic truth from the recipient. In this regard, in a social debate on what can be considered trustworthy, alternative choices of consuming information might one day lead to the acceptance of comics journalism as a serious source of information. Having explained the rules along which the ‘comics journalistic pact’ works, I will now examine the issue of ‘voice.’ 3.1 Voice The following section elaborates on the depiction of voice in comics journalism (see Ch. 3.1.1). The term “voice” is chosen here as an umbrella term and refers to all aspects of opinion, perspective, and thus ways of thinking. The topic of ‘voice’ is manifold in comics journalism and appears on di erent levels. On the one hand, it is a term for the analysis of the voice of the author and the narrator: ‘Who speaks in comics journalism? ’ On the other hand, it describes a purpose that comics journalists often pursue, namely, literally to give a voice to marginalized groups (see Ch. 3.1.1). Because pragmatic, reader-centered, and formal restrictions prevent comics journalists from reporting in nitely on a particular issue, comics journalism must include selection and omission, which makes the nished piece of comics journalism a mediated product. Such tendencies become even more evident in the cartoon world of non ction comics, in which the intimacy of an articulated rst-person narration overlaps with the graphic power of caricature and visual metaphors, as well as with the distribution of information. In contrast to Chapter 3.2, this part deals with the verbal voice as depicted in caption boxes and speech bubbles. Narratology and comics studies provide a set of analytical tools and categories here. However, I will show that many of these tools and categories do not do justice to the analysis of comics journalism, because they make things more complicated than useful. Based on these premises, in the second part of this section, I will develop a model of narrative mediation which considers literary and journalistic theory alike. 3.1.1 Voice-Giving Like New Journalism, comics journalism pursues the major objective of giving voice to stories that would not be heard otherwise for various reasons. Many 157 authors stress the importance of heterogeneous news coverage but criticize that often it is not done (cf. Wallman, “Brick by Brick: Is this Really Europe? A Comic From Eastern Europe’s Border Camps” n. pag., cf. Lomasko 7). From a historical perspective, the roots of modern reportage go back further than New Journalism often suggests. As early as the nineteenth century, journalists rst drew attention to the grievances as a response to the shock of life in an industrial society. Reporters moved out to the slums to tell the bourgeoisie about the contrasts between rich and poor and between factories and villas (cf. Henk 42). Comics journalists, too, try to do something against the voicelessness of the people who live on the margins of our society. For example, Dan Archer reports on textile workers in Gawair, a slum area in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka (cf. Archer, “Reporterskizzen aus Bangladesch” n. pag.; cf. Archer and Finger). In another example, David Hedges and Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the zones in America that have been o ered up for exploitation in the name of pro t, progress, and technological advancement. In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt , they want to show what life looks like in places where the market rules without constraints. Many of these comics reportages are, therefore, set in war zones, refugee camps, prisons, and other areas of con ict. ‘Migration Comics’ There are seldom appropriate words that describe the feelings of extreme violence, human misery, and injustice, because those a ected by migration often do not understand the emotions themselves (cf. Emcke 15). Consequently, through its visuality, comics journalism challenges this observation insofar as it tells not only verbally but also visually. It adds a particular value to the seemingly ‘unspeakable.’ 14 This is also the reason why comics journalist Cyrille Pomès preferred the medium of comics reportage to a verbal description when reporting about the refugee camp in Calais, France, in No Man’s Land . In his mind, the protagonists of the story—refugees, residents, and volunteers—are both victims and eyewitnesses who often lack words for their extreme borderline experiences (cf. Pomès n. pag.). Refugees , to add another example, consists of a news game which has been created as part of a larger project by the German-French broadcast station ARTE. 15 “A refugee camp as setting for a game? Are you kidding me? A bad 14 Current research classi es all works which deal with the topic of migration, refugees, and asylum in the broadest sense as ‘migration comics.’ It is particularly useful to examine them for the aspects of trauma and aesthetics. 15 A news game is the application of journalistic principles (methods, patterns, type of reporting, genres) to content—based on real con icts and problems—in a game concept in order to make current events and topics visually accessible and tangible. ARTE re ects on itself as follows: “What we o er you here [...] is simply an original and educational way of passing on information. Nothing more, but nothing less” (Siegel). 158 joke? Trying to kick a buzz? ”—with these introductory words of the game, the justi cation of the creators for a new(s) format begins. The aim is to examine the current migration situation from as many di erent perspectives as possible. The recipient makes up her mind by dealing with many perspectives, contents, and modes. Apart from “teach[ing] something,” the online editor of ARTE Laure Siegel wants “to give people the voice and not only to NGOs,” and “to play with the format and make people interested in the topic [refugees]” (Siegel n. pag.). 16 Further examples of ‘migration comics,’ which I have already mentioned earlier, are Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos , One Day in Kara Tepe , and Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room . ‘Prison Comics’ Connecting testimony, journalism, and activism to comics journalism can o er thought-provoking impulses for society. Accordingly, comics journalism contributes to a speci c way of cultural worldmaking and gives voice to those who are very likely to be seldom heard (see Fig. 3.1). Chappatte and Widmann, for example, raise a discussion on the death penalty in the United States. In Inside Death Row , it is not their intention to argue that those men sitting on the death row are innocent; indeed, most of them are guilty because they took part in crimes that ended tragically. Instead, with their comics journalistic work, they want to show the more signi cant spectrum of what these crimes constitute—the complexity, the pain, the hopelessness of the inmates and their families. This piece of comics journalism also stresses that even death row inmates are human beings and have a right to a fair trial. They are citizens but on the margins of society. For example, the authors include the story of Kevin Cooper, who is presumably wrongly imprisoned, and refer to Amnesty International , which is trying to free Kevin Cooper. 17 Thus, this project demonstrates the complex and challenging diving line between art, journalism, and activism, which I will elaborate on in Chapter 4.1.3. Like Chappatte and his wife, the Russian artist Victoria Lomasko was also given access to a prison. In August 2010, she was a volunteer at the Centre 16 This project is also unique because it can be categorized as ‘transmedia comics journalism.’ It is a particularly rare case in German-speaking countries, too. One person from each professional group—the lmmaker, the photographer, the comic artist, and the writer—visits a refugee camp in the world—in Chad, Nepal, Iraq, and Lebanon—and has to create a report about the camp’s situation by using her profession, knowledge, and talent. The genre of “reportage” is the rst choice of all these media. The recipient is also to be seen as an actor in this game due to the distinctive and active role she takes in the play. This role is clearly de ned by ARTE, because the players act as ctional ARTE reporters in the refugee camps, moving through the camp and nding out about the people there and their living conditions. Hereby, the recipient can collect material that was collected beforehand and thus pre ltered by the four professionally hired artists. At the end of the game, the recipient collects her own report in the form of interviews, picture galleries, and mini-reports. 17 The website is <www.savekevincooper.org>. 159 Figure 3.1: Screenshot, Inmate Art “Windows on Death Row” (Hromadka et al. n. pag.) for Prison Reform at the Mozhaysk Juvenile Prison in Russia in order to give drawing lessons to the inmates. All the archival materials developed by the prisoners in the course of the project over four years are currently exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. In her ‘post- eld work phase’ (see Ch. 4.2.2) she included this event as a chapter “Drawing Lessons at a Juvenile Prison” in her book Other Russias (cf. Lomasko 45): “I [Victoria] didn’t want them to remain in Russia, where they could very well have disappeared, like so many materials from past social experiments” (47). To have this issue recorded was the reason why she decided to make a book project out of it. 160 3.1.2 Narrative Mediation in Comics Journalism Having introduced two forms of comics journalism which deal with ‘voice’ on the level of content, I will now examine the voice of the comics journalist. Therefore, I will analyze the voice of the comics journalist as attributable to the author and narrator. The Author and Narrator Comics scholar and narratologist Jan-Noël Thon recognizes two signi cant lines of argumentation regarding the narrator in what he calls the “post-Genettean” era (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 68), with which he refers to all works published after Genette’s in uential book Narrative Discourse . On the one hand, there is a group of narratologists emphasizing the “(self-)representation of a narrating character who is clearly distinct from the author as a necessary condition for speaking of a narrator.” Richard Walsh (cf. Walsh, “Who Is the Narrator? ”) is one proponent of this view, which Thon also sympathizes with (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 68). On the other hand, there are scholars like Richard Aczel, who refer to the narrator as “a bundle of occasionally rather basic narratorial functions ranging from the selection, organization, and (re)presentation of elements of the storyworld to evaluative comments and self-characterizations of a narrating character” (qtd. in “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 68). 18 Although Thon acknowledges that these “narratorial functions” are important, he dislikes them for conceptual and terminological reasons (cf. “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 70). 19 However, the key question of Thon’s analysis of verbal-pictorial non-narratorial representations has become whether the narrator is located within the rst-order storyworld or outside of it (cf. Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 73). 20 18 Aczel distinguishes between the concepts of “voice” and “narrator,” saying that a text either has or does not have a narrator, but that voice is “more or less strongly detectable” (Aczel 490). 19 Thon’s di erentiation made for ctional graphic narratives considers “narratorial representation,” “authorial representation,” and “non-narratorial representation,” although the rst two are sometimes di cult to separate from each other, as Thon admits (cf. Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 71). In his view, this distinction should only be used in cases where the verbal narration “is more or less explicitly attributed not only to a narrating but also to an authoring character” (76). While the rst one refers to “the kind of verbal narration attributable to a more or less explicitly represented (usually ctional) narrator-as-narrating-character that is distinct from the author” (70), the second re ects “the kind of verbal narration attributable not to such a narrator but rather to an authoring character that functions ‘as narrator’,” and third, “the kind of verbal-pictorial representation in panels [. . . ] which is [. . . ] also the result of a process of creation but whose ‘source’ is usually not [. . . ] represented and whose multimodal con guration prevents us from attributing it to a ‘speaker’” (70-71). 20 Thon suggests minimizing the number of “technical” terms surrounding “implied authors,” and suggests speaking instead of “ rst-order storyworlds,” “second-order storyworlds,” etc.— which are narrated by extra-diegetic narrators for rst-order storyworlds and intradiegetic narrators for second-order storyworlds (cf. Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 72; cf. Ryan, “Story/ Worlds/ Media Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology”). 161 In other words, do we understand a verbal narration as being written, thought, or spoken? In ctional graphic narratives, Thon states, narrators usually do not control, organize, and present the verbal-pictorial elements of the overall narration by themselves. He demonstrates his hypothesis, among other things, with Shaun Tan’s ctional graphic narrative The Arrival (cf. “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 86). Consequently, he goes on to ask how verbal narratorial representation relates to verbal-pictorial non-narratorial representation. 21 Moreover, while in literary narratology, a role model of narrative communication usually di erentiates between “actual author,” and “implied author” 22 (cf. Ryan, “Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author”; cf. V. Nünning and A. Nünning 107) 23 , a narratology that is speci c to comics takes into account the presence of an agent responsible for graphic enunciation, because—generally— the question of the narrator is a di cult notion for any visual medium, so, too, for comics. I agree with Thon, who thinks that the “implied author” has become too vague “and varied to be particularly useful by now” (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 88). Even if Thon refrains from speaking of an “implied author,” which basically means a postulated author, he prefers speaking of a “hypothetical author” instead (88, 90). The latter term acknowledges that some aspects of a graphic narrative design should be ascribed to an “enunciator” in preference to a work’s author (cf. “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 88). Therefore, in the case of ctional comics, theories of enunciation need to be considered, which add “enunciative instances” describing semiotic modes of representation, and which help to conceptualize the narrative agency (cf. Surdiacourt; cf. Mikkonen; cf. Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator”; cf. Baetens). Thierry Groensteen introduces the “monstrator” (cf. Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator”) 24 and the instance of the 21 There are two ways in which storyworlds are represented in graphic narratives—as narratorial representation whenever verbal narration is used, which readers tend to attribute to a speaker as a narrating character—and, as what Thon calls “non-narratorial representation” (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 82), which is the verbal-pictorial mode of presentation, or as David Bordwell remarks, an implicit, non-personi ed narrator that can be identi ed as the origin or the “locus of narration” (Bordwell 61-62). Moreover, Thon also explains that the distinction between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators does not apply in the same way to multimodal narrative representations (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 72). 22 Established role models of narrative communication in literature usually di erentiate at least between “biographical” or “actual author”, the “narrator(s)”, the narrated characters and the “abstract”, or the “implied author” (Chatman). 23 Marie-Laure Ryan has revisited the concept of “implied author.” She proposes a critique of the three common functions of an “implied author” and defends the idea that if the author reveals herself through a text, a phenomenon which can occur to variable degrees, it is as the manifestation of a real person that this gure attracts the interest of the reader. 24 Groensteen (cf. Groensteen, Bande dessinée et narration: Système de la bande dessinée 2 93) works with Gaudreault’s term of “monstration,” which is de ned in order “to characterise 162 recitant, who is responsible for verbal enunciation. 25 Groensteen demonstrates that a substantial part of the narration of comics occurs in and through the images and their di erent levels of articulation. Nevertheless, he proves that there is a gap between what is verbally told and what is visually shown. The necessity to distinguish these instances from that of the narrator is corroborated by the di erent positions that can be adopted with respect to storytelling, which also constitutes the di culty of a narratology of comics due to its polysemiotic nature that combines texts and images to varying degrees. Non-Hypothetical Authors Thon introduces a model of “hypothetical authorship” for ctional narratives and storyworlds. However, I doubt that this distinction still holds for non ction comics. In my opinion, “hypothetical” describes an abstract concept rather than a concrete reality, which contradicts journalism’s task to present information from and about reality. In this respect, it seems to be more reasonable to ascribe authorship to a real author who can be seen as an intention-driven authoring character whose intrinsic motivation is responsible for the journalistic investigation and the choice of topics. They can range from issues that involve criticism of society, and literary-cultural topics to political concerns, and they always depend on one’s interest and background. 26 However, there is still the question of how and to what extent the real author in the extratextual world resembles the medially transmitted author in the comic book, which will be analyzed at length in the next section. Other than in ctional comics, non-narratorial verbal representation does not work and does not coincide with comics journalism made by humans and not by non-anthropomorphic, un-personi ed, and inhuman gures. The comics journalist is a human person and thus not merely an instance or entity who narrates the story. Comic images are nished products and not ction. Hence, one can connect the authorial personi cation to the handmade nature of the creator and to showing as the dominant pictorial mode. Additionally, this also implies that there must be some human being beyond the piece of comics journalism, who is responsible for the whole artwork, for example, and identify that mode of communication in a story that consists of showing characters that act rather than telling the events that they undergo, and to replace ‘representation,’ a term that is too marked, too hackneyed and too polysemic” (“The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator” 3, emphasis in original). Thus, Groensteen di erentiates between “monstrateur” and “récitant.” Both create the “narrateur fondamental.” 25 Philippe Marion has suggested a di erentiation within graphic enunciation between monstration and what he calls “graphiation.” Whereas monstration is “transitive, turned towards guration”, graphiation is “re exive, turned towards the graphic gesture”—a distinction Groensteen considers super uous (Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator” 3-4). 26 Egon Erwin Kisch requests a dedicated stance of the author towards the subject of interest (cf. Kisch). 163 for the arrangement and size of panels, the individual style of drawing, the speci city of lines, the artistic technique, etc. Hence, one can invoke a visual and verbal narrator, and attribute both the narratorial and the pictorial track to the comics journalist because journalism is practiced by human beings instead of de-anthropomorphized bundles of functions or hypothetical voices that might occur in the ctional realm. Focalization, Ocularization and Monstration Similar to the narrative mediation, the concepts of “point of view” or “focalization” have to be reframed in comics journalism. Visual focalization and techniques of narrative perspective in comics address the position, angle, eld, and focus of vision (cf. Mikkonen 102). They are referred to as “ocularization”—a term coined by lm theorist François Jost, which serves “to account for the camera’s placement and the point of view that the placement translates or suggests” (Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator” 2). 27 Kai Mikkonen speaks of “perceptual focalization” (Mikkonen 102), but uses it synonymously with Jost’s term. 28 Ocularization in comics covers not only “images representing the ocular viewpoint of a character,” but also “images which bear traces of subjectivity through deformation” and “wholly subjective images” (Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator” 3). Even if Groensteen acknowledges “ocularization,” he does not work with it because of its closeness to the camera-eye and lm studies, and works with André Gaudreault’s term of “monstration” instead. For Groensteen, the term “monstrator” indicates “the instance responsible for the putting into drawing [. . . ] of the story” (4). In other words, it refers to what is seen is the result of something being shown and thus of a decision regarding enunciation. As Groensteen remarks, “[t]he question of the knowledge that is held respectively by the narrator, the character and the reader is indeed distinct from that of the perceptive focus” (2). As the following pages will show, the concept of focalization is super uous in comics journalism with single authorship because of the important notion of the concept of “witnessing.” Equally, Chapter 3.2 stresses the importance of the comics journalist’s (eyewitness) testimony in order to be a reliable witness and thus a credible narrator. 27 For a further discussion (cf. Hescher Chapters 4.2, 4.3, 4.8). 28 Like the cognitive facet, one can also consider ocularization as being internal or external, with some additional variations. In external ocularization, which predominates in most of the comics, the focalizing character is seen from the outside, without any attempt at recreating their particular visual eld. Particularly in the case of what Jost calls “spectatorial ocularization,” the recipient is privy to visual information outside the focalizer’s radius of seeing, such as the popular example of a monster sneaking up to its victim from behind. For “internal ocularization”, which Jost divides into primary and secondary forms (cf. Jost 75). 164 This is my example of how a narratological analysis of comics journalism could read: Glidden in ( RB ) and Sacco in ( Journalism ) oscillate between an extradiegetic homodiegetic and an intradiegetic heterodiegetic narratorial role. Generally, they are responsible for the authorial representation. They can also be seen as “authoring characters” and “narrators-as-narrating characters” (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ”). While, for example, Sacco’s narrating I is marked as extradiegetic, there is some uctuation regarding his involvement in the story he narrates. The central part of the overall narrative consists of his observations of the situations and interview reports, making his role heterodiegetic. However, Sacco also includes parts in which he is directly addressed by his interviewees, making his narratorial role in these parts homodiegetic. Sacco— and this also holds for Glidden—includes many shorter stories from within the rst storyworld. However, the narration of some of these can be attributed to Sacco’s and Glidden’s experiencing I, which in turn becomes an intradiegetic homodiegetic narrating I. They are narrating homodiegetic characters in their rst storyworld. Therewith, one can observe that homodiegetic narrators are more easily realized in extradiegetic and intradiegetic varieties, even though deciding which is which may occasionally prove di cult. At rst glance, the author’s narrative situation is not clearly apparent. A non-narratologist will presumably not understand who narrates when and how. Moreover, this type of analysis is less comprehensible and does not do justice to the fact that journalism should be understandable and accessible by everyone. A Model of Narrative Mediation in Comics Journalism Apart from autobiographies, in ctional texts, the author, the narrator, and the character are usually not the same; yet, the person who writes a journalistic reportage is often also the person who investigates the material (function of a journalist) and narrates the story (function of a narrator) based on facts. Unlike in ctional narratives, which may deliberately delude the reader, one has to trust the comics journalist and the media representative to report fully, accurately, and justly, which is not di erent from traditional journalism. By ascribing importance to the author in single authorship comics journalism, one can assume the identity of the author as the narrating character of her story due to her verbal and visual occurrence on the level of the storyworld. This identity can be overtly and directly expressed through the use of the pronoun ‘I’ in the narratorial caption script, in speech balloons, and it can be visually shown 165 through the ‘cartoon-me’ (see Ch. 3.2.3). 29 Nevertheless, it is vital to know in the realm of comics studies that narratological models prove to be helpful for a start but have some critical shortcomings. One of the reasons is the use of too conceptual terminology, which seems to be more applicable to ctional comics; so is the distinction between three types of focalization. One part of the comics journalistic pact acknowledges that the comics journalist must be the same person who researches and draws. This also makes her a comics journalist. Drawing already requires a perspective and the author’s point of view. Because the concept of focalization can also be described as ‘who perceives? ,’ it must be clear from the outset that the journalist is the one who perceives the environment and situation during the eld research, for example, she speaks to interlocutors, takes notes and sketches, etc. From this, it is also possible to derive her authorial function in single authorship comics journalism. Moreover, a theory of narrative mediation in comics is generally one of the most signi cant research lacunae at the moment. 30 Jens Eder has attempted to elaborate a narratology of comics by examining to what extent the concepts of lm studies can be applied to comics, because a narratology of comics also has to deal with gaps regarding questions of reliability between who tells and what is actually shown to the viewer. He argues that the design of a lm can, indeed, be traced back to the lmmakers—real authors, or author collectives; even if one assumes that lms are generally understood by their viewers as consciously designed means of communication [. . . ] one does not need to attribute their design to narrators or implicit authors, but can also trace them back to the real lmmakers as authors (collective) (cf. Eder 616). 31 Because of the lack of an overarching “comics narratology,” I am working with parts of Genette, Narrative Discourse , Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film , Walsh, “Who Is the Narrator? ” and partly Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology . 32 Moreover, I adopt Stanzel’s concept of “veiled mediacy” (cf. Stanzel) and apply his idea of “overt” and 29 Julia Ludewig speaks of “veiled” and “highlighted” mediation (cf. Ludewig 24). She also uses the distinction of “unobtrusive” and “intrusive” narrators (28), which is the same as the distinction between “overt” and “covert narrators,” with which I am following Stanzel and Chatman. 30 The Dutch narratologist Roel van den Oever is currently creating a model solely for comics. Inspired by Mieke Bal’s theory on narratology, he suggests di erentiating between three tracks—a spatial track (layout), a visual track (images), and a verbal track (words). 31 The original reads, “Selbst wenn man davon ausgeht, dass Filme von ihren Zuschauern in der Regel als bewusst gestaltete Kommunikationsmittel verstanden werden [...], muss man ihre Gestaltung nicht Erzählern oder impliziten Autoren zuschreiben, sondern kann sie auch auf die realen Filmemacher als Autoren(kollektiv) zurückführen”. 32 In her model of “natural narratology,’ she argues that mediacy does not refer to mediating through a (narrator’s) discourse but through consciousness. For her, the teller/ narrator is only one possibility to narrate; cognitive frames such as viewing, observing, experiencing, and re ecting also play an important role. Here, I combine Fludernik’s observations to the concept 166 “covert” narrators, who remain more or less hidden in the narrative’s discursive shadows (see Ch. 2.3.1). I understand “immediacy” as a category that is di erent from “objectivity” and “factuality,” and, more speci cally here, as a concept for the recipient’s impression that the author’s mediating function is minimal, if not absent. This seemingly absent intermediary transmission system is called “veiled mediacy” (Alber and Fludernik, “Mediacy and Narrative Mediation” n. pag.). This idea can be connected more to the notion of more documentarylike comics journalism, which lacks a clear and overt narratorial voice (see Ch. 3.1.3). First and foremost, I start from Richard Walsh’s understanding of a possible equation of the author with the narrator, which seems to be the best option to combine journalism with literature. According to Walsh, “the narrator is always either a character who narrates, or the author” (Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction 78). Walsh argues that the “extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators [. . . ], who cannot be represented without thereby being rendered homodiegetic or intradiegetic, are in no way distinguishable from authors” (84). In reality, it is not the narrator but the author of a novel who writes down the words. However, comics journalism fundamentally undermines this previous separation. As a hybrid form, neither the strict separation between the author and narrator, nor the unity of these two is taken into account. This aspect demonstrates that the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is justi ed in order to assume a similarity between author and narrator. In contrast to literary studies, one considers the narrator in the storyworld as the real author from the extratextual world. I am well aware of the mediation that takes place between the author in the real world and the presentation in the text. I accept that there are di erent ‘selves’ of an author, such as the remembering self, the narrarting self, the experiencing self, and the drawing self—all of them constitute the authoring self. At some point, I have already spoken in a di erentiated way about the ‘comics journalistic pact’ because I mentioned ‘single authorship comics journalism.’ For single authorship, the model includes at least two levels of mediation—the extratextual world, in which the real comics journalist and the real person (who can be a subject of interest to the comics journalist) are located (see Fig. 3.2). ‘Storyworld 1’ is inside the extratextual world in order to take account of the mediation. The ‘cartoon-me,’ which is the visual selfresemblance in the form of a cartoon of the real comics journalist, embodies the journalist and the cartoonist. She is also the narrator and eyewitness of the story to tell. If the comics journalist only gives voice to other characters to of witnessing. Especially in single authorship comics journalism, particularly in reportages, the author takes a special status because of her viewing, observing, experiencing, and drawing. 167 ‘Real’ Comics Journalist Storyworld 1 Extratextual Level (‘Reality’) ‘Cartoon-Me’ (of the Comics Journalist) Cartoon Image of the ‘Real Person’ ‘Real’ Person Storyworld 2 Textual Level Figure 3.2: Model of Narrative Communication in Comics Journalism let them tell their stories, she narrates the story no longer verbally but visually. Then, ‘storyworld 2,’ which is verbally told and experienced by another character, comes into existence. Moreover, the existence of the storyworld 2 is connected to a time shift. While comics journalism mostly presents the ‘storyworld 1,’ the narration told by a character happened in the past and is referred to a ‘storyworld 2.’ 3.1.3 First-Person Narration vs. Neutral Documentary-Like Narration This chapter elaborates on the author’s narrative situation. I have argued that narratological concepts, speci cally the separation into heteroand homodiegetic, as well as categories of extraand intradiegetic narration and focalization, are not appropriate in comics journalism. In my view, they are either super uous, because it can be made very plausible and authentically comprehensible who the author and the narrator are, and what roles the author has in single authorship comics journalism. Or, the narratological categories 168 cannot be veri ed unambiguously and complicate things unnecessarily, thus distracting from the actual content. Instead, for the analysis of the author’s narrative situation, I suggest a di erentiation into a ‘verbal’ and a ‘visual’ way of narration. Then, both categories can be further di erentiated into a ‘covert’ and an ‘overt’ narrative situation. From these two distinctions of the narrative situation, the role and the function of the author follow. In other words, ‘verbally overt’ refers to the author as the narrator and means that she reveals herself to the recipient, mostly by directly uttering her opinion in the caption boxes. In contrast, ‘verbally covert’ means that the comics journalist as the author is the narrator but does not clearly utter her opinion verbally. The recipient knows that she is the creator and assumes that she is also the narrator because of the ‘comics journalistic pact; ’ yet, she does not clearly and openly reveal herself in the storyworld. Visually and Verbally Overt Narrative Situation I have introduced the category of ‘visually and verbally overt narrative situation.’ This one is repeatedly discussed from di erent perspectives throughout the study because it belongs to the narrative situations that are most frequently used in comics journalism. In the case of single authorship, the author of the story is also the one who does the journalistic research, goes into the eld, witnesses, and mediates the content by eventually telling the story visually and verbally. This functional diversity of the author in one person is a key feature of single authorship comics journalism. The ‘cartoon-me’ as the overt visual expression of the author and the rst-person narration in the caption boxes characterize this category. Nevertheless, it should not be mixed up with the autobiographical narrative situation (Ch. 3.2.2), because the author of comics journalism is not the protagonist in her story. However, there are situations in the stories in which the comics journalist does not verbally narrate because she gives the voice to other characters, who tell their stories in the storyworld 2. The comics journalist documents these memories and experiences of past events. Even if the author does not verbally narrate, she is still responsible for the visual narration, namely, the representation of what the characters have told her. The author draws from her memory because she could not experience the events herself, and this is exactly the point at which the author has to use her imagination to be able to draw something at all (see “informed imagination” Ch. 2.2.3). In the second part of “Chechen War, Chechen Women” from Journalism , which is entitled “Every 50 Years,” Sacco did not experience the escape during World War II himself but decides to have the Chechen woman Asset speak as a witness of that time (see Fig. 3.3). Thus, Sacco steps back as a narrator and lets Asset tell her family’s tragic story. Therefore, at the beginning of 169 Figure 3.3: Page Excerpt, Asset Narrates ( Journalism 41) the story, Sacco places the old woman very prominently at the center of the panels (40-47). By drawing the woman from the front, the recipient gets to see her straight into the eyes, which creates an immersive e ect. Whereas at the beginning, she is presented in full body posture, Sacco now emphasizes her face and the upper part of her body to draw attention to her story. Whereas at rst, Sacco starts his narration by introducing the Chechens’ history, he eventually hands over the narration to Asset. For this purpose, Sacco connects the rst panel, in which Asset and Sacco himself can be seen, with the second panel, in which only Asset is visible with a caption box that overlaps both panels ( Journalism 41). It reads, “Asset is thinking back to a day in February 1944 and the de ning catastrophe in her people’s history” ( RB 41). Because we can see Asset and Sacco, and how he takes notes and listens to her in the rst panel, the recipient is alerted to the fact that Sacco’s documentary-like style of telling switches to a rst-person narration. The caption box is an element of the extratextual world and can be ascribed to Sacco as the authoring character. By zooming in on and showing a close-up of Asset’s mature face, the reader gets the impression of Asset telling her story herself. This makes her a narrating character, while Sacco keeps the role of the authoring character (41). One can imagine that this is how Sacco sees Asset—a face marked by life and age. Moreover, one gets the impression that not only the distance between Sacco as the comics journalist and his interviewee is dissolved, but also the 170 distance between the recipient and Asset. The recipient is immersed in the storyworld by noticing that it is now Asset who is narrating, which is also shown by a speech balloon linking its tail to Asset’s mouth. Additionally, the caption box in the next panel starts with quotation marks, which indicates Asset’s memories in direct speech: “I was six years old [. . . ]” ( RB 41). Sacco then represents character dialogue which he normally depicts with speech balloons in caption boxes. He uses quotation marks to make it clear that it is Asset’s story and not his: “‘[o]n the previous evening, the soldiers called all the men to a meeting’” (41). This example has shown that the author is the character who visually narrates and draws. The author is also the witness in storyworld 1 but hands over this role as soon as another character starts telling her story in storyworld 2. One can encounter two things then. First, the author only goes on to narrate visually. Second, there is a backshift in time between storyworld 1 and 2. For the verbal mediation, one can observe that the author rather re-tells or records other people’s experiences instead of verbally narrating the story herself. (Evans comments on it every now and then.) Thus, whenever storyworld 2 occurs, the author’s role shifts from a narrator to a narrating character in the story. Before introducing the second possibility of the narrative situation, I would like to draw attention to Threads . In this narration, Kate Evans is the verbal and the visual narrator, who is overtly shown in the storyworld. At some point in the narrative, she arranges short pieces of statements on a splash page (see Fig. 3.4, Fig. 3.5). These are utterances by refugees about their ight, their well-being, and their current lives in the refugee camp. Because these statements remain anonymous and are not assigned to any speci c person by name, and because no reference from which Evans has obtained these statements is mentioned, these snippets represent the stories of thousands of other refugees with similar fates. Moreover, these snippets of paper, in which other people tell their stories (and not Evans), are contrasted with one message on the smartphone, revealing the rejection of migrants. It is very likely that the creator of this statement holds an anti-asylum position because one can read on the screen of the phone (see Fig. 3.5), “99% [“of the so-called ‘refugees’”] are chancers trying to game the system” ( Threads 141). Evans collects all text excerpts on the splash page and leaves them uncommented for the moment. She thus contrasts two positions in the refugee debate: on the one hand, she gives a voice to those people who are a ected by this situation (see Ch. 3.1.1). On the other hand, she takes the generalizing and almost populist phrases of the asylum opponents and makes them being heard as well. Interestingly, the statements of the refugees are imitated as if they were cut out of newspapers and magazines, whereas the 171 Figure 3.4: Splash Page, Left Part ( Threads 140) 172 Figure 3.5: Splash Page, Right Part ( Threads 141) 173 text by the anti-asylum person alludes to the Internet as its source because of the smartphone. This can perhaps be read as an allusion to the rapid spread of “fake news” through the Internet. 33 By juxtaposing these two points of view, Evans brings up two perspectives. By presenting her own experience, a third perspective is shown, which attempts to either con rm or refute the statements of these two sides. Verbally Overt and Visually Covert Narrative Situation This possibility of a ‘verbally overt and visually covert situation’ is found less often in comics journalism. It is characterized by the fact that the comics journalist verbally reveals herself through rst-person narration, but is not to be seen with a ‘cartoon-me’ in the storyworld. Fig. 3.6 shows an excerpt from Felix Schaad’s reportage Freetown about the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone in 2015. The narratorial script occurs without frame boxes in the panel and reads, “I was invited by [. . . ]. Now I am in the Ebola area.” 34 Although the rst word of the work immediately reveals the verbal narrative situation, the recipient is not given any visual image of it throughout the entire work. Only through the paratext, the references, and proofs in the extratextual world does it become clear that the author is also the narrator (see Fig. 3.6; see also Fig. 4.33, Ch. 4.2.3). Figure 3.6: Page Excerpt, “Freetown, Sierra Leone, 23. Februar” ( Freetown ) 33 While there are six more places in Threads in which smartphone screens with anti-refugee contents occur, this splash page is the only one of this kind. 34 The original reads, “Ich bin von [. . . ] eingeladen worden [. . . ]. Jetzt bin ich also im Ebola-Gebiet.” 174 Verbally and Visually Covert Narrative Situation In contrast to the category in which the author is openly recognizable and only recedes behind other characters for small parts of the narrative, the classi cation “verbally and visually covert” describes all cases in which the author remains visually and verbally covert and does not reveal herself in the storyworld. What happens if there is no identi able rst-person narrator but the reader assumes the identity of the author with the narrator because of the ‘comics journalistic pact? ’ What kind of mediation is then used to narrate at all? Two examples will be presented, each of which deals with the narrative situation di erently. Both works were created by Dan Archer; both use multiperspectivity, eyewitness accounts, and a variety of di erent visual media, such as photographs, maps, infographics, videos, audio material, and trial verdicts. 35 Other than in the majority of comics reportages, the visual and verbal narrator remains neutral in both examples and thus cannot be unambiguously ascribed to Dan Archer, despite the hint in the paratext. Hence, compared to other pieces of comics journalism discussed in this project, the author does not occur in the storyworld, which makes this type of comics journalism apparently more neutral in its narrative voice (cf. Schlichting, “Interactive Graphic Journalism”). As mentioned earlier, dealing with testimony is crucial to comics journalism. In particular, visual testimony fosters the recipient’s opinion-making in complex cases, because it may also in uence the form of a primary work (see Ch. 2.6.1). With The Nisoor Square Shootings ( NSS ), one encounters a piece of art that can also be classi ed as web-comics journalism. It works with di erent degrees of testimony and retells what happened during the 15-minute bloodbath at the Nisoor Square, an intersection in western Baghdad in 2013. According to o cial hospital records, 17 people were killed, and 20 were injured by Blackwater, a North American private military company that protects American diplomats and civilian o cials in Iraq, who was escorting a US embassy convoy on 16 September 2007. The killings outraged Iraqis and strained the relations between Iraq and the United States, especially due to very di erent opinions and statements from the two sides as to who red rst and why. 36 Blackwater guards claim that Iraqi police o cers and civilians shot at them, while eyewitnesses and Iraqi police o cers insist that the guards opened re rst in the square, unprovoked, and continued shooting even as civilians ed for their lives. NSS attempts to show di erent perspectives on the incident pieced together from news reports and eyewitness testimonies. It also 35 Dan Archer can be regarded as a pioneer of this new type of web-comics journalism. He is playing with technology and new digital ways of storytelling while at the same time pushing the boundaries of narratology, comics studies, and non ctional storytelling to their limits. 36 On 13 April 2015, Slatten, one of the main Blackwater soldiers involved, was sentenced to life in prison by a US federal court, while the other three guards were sentenced to 30 years in prison. 175 o ers a new perspective on US foreign and domestic policy and gives voice to stories that would not be heard otherwise (cf. multiple journalism n. pag.). Figure 3.7: Screenshot, Start Screen ( NSS n. pag.) After accessing NSS ’s homepage, one encounters an aerial photograph of Nisoor Square, which is reminiscent of a satellite image from Google Earth (see Fig. 3.7). The viewer obtains simple, short instructions on how to use the slider to move through the time line. The scenic complexity is minimized and lled with the steady ashing of two di erent geometric forms varying in size and connected to three di erent colors—a green circle symbolizes Iraq police o cials; a yellow rectangle indicates several civilian cars, and a larger red rectangle represents the Blackwater guards. As one can see in the rst image (see Fig. 3.8), NSS includes an interactive timeline which narrates panel-by-panel and thus minute-by-minute based on eyewitness testimony. The user follows the plot by clicking on the colored geometric shapes. Windows with frames, speci cally single panels with speech balloons, then pop up (see Fig. 3.9). If the user clicks on these frames once more, one sees that they are hyperlinked to various other home pages. These are the websites from which Archer has taken his (audiovisual) source material, as well as the interviews with eyewitnesses. According to Dan Archer, NSS is therefore an interactive comic with content underneath it (cf. multiple journalism n. pag.). NSS promises to be an “interactive timeline” (cf. Archer, “Archcomix: Dan Archer’s Personal Webpage” n. pag.); a timeline that consists of twelve 176 Figure 3.8: Screenshot, A Google Map and a Timeline ( NSS n. pag.) di erent points in time from 12: 24 until 12: 39 on 16 September 2007 (see Fig. 3.8). It directs the viewer to the lower right side of the photo. 37 Figure 3.9: Screenshot, The Perspective of Iraqi Police O cials at 12: 24 p.m. ( NSS n. pag.) This excerpt from the rst plot at 12: 24 p.m. of NSS shows that there are di erent characters simultaneously interacting in the diegetic world. At this speci c moment in history, the events naturally happened at the same time. In order to understand their messages fully, the process of narration is slowed down 37 On a closer look, one can see that four minutes are missing and do not appear on the timeline. 177 Figure 3.10: Screenshot, The Perspective of the Civilians ( NSS n. pag.) by splitting the main plot into sequences. Each sequence consists of di erent panels that form the plot within each of the twelve pieces, or ‘frequencies,’ of time. With this, it does not matter which geometric form—and, in addition to that, which character—to click on rst, because all is happening at the same time. In other words, the recipient is free to choose any story she likes to read. However, the reading has no e ect on the order of the killings. Also, reading everything from the perspective of the Blackwater guards rst (see Fig. 3.11) and then from that of the civilians (see Fig. 3.10) does not change the plot, except for the individual reader’s gathering of the narrative. Therefore, it can be concluded that the linear narration as the main feature of traditional storytelling has been broken up. In other words, the series of screenshots I arranged here is just one way of reading the temporal sequence. Theoretically, it is also possible to move along the timeline and only focus on the statements by one group, such as the Blackwater guards (depicted as a red rectangle), before switching to the other eyewitness accounts. One could argue that this turns the event into a more personal and dynamic experience because the spatio-temporal strength of comics is used to play with the characters’ voices. Eventually, the recipient can make up her own mind. In addition, the notion of sequence literally ties in nicely with the characteristic feature of comics as sequential art. Overview of Narrative Situations Depending on the author’s narrative situation, comics journalism may either appear more subjective or more documentary. If the author ful lls the functions of the journalist, the drawer, 178 Figure 3.11: Screenshot, The Perspective of the Blackwater Guards at 12: 24 p.m. ( NSS n. pag.) the eyewitness, and the narrator, one is dealing with a very strong single authorship. This narrative situation is usually presented overtly both verbally and visually. Furthermore, it is marked by direct speech in caption boxes or in speech balloons. The author’s ‘cartoon-me’ turns towards the reader and looks at her often. In contrast to comics journalism which is characterized by a rather covert narrator’s voice that never reveals itself visually and only in some cases verbally, the distinction between a narrator and author is more appropriate, indeed, because the ascription to a single person is not unambiguous. The narrative situation of comics journalism which has a more documentary character is characterized by the fact that the narrator rather presents and records the facts. She often collects them from other sources instead of moving the narration forward (see Fig. 3.4 and 3.5). Moreover, another case in which this situation can be observed is when the comics journalist does not act as an eyewitness herself. Then, she cannot tell the story verbally, but only describe other people’s experiences in storyworld 2 through visual images. Here, the narrator functions more as a presenter of facts. Furthermore, I have shown that the di erence between storyworld 1 and 2 is a shift in time from the present to the past tense. In combination with the visual representation of the character, this is one way in which immersion is created. While the author is at the same time the eyewitness of the incidents in storyworld 1, storyworld 2 comes into existence as soon as a character starts to tell her story. The author has not been able to experience on her 179 own what the character in storyworld 1 narrates. Furthermore, a more neutral tone appears if the author recedes into the background to a certain degree and has another character tell the story. Such examples show the fuzziness of the generic boundaries between the documentary and the journalistic mode, which are blurred in the process. This is presumably also the reason why other scholars prefer the term “documentary comics” instead of “comics journalism” (cf. J. C. P. Schmid; cf. Mickwitz). Moreover, a ‘visually and verbally overt narrative’ situation can be attributed to the author, and this is particularly useful in the journalistic genre of reportage. In this case, the role of the author and the situation of the narrator can also be seen as reasons why comics journalism is often wrongly equated with comics reportage. Due to its rst-person narration and subjective stance, comics reportage should be seen as a form of comics journalism. The supposedly higher degree of subjectivity can be better justi ed and understood in this genre by looking at the author’s strategies of authentication in the extratextual world (see Ch. 4). Figure 3.12 shows a classi cation that summarizes the main primary works of this study according to their narrative situations. Whereas examples printed Visual Overt Covert Ver bal Overt reads: From the Refugee Crisis, Rolling Blackouts, Journalism, Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos, One Day in Kara Tepe, Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room, e Influencing Machine, … Freetown, Schwerter Ruhr-Nachrichten, some Introductory Panels, e.g., Inside Death Row Covert Ferguson Firsthand, The Nisoor Square Shooting, The War Over Water, Escaping Wars and Waves Figure 3.12: Classi cation of Narrative Situations with Examples 180 in bold in the lower right corner list the works which are to be understood as more documentary-like, the upper row consists of examples of rst-person narration. Moreover, one can note that the lower left corner remains free, because this combination does not make sense. A verbally covert narration in tandem with a visually overt representation of the author is contradictory and does not exist in comics journalism. 3.1.4 Metaization and Self-Referentiality in Comics Journalism Another characteristic of comics journalism is the way it deals with itself. For this reason, the procedure of “metaization” is assigned to ‘voice’ and is examined more closely in the following, because metaization, metalepsis, and self-references not only occur in ction (cf. Hauthal et al.) but also in comics journalism. 38 According to Karin Kukkonen, metalepses “have been with comics since their beginnings in the Sunday newspapers at the dawn of the twentieth century” (Kukkonen 213). Metaleptic features of comics can refer to the gutter, the drawing style, or the interaction of characters and paratextual elements “when these conventions of representation are foregrounded” (219). Hence, the question is to what extent comics journalism re ects on itself. First of all, one can point out that the terms “metare exivity,” “selfre exivity,” and “selfre ection” are often not used consistently (cf. Hauthal et al.). Although Werner Wolf acknowledges this terminological complexity (W. Wolf, “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 29), he contributes to it himself, di erentiating between terms that sometimes overlap and are hard to distinguish from each other. 39 According to Wolf, “meta-reference” is de ned as a special case of “self-re exivity,” where, within a semiotic system, statements—for example, comments, descriptions—are made or implied by a meta-level about this system as such or partial aspects of it (cf. “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 38-39). In the case of media systems, this means that the meta-reference regularly refers to their ctionality in the sense of the character of media as artifacts, the reference quality, and related aspects and stimulates the recipients to re ect on them (cf. “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 38-39). “Self-re exivity,” 38 Metaizing ways of depiction almost always refer to the created character of a work. Werner Wolf de nes metaization as “transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen, das im Einziehen einer Metaebene in ein semiotisches System (ein Werk, eine Gattung oder ein Medium) besteht, von der aus Metareferenz erfolgt” (W. Wolf, “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 38). 39 His introduction of terms like “selbstreferentielles Verweisen,” “selbstreferentielles Bedeuten,” “Selbstre ektivität,” “Metaelemente,” or “Selbstreferenz” complicates things more than it does simplify. 181 in contrast, refers to the question of whether a piece of comics journalism is marked by or makes any reference to its arti ciality or contrivance. Often being used interchangeably with “re ection,” “re exivity” is an intellectual capacity which exposes and enables the questioning of ways of being and doing, as well as its underlying structures. In my analysis, a text can refer to itself. “Metaization” relies on a special case of reference, and intermedial references are also a form of reference (cf. W. Wolf, “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 31). 40 Christian Bachmann remarks that “meta” has some constraints with regard to time: metacomics articulate the idea of the conditions that an author (collective) has of the dispositive ‘comics’ at the time of production of the comic book (cf. Bachmann 38). In other words, this is the prerequisite for the self-referentiality of comics journalism to be subject to media and thus generic change. It nicely ties in with the idea of a time shift between storyworld 1 and storyworld 2, thus supporting the process of immersion. Since the rise of a sort of re exive journalism in the late 1990s, journalists have increasingly turned the pen (or camera) on themselves. Part of the journalistic coverage of events has become a commentary on the coverage itself, which relies on meta-narratives of journalism as part of these evaluations. Consequently, the public implicitly becomes aware of the fact that the news media plays an active role in ‘making’ the news (cf. Peters 606; cf. Enli). Aside from the impression journalists try to give, they are not “ ies on the wall that are neither seen nor heard,” as Joe Sacco puts it (Sacco, Journalism XIII). As soon as a journalist is in the eld and investigates, the person’s presence is almost always felt (cf. Journalism XIII). It has become a characteristic of postmodernity to have media representations re ect on themselves more and more (cf. Nöth). Winfried Nöth, in contrast, criticizes journalism’s preoccupation with itself. He states that [t]he mediators have turned to representing representations. Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of lming, they lm that they lm the lming. [. . . ] The messages of the media are about messages of the media. (Nöth 3) While some scholars are very critical of metaization, I support it and argue for using this potential of self-referentiality as an additional means of the author’s authentication in comics journalism. That is why in the following, three 40 Self-reference and self-referentiality are used synonymously (cf. W. Wolf, “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 32), as are “metareferentielle Selbstre exivität,” or short “Metareferenz”/ “Metare exivität” (cf. “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 34). For a detailed overview (cf. “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen” 38-39). 182 categories are introduced, all of which deal with self-referentiality—references to the content, the form, and the production process. 41 Self-Referentiality of the Content I label comics journalism about comics journalism, or comics journalism that explains itself to the reader, ‘meta-comics journalism.’ Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts ( RB ) is an outstanding example in several regards. On the one hand, it is about the life and conditions of living in war areas and refugee camps, such as in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. It reports about deportation, immigration, and its long-term e ects on the country and its people. On the other hand, it is a reportage about how journalism is made. Glidden’s observations give readers an insight into the work process of the reporter team around the real-world journalist Sarah Stuteville. Sarah Glidden joins a team of journalists who are friends of hers and accompanies them on their journey. They discuss the di culties of nding journals and magazines which publish their texts and photos. Throughout the book, the journalists raise questions about truth and truth nding, objectivity, and emotional distance. The ‘novel-length’ comics reportage critically questions the functions of journalism. Moreover, it challenges the idea of what journalism is, or is for, and asks questions about its status in our society. In particular, the rst and last chapters of Rolling Blackouts are framed as meta-discourses, not least because they address the di erent ‘phases of comics journalistic eldwork,’ which will be introduced in Ch. 4.2.2. Before and after the journey, Glidden steps out of the shadow of the other reporters and focuses on her own thoughts and barriers while compiling the material and starting her own book project (see Fig. 3.13). She is pushed along “by the fantasy that [she] was going to make a di erence through [her] work” (Glidden, RB 297). Further examples of meta-comics journalism which re ect upon media are Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel and The In uencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone. Self-Referentiality of the Form Although critical self-re ection is not uncommon in literary texts, it is in journalism. Comics journalism, though, is a genre characterized by a high degree of self-referentiality and comments on itself. Either there are self-referential references at certain points within the work, or the whole work itself makes thematic references. An example where 41 I have already started this study with a piece of meta-comics journalism Adventures in Comics Journalism by Neufeld. Another example about comics journalism is “An Introduction to Comics Journalism, in the Form of Comics Journalism” by Archer. 183 Figure 3.13: Page, Sarah Glidden Working on Her Project ( RB 297) 184 the carrier medium refers to comics and partly takes its form is Schwerter Ruhr-Nachrichten (see Fig. 2.9) and has already been discussed in Ch. 2.6.1. 42 Compared to the German comics scene, the Franco-Belgian one shows a rich tradition of comics heritage. There, it is more common to publish information in comics and treat them as legitimate sources of information that can serve as the starting point for encouraging social debates. The French magazine Charlie Hebdo is one prominent example that uses humor, irony, and satire visually (cf. Sacco, “On Satire - A Response to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks”). The fact that the German edition of Charlie Hebdo had to be discontinued after only a few issues in 2016-2017 proves that Germans are still very skeptical of the visual processing of drawn information (cf. Lukas R.A. Wilde). Self-Referentiality of the Production Comics journalists know about the disadvantage of their works in relation to the time and duration of the production (see Ch. 2.6.2). However, they often take up this topic in interviews or address it in the work itself, for example, in the preface or afterword. It is not unusual that editorial guidelines and reasons for a publication are mentioned. The same holds for the editing process after a journey (see Ch. 4.2.2). A particularly outstanding example of self-commentary is “The Time It Takes for a Drawing” by Nicholas Wild (see Fig. 3.14, 3.15). 43 Wild expands his active role as a cartoonist and comments self-critically, ironically, and sometimes polemically on his method of drawing and on what can go wrong while drawing. Thus, this example is also representative of the problems and prejudices comics journalism faces. In the course of drawing on the spot, the situation to be drawn can change in the meantime. Comics journalism, therefore, does not deny its subjective perspective and its partial reliance on the author’s imagination but still tries to depict reality as “essential truth” (see Ch. 2.2). In this example, Wild uses ontological and rhetorical deixis when discussing the role of coloring and editing. For example, he directly addresses the recipients and anticipates their possible questions, not only by using the rst-person plural narrative but also by putting himself on the same level of knowledge with his readers, ‘Wikipedia tells us the following.’ 44 Moreover, he admits that drawing can be exhausting, and that he, too, sometimes needs a break, “[t]here is no end to it. Suddenly they [the refugees from Camp Beldangi] come 42 To brie y recall the main point of this discussion, Schwerter Ruhr-Nachrichten was published in the style of comics, which means that a daily newspaper made journalism in style. Nevertheless, it was still printed as a newspaper. 43 The original reads, “Die Zeit für eine Zeichnung,” which is a digital comic. In order to make the in nite canvas tangible, I have placed the parts that belong together next to each other in pairs. 44 The original reads, “Wikipedia verrät uns Folgendes.” 185 Figure 3.14: Screenshot, “Die Zeit für eine Zeichnung” Part I/ IV ( Die Zeichnungen von Nicolas Wild n. pag.) 186 Figure 3.15: Screenshot, “Die Zeit für eine Zeichnung” Part IV/ IV ( Die Zeichnung von Nicolas Wild n. pag.) 187 from everywhere. My wrist hurts,” which shows comics journalism’s side of craftsmanship (Wild n. pag.). 45 If this is the case, he took pictures because “drawing all this makes [him] afraid” (n. pag.)—a common method which other comics journalists also use. 46 His panel consists of a highly self-referential image and only shows one moment at a speci c place. Wild refers to it as “a collage of several small realities di erentiated according to space and time” (Wild n. pag.). The reader sees a woman sitting by the road and selling fruits and vegetables. While he was drawing the turnip and fully diving into the situation, the old woman disappeared after some time. Because Wild—who pursues what I will introduce as ‘working method A’ (see Ch. 4.2.2)—makes sketches and drawings on the spot, it is later longer comprehensible to him what color and pattern the old woman’s dress had looked like, and whether it was a turnip she had sold. Even though there is no ‘cartoon-me’ (see Ch. 3.2.3) visible in the panels, his voice is overtly presented in the narrative caption boxes. Wild directly addresses the genre’s vulnerable spot—namely the long duration of production. What Wild calls “small realities” belongs to the puzzle, but it often delays and slows down the production process. In an ironic and straightforward way, Wild shows that it is not a matter of drawing every speci c detail—especially not under time pressure. For comics journalists, it does not seem to be of greatest priority whether the nal image on paper resembles the correct colors of the dress in the extratextual world, or whether a tree stands on the same spot as in reality. For example, neither the color nor the pattern of the woman’s dress matter; the crucial message for the narrative is that he portrays an older woman who sells vegetables. Therefore, one could introduce the distinction between ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ visual details, for instance, visual explanations that contribute to the story, and visual details that are merely decorative and additive elements to the main message. Regarding color, however, things are di erent, particularly when it is about the author’s “brand.” For example, when Kate Evans keeps drawing herself with pink hair, one can assume that pink is not chosen arbitrarily, but that there is a reason for it. Either this is the way she really looks like, or there is no logical reason at all; yet, her pink hair is her trademark in Threads , but without consideration of the extratextual reality, this characteristic would certainly not be immediately apparent. 45 The original reads, “Es nimmt kein Ende. Plötzlich kommen sie [die Flüchtlinge vom Camp Beldangi] von überall her. Mein Handgelenk tut weh.” 46 The original reads, “Ich habe Fotos gemacht. Aber das alles zu zeichnen macht mir doch Angst.” 188 Paratext Apart from comics journalism’s self-references to the form and the content, the prefaces and editorials as part of the paratext in the production also play a special role in the metaization process. Although a footnote is an annotation that is removed from the continuous text to make the text easier to read, footnotes are sometimes drawn in the panels. Then, they become part of the diegetic storyworld but often interrupt the narration and the visual layout of the panel. If footnotes are inserted in the gutter or placed outside the panel, an intermediate level is drawn in between the presentation and the presented. Then, they shape the expectations of the reader, frame the classi cation of the piece regarding the genre, and thus contribute to the claim to factuality of the work. Two observations can be made. First, these prefaces and editorials are written by the comics journalist herself. They give insights into the production process and are committed to transparency. Second, the author herself points to changes and transformations that had to be made in order to create a smooth narrative. 47 There are several ways to sensitize the reader regarding the claim to factuality of a work with the help of the paratext. Paratextual indicators are, for example, (sub)titles, the cover (blurb), the publisher’s classi cation of the genre, dedications, and mottoes. Nina Mickwitz also lists “materially appended publisher’s/ editor’s descriptions, quotes from reviews on the back cover, and often a substantial author statement or a foreword by someone else, but also reviews, listings, and advertising” (Mickwitz 19). Special editions, for example, o er a good opportunity to obtain additional information. In Sacco’s Journalism , this includes extracts from notebooks to “illuminate some of [Sacco’s] working methods ‘in the eld’ and provide a context for certain pages” (Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition x). No matter how much the paratext is used to present the truth, there is still the danger of misleading the reader. Carolin John-Wenndorf already frames the conceptual use of paratexts when she speaks of a peritextual temptation (cf. John-Wenndorf 207). 48 What this connotation acknowledges is the fact that even prefaces written very authentically and realistically could be ctitious and wrong. However, as soon as we nd ourselves in a journalistic context, the reader must be able to expect that what is written and announced on the cover, for example, is also included and true. The paratext must not turn comics journalism into a deceptive package. As such, paratexts provide orientation, they allow for a quick classi cation, and they enable the reader to access the credibility of the media o er. Above all, they also guarantee the ‘comics 47 As a part of the formal self-referentiality, the paratext can be attributed to the unique role of footnotes in comics journalism. There are many reasons why and when they are inserted, because the authors include them di erently. There is much to say about the role of footnotes in comics journalism which future research can focus on. 48 The original reads, “peritextuell verführen.” 189 journalistic pact’ between the author and the reader, which categorizes the piece of comics journalism in question as a visual reality narration. When speaking of the paratext, the place of the publication and the publisher’s prestige also come to mind because they in uence the trust-building steps in the reception process. A publication in The New York Times is likely to arouse greater public interest than a publication in The Nib Magazine , because the latter is a niche magazine, not mainstream and not well known. Moreover, it is not untypical for comics journalism to already refer to narrative and dramatic techniques that are used in the story. A piece of work with an “author’s note” together with a photograph of the author seems to support the existence of the author in the real world more than one without these paratextual elements. An explanation of how the author has edited the story and of how she has transformed the dialogues in order to get a story seems to be more trustworthy than a work of comics journalism without such explanatory materials. A reference-chapter and a biographical part, or a section of keywords in the appendix makes an entire publication look as if it was not literature, but an educational book, which also contributes to the impression of a crossover between the documentary and journalistic modes in non ction comics. Josh Neufeld’s preface of A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge is split up into three parts consisting of the copyright page, a short explanation of Hurricane Katrina, and the “Who’s Who,” in which Neufeld introduces his seven main narrating characters. For him, it was important to tell the story “from the perspectives of a range of real people who had lived through the storm: wello and poor, black and white, young and old, gay and straight, male and female, those who evacuated and those who stayed behind [. . . ]” (Neufeld, A.D. 191). However, while the copyright page starts with the framing sentence, “[a]lthough based on real people and events, some names and details have been changed for dramatic purposes or to protect the privacy of individuals” (n. pag.), the afterword reveals more details: DENISE, LEO, MICHELLE, ABBAS, DARNELL, KWAME, and BROBSON [. . . ] are real people who lived through Hurricane Katrina. The events that occur in “A.D.” actually happened to them, and most of the dialogue in this book is taken from our conversations, quotes from interviews, or entries from their blogs. The places and details are real too—down to DVDs and comics on Leo’s shelves and the contents of Abbas’s store. (Some names of identifying characteristics, however, have been changed to protect people’s privacy.) (Neufeld, A.D. 191) 190 The preface can also include some sort of acknowledgment and already express gratitude to people the journalists have met during their travels, for example, those who were open-minded and willing to tell their refugee stories. In the preface of Escaping Wars and Waves , Olivier Kugler writes that he was very grateful for the opportunity to meet the people he portrayed. He feels: connected to them and want[s] to thank them very much for their patience and trust. [He] hope[s] that their circumstances have improved signi cantly and wish[es] them, and their compatriots, all the best! (Kugler 4) In comparison, Evans’s gratefulness as part of the copyright page reads, “[t]hanks [. . . ] to [. . . ] all the other people whose stories I have borrowed, but whose names I have concealed” ( Threads 4). To sum up, apart from evoking self-referentiality on the formal level, the foregrounding of the comics journalist through drawing herself in the panels can be seen as a key feature of comics journalism. Because this process is actualized through a representation of the author—as the next section will show—, comics journalism transgresses the boundaries between the ctional world and the real world. Additionally, there are not only numerous primary works which theoretically and visually express what comics journalism is and wants to be (for example, Archer, Neufeld). To a greater extent, comics journalism can be treated as the unfolding of a complex space of re ection by steadily inquiring about the nature of journalism. Moreover, comics journalism questions itself, its concepts, its form, and production process—sometimes more, sometimes less; sometimes very openly, sometimes in a more concealed way. Metaization in comics journalism can thus be seen as a driver of genre development and of hybrid forms (cf. Hauthal et al. 1, 11; cf. A. Nünning, Hybridisierung und Medialisierung als Katalysatoren der Gattungsentwicklung ). By constantly questioning itself, comics journalism takes an important step towards being noticed, because in comparison to traditional journalism, which has not re ected and questioned itself to that extent for years, it deals openly with sources of error. In this respect, comics journalism represents a countermovement to traditional journalism, trying to improve the things that go wrong in traditional journalism. 3.2 Face In Chapter 3.1, I have shown that the comics journalist as the author takes the functions of the verbal and visual narrator (drawer) , and journalist . In this section, another role of authorship is added—namely that of the eyewitness (investigator) , because the ‘face’ constitutes the second part of the ‘comics 191 journalistic pact’ and analyzes the visual (self-)representation of the author in comics journalism. I will analyze single authorship and point to the challenges I face with collaborative authorship (see Ch. 3.2.4). Because the face and especially the eyes of the comics journalist play an important role, the focus of this chapter is on seeing. On the one hand, seeing is a basic prerequisite for observing in order to create a mimetic drawing of reality. On the other hand, the eyes are the body parts that are important for witnessing events that can be re-told later on. 3.2.1 The Role of Witnessing In the discussion of Nisoor Square Shooting in the last section, it was already mentioned that witnesses are important gures in comics journalism. In the medium of comics, showing means narrating, but strictly speaking, the pictorial and the verbal narration in comics cannot be simultaneously perceived (cf. Schüwer 322). In the last ve years, there have been various approaches to grasping narration in graphic narratives. One can observe that there is a signi cant heterogeneity in terminology, particularly regarding the issues of focalization and point of view, which have a narratological origin. Theories derive from post-classical narratology, that is, from transmedia narratology (cf. Meister; cf. Ryan, “Story/ Worlds/ Media Tuning the Instruments of a Media- Conscious Narratology”; cf. W. Wolf, “Transmedial Narratology”) and cognitive narratology (cf. Alber and Fludernik, Postclassical Narratologies: Approaches and Analyses ; cf. D. Herman; cf. Jahn), as well as from cinematic theory (cf. Bordwell; cf. Gaudreault; cf. Jost). In comics studies, the concepts of voice, perspective, point of view, and focalization have been of interest for many scholars (cf. Kukkonen; cf. Mikkonen; cf. Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ”). As I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, some scholars struggle with transferring Genettean narratological concepts to comics, because the problem with the concept of “focalization” from classical narratology is that it accounts for only one ctional entity—namely the narrator, who is solely responsible for the whole (verbal) narrative discourse in ctional comics— except for cases with multiple narrators and focalizers. Achim Hescher, for example, argues that focalization “can neither account for one nor for the other because no ctional entity from the mediating/ transmitting communication system generates both tracks, that is the narratorial script as well as the images (including the speech/ thought balloons),” which is why he eventually replaces the term focalization with the term “pictorial point of view” (Hescher 119-121). Focalization is helpful for a text-immanent approach to ctional texts. However, because the author in single authorship comics journalism is also the person who clearly expresses what she has seen, experienced, or thought, I 192 replace the concept of “focalization” with “witnessing.” Moreover, I see the possibility of discussing “the witness” as a conceptual link between the di erent positions that a journalist can take with regard to her involvement in the story (involved versus uninvolved) in order to also do justice to the fact that journalism and literature intertwine in comics journalism. Since the research on the Holocaust and on oral history, testimonies are regarded not only as expressions of subjective experience and memory but also as valuable historical documents and serious sources of historiography. Scholars have been emphasizing the value of testimony in various context more and more, acknowledging that testimony goes beyond the transmission of mere factual knowledge (cf. S. Schmidt 49). 49 Sociologist Renaud Dulong states that the singularity of the testimony is not about its function as evidence, but about its ethical and political dimension. 50 In other words, this ethical and political dimension of the concept of “witnessing” legitimates the subjective, emotional and expressive side which can also be found in comics journalism. Being contextualized and embedded in the contemporary media landscape and pertinent debates, the use of testimony can be a way of justifying the sometimes inherently subjective perspective of the journalist on the storyworld. Similar to the recipient’s trust in journalism, the concept of testimony makes the fact- ction-debate approachable for comics studies by taking the eyewitness account for granted and fact-based. Moreover, the depiction of fact-based witnessing justi es the representation of ‘essentially true’ content in comics journalism. The Witness Comics journalists not only witness but also con rm happenings with their own eyes, pens, and papers. Against the backdrop of our cultural memory and the times of “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and “posttruthness,” understanding the comics journalist as a witness can turn out to be tremendously helpful and relevant for analyses. In English, the term “witness” has its origin in “to wit,” which means “wissen” (German for ‘to know’). 51 A witness is someone who has knowledge of something (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges 11); and someone who testi es something 49 Art Spiegelman uses an animal metaphor for portraying humans with the heads and tails of di erent species of animals; Jews are drawn as mice, whereas Germans and Poles are depicted as cats and pigs in The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale . 50 The original reads, “Die Singularität des Zeugnisses [. . . ] gerade nicht in seiner Funktion als Beweis, sondern in seiner ethischen und politischen Dimension [besteht]” (cf. S. Schmidt qtd. in 49). 51 For a detailed discussion on knowledge and witnessing (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges). It is their aim to analyze the gure of the witness as a social institution of knowledge and its ethical, political, and cultural dimensions. 193 knows something (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges 11). 52 Similar to journalism, our opinion depends on the testimony of others because we cannot experience everything for ourselves. Additionally, being a witness describes the circumstance with regard to a speci c moment or period in time. The witness, then, may have knowledge that proves helpful for history. While the English language distinguishes between “witness” and “eyewitness,” the German language di erentiates between more terms, such as “Zeuge,” “Zeitzeuge,” “Hörenzeuge,” and “Augenzeuge.” 53 What I like about the German distinction is that the term “Zeitzeuge” refers to a time span in the past and mostly describes people with regard to crucial events in history. For example, people who lived during the Second World War are called “Zeitzeugen” and not only witnesses, as if they had observed a car crash. However, analyzing the “witness” means being confronted with an ambivalent gure due to the rst-person narrative. On the one hand, one has to ascribe a certain authority and trustworthiness to the witness. On the other hand, a witness may also misrepresent the facts (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges 11). 54 A witness [. . . ] should report an event as impartially as possible, and should not be himself involved in the web of actions he describes, of victims and perpetrators, of guilt and innocence; opinions, sel sh or political considerations should not cloud the evidence of the testimony. The witness is the one who says what was and what is true, without asking about the consequences of his statement. From this authenticity, from this absence of any subjective interest his speci c authority arises. 55 (S. Schmidt and Voges 10) 52 The original reads, “Zur Tüchtigkeit eines Augenzeugen wird erfo[r]dert: 1) er muss bei der Sache gegenwärtig gewesen sein, die er bezeuget; 2) er muss im Stande sein, eine richtige Erfahrung zu bekommen; 3) er muss ein gutes und treues Gedächtniss haben, oder seine Erfahrungen als bald aufschreiben; 4) er muss die Gabe besitzen, seine eigene Erkenntniss auf eine richtige und hinlängliche Art zu bezeichnen” (§ 209). 53 The original reads, “Ein Augenzeuge testis oculatus ) ist ein Zeuge, welcher die Sache selbst erfahren hat, die er bezeuget. Ein Hörenzeuge ( testis auritus ) ist kein Augenzeuge, sondern er hat nur das Zeugnis[] anderer von der Sache erfahren” (§ 208, emphasis in original). 54 The speci c ambivalence of the gure of the witness cannot be dissolved; it is a constitutive feature of this gure (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges 15). For a detailed discussion on testimony and witness as social and cultural practices (cf. Scholz). Moreover, it is not only the gure that is ambivalent but also the act or process of witnessing as such (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges 13), because in literary studies, “ambivalent” can also address the concept of unreliable narration (cf. Weitin; cf. A. Nünning, “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches”; cf. Martínez and Sche el). 55 The original reads, “Ein Zeuge [. . . ] soll möglichst unparteiisch von einem Ereignis berichten, und dabei nicht selbst in das von ihm geschilderte Ge echt von Handlungen, von Opfern und Tätern, von Schuld und Unschuld verstrickt sein; Meinungen, eigennützige oder politische Überlegungen sollen die Evidenz des Zeugnisses nicht trüben. Der Zeuge ist der, der schlicht 194 Furthermore, on the one hand, this ambivalence is due to the fact that the witness is seen as an object of record, or, what Krämer calls an ‘unmistakable recording instrument’ (Krämer 128) 56 because the statements of the witness have to function as evidence. In court, for example, witnesses and their testimonies play a major role. On the other hand, however, a witness is also only a human being and thus fallible. In contrast to what the di erence between knowledge and belief seems to suggest, these concepts are based on truth, which is the foundation of our dealing with knowledge and the core of social epistemology (cf. Krämer 132). 57 The following question remains, however: If one cannot even believe eyewitnesses, whom can one believe at all? In her publication Weil es sagbar ist: Über Zeugenschaft und Gerechtigkeit , Carolin Emcke discusses the concept of witnessing as part of “Zeugenschaft,” mostly with regard to traumatizing events. 58 Like many comics journalists—for example, Sacco, Glidden, Archer, Kleist, Vanistendael, and Evans, to name but a few—Emcke, who is a journalist herself, often traveled and reported from areas of con icts, such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan. In her book, she investigates how it is possible to verbally describe horri c events and the injustice that is happening in the world. Among other things, she asks which conditions a society needs to provide for victims of violence to be able to speak about their su ering. The reason why I insert her ideas is that I agree with her observation. She postulates that it seems as if it needs a special [linguistic] gift to describe misery (Emcke 15), 59 and by elaborating on her family’s history, she even claims that a verbal description of extremely cruel violation is sometimes impossible: Bestimmte Erlebnisse scheinen nicht erst die Möglichkeit zu begrenzen, sie zu beschreiben, sondern schon das Vermögen, sie zu erfassen. Extremes Unrecht und Gewalt stellen eine Anomalie dar, sie widersprechen jeder unversehrten Welterfahrung. [. . . ] So werden Leid und Gewalt zu einem sprachlichen Problem: Die Erlebnisse scheinen nicht beschreibbar, weil die Betro enen sie selbst nicht verstehen, weil sie alles zu übersteigen drohen, was sagt, was war und was wahr ist, und der dabei nicht nach den Folgen seiner Aussage fragt. Aus dieser Authentizität, dieser Abwesenheit jeglichen subjektiven Interesses, erwächst seine spezi sche Autorität.” 56 The original reads, “untrügliches Aufzeichnungsinstrument.” 57 The original reads, “Anders als es die Di erenz von Wissen und Glauben nahe zu legen scheint, bilden der Glauben an und das Vertrauen in den anderen ein Fundament unserer Wissenspraktiken.” 58 Emcke is a German writer and journalist who was awarded the Theodor-Wol -Preis prize in 2008, the Lessing-Preis des Freistaates Sachsen in 2015, and the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 2016. 59 The original reads, “Als ob es einer speziellen [sprachlichen] Gabe bedürfte, Elend zu beschreiben.” 195 vorher als Erfahrung zählte. Zu harmlos wirken die üblichen Begri e angesichts des Schreckens, zu ach. 60 (Emcke 14-15) Emcke thinks that the verbal description of extreme su ering and violence lacks a proper representation. When victims want to talk about their past, they often do not have the appropriate rhetorical skills to express themselves in the way they want to be understood. Hence, if one brings together these stories of crisis and trauma with the visual medium of comics, a unique combination arises because comics can step in with their visual imagery where the verbal text ends. 61 In other words, rst, the human su ering can now be approached verbally and visually; and second, the accounts of witnesses are appreciated and preserved for posterity. Why Would Witnesses Lie? However, the risk remains that one deals with witnesses who might not speak the truth, but why would a witness lie? The reasons are manifold and a rephrasing into ‘why a witness would not lie’ seems to promise more insights in order to verify a witness’s credibility. I would like to quote from the text “Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre,” which was written by the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-1777): 62 Das Ansehen eines Zeugen (autoritas testis) besteht in demjenigen Grade seiner Ehre, vermittelst dessen er in seiner Erkenntniss für nachahmungswürdig gehalten wird. Wir können keinem Zeugen glauben, der in keinem Ansehen bei uns steht. Und dieses Ansehen besteht 1) in der Tüchtigkeit des Zeugen (dexteritas testis), wenn er zureichende Kräfte besitzt, nicht nur eine richtige Erfahrung zu bekommen, sondern dieselbe auch auf eine richtige Art zu bezeichnen; 2) in der Aufrichtigkeit des Zeugen (sinceritas testis), oder in der Neigung seines Willens, seine Erfahrungen so zu bezeichnen, wie er sie für wahr hält. Keins von beiden kann, ohne dem andern, einem Zeugen das gehörige Ansehen verschaffen. (G. F. Meier 207-209) Even though the text was written almost 250 years ago, its content is still very much up-to-date and makes it clear that the question of the trustworthiness of 60 My translation reads, “Certain experiences seem to limit not only the possibility of describing them, but already the ability to grasp them. Extreme injustice and violence are an anomaly; they contradict any intact experience of the world. [. . . ] Thus, su ering and violence become a linguistic problem: the experiences do not seem describable, because those a ected do not understand them themselves, because they threaten to exceed everything that previously counted as experience. The usual terms seem too harmless in the face of horror, too at.” 61 Hillary Chute, for example, describes how comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma (cf. Chute, Disaster Drawn ). 62 Johannes-Georg Schülein discusses the problem of the credibility and the ethical claim of the witness in more detail (cf. Krämer et al.). 196 persons and witnesses, in particular, is a question that transcends epochs; one can still gain truth from it. The crux of the matter is due to personal honor and reputation which, according to Meier, are dependent on competence and sincerity. Moreover, sincerity in all its forms makes a witness an honest person. A similar position is held by Sybille Krämer when she argues that it is the coherence and reliability of the person that becomes the source of evidence and testimony. The truth of a sentence is based on the truthfulness and credibility of the person. The fallibility in the epistemic role of the testimony is compensated for the ethical role that trust plays (cf. Krämer 125, emphasis in original). Consequently, witnessing is about keeping one’s honor. It is about one’s motivation not to lie. It is about taking responsibility to an extent that might not be appreciable by the witness herself beforehand (cf. Krämer 119). Naturally, by making the witness’s credibility a condition of her truthfulness, the uncertainty of a testimony is transformed into the personal risk of a witness. What I want to argue for is that comics journalists are not only journalists and storytellers but also important witnesses of our time. They record our society in all its forms and varieties with visual means. One could even argue that they are not only witnesses (‘Zeugen’) but also testi ers (‘Bezeuger’) of the truth, using minimalist means—their eyes, pens, and papers. Moreover, they are also producers (‘Erzeuger’) of a sociopolitical discourse, an aspect in which I see a connection to what Emcke calls the “ethical burden of testimony” (Emcke 20, my translation). 63 For example, with regard to witnesses of war and survivors of the Holocaust, it can also be the case that only a few witnesses are still alive. The way in which their knowledge is treated and how a society ghts against forgetting also touches on ethical issues. One might say that comics journalists themselves are a ected by a moral burden of testimony because, as journalists, they experience what many people do not; they go to places, such as war zones, prisons, and refugee camps, to which the majority of people will not go voluntarily. Comics journalists carry with them what they have seen and experienced; they must reproduce it ethically and morally correct, and in a drawn manner. In the preceding chapter, I presented three narrative situations (see Ch. 3.1.3). Among other things, I have already brie y dealt with the role of testimony in The Nisoor Square Shootings . In order to underline the importance of the witness, I would like to work with an outstanding example now, which highlights the role of the witnesses also on the level of the storyworld. That is why in the following, I will analyze how and to what extent eyewitness testimony appears in Ferguson Firsthand . 63 The original reads, “ethische Last der Zeugenschaft.” 197 Eyewitness Testimony Ferguson Firsthand ( FF ) is a 3D forensic walk that combines comics journalism with virtual reality in order to recreate the crime scene of Michael Brown’s shooting. 64 Michael Brown, who was an 18-year-old African American, was fatally shot on 9 August 2014 by the white police o cer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, a northern suburb of St. Louis (cf. Media video). 65 I chose this example because it focuses on testimony and determines the impact of witnessing on the lives of others. It also shows the diversity of testimonies about the same incident. In this case, this means that the recipient tries to make a judgement on testimony and nd out whether Michael Brown was unarmed or pointed a gun at the police o cer Darren Wilson; whether the police o cer shot rst for no reason or in self-defense; and whether Michael Brown put his hands over his head and followed the police o cer’s instructions, or not. Because the testimonies di ered among the eyewitnesses, Dan Archer, who is the author of this work, recreates the scene in original scale and makes the sources and eyewitnesses’s statements accessible to everyone, aiming at providing everyone with the same information. 66 Based on the eight eyewitness accounts of Michael Brown’s death that were given to media outlets such as CNN and NBC, and other media of evidence and documentation—for example, photographs, videos, police reports, and grand jury verdicts—this piece of comics journalism allows the recipient to compare and contrast the di ering eyewitness reports in order to see how this incident has given rise to such a wide range of perspectives. Even if a variety of di erent media are used to reconstruct the shooting, the main medium of narration in the storyworld is comics. This is due to its quantitative and qualitative importance to the plot, because each eyewitness account delivers the plot from multiple perspectives and in its own unique way. 67 64 The full story runs only on the Unity game engine if one is wearing virtual reality (VR) glasses. 65 The disputed circumstances of the shooting of the unarmed man received considerable attention in the United States and across the world. It sparked existing tensions in the city with a black majority, attracted protesters from outside the region and generated vigorous debates on the relationship between law enforcement and African Americans and about police o cers’ use of force in Missouri and nationwide. Brown’s death rapidly turned into a ‘media event,’ not only receiving 24-hour news coverage, but also going across any type of (social) media. 66 In retrospect, it can be said that the police o cer was found not guilty in 2015 and that the witnesses who corroborated the o cer’s account were found credible by the jury. 67 All eight comics exist independently from each other (cf. Archer, “The Michael Brown Shooting: Choose Your Eyewitness” n. pag.; cf. Archer, “Methodology: How Dan Archer made his Ferguson virtual-reality experience” n. pag.). Hence, the narration can be understood by bypassing the virtual reality experience, because the complete virtual reality experience only works on desktop computers. 198 By wearing the Oculus Rift 68 , the recipient immerses herself in the storyworld from the very rst moment onward (see Fig. 3.16). Once inside the elds, the recipient, who can also be called a “user” in this example, can use either the mouse to control where she looks, or the cursor keys to move in the respective direction. The landscape of the storyworld looks like the Can eld Green Apartments in reality. 69 FF exhibit a neutral narratorial voice because one encounters a visually and verbally covert narrator and thus also no ‘cartoon-me.’ In FF , the user cannot create an avatar or pro le of herself, even if it looks like a game. The recipient is represented with a blue arrow whose moves within the storyworld can only be followed from a bird’s-eye view on the map. This creates a feeling of distance from the investigation on the part of the recipient. Having minimal contact with the subject at hand also seems to be helpful to provide a neutral and objective reporting with many di erent perspectives. Figure 3.16: Screenshot, Start Screen ( FF n. pag.) There are three di erent colors of beacons—black stands for audio material; white represents forensic evidence; and colored beacons are for the comics. 68 Oculus Rift is a lineup of virtual reality headsets, which was developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a division of Facebook. 69 “In terms of pipeline, I rst went to the scene to take picture references (but was unable to contact the eyewitnesses in person), then mapped out the environment using Google SketchUp. Then I produced basic building/ car/ tree/ street outlines on top of Google Earth satellite imagery and sent those to a team of 3D artists, who rendered the outlines into high-resolution 3D assets using 3DS Studio Max. Those were then assembled and the interactivity programmed inside the Unity game engine,” says Archer (SplinterNews n. pag.). 199 Following the arrows and walking into a beacon will activate a story, which one can read through panel by panel. Black and white beacons can be visited at any time, whereas the colored ones are linked chronologically to guide the user through the area, starting with the most important eyewitness testimony. Ti any Mitchell’s account said that she was ‘coming around the corner,’ but that she also saw Wilson and Brown ‘tussling through the window,’ which I [Dan Archer] took to mean that she was on the same side of the street as they were (otherwise, her view would have been blocked by the police car). I also assumed she was on the east side of the apartment building as otherwise that would have meant Brown would have run towards her and been approximately a dozen feet away from her when he was fatally shot, which is a detail that I thought Mitchell would have emphasized had it been the case. (cf. Archer, “The Michael Brown Shooting: Choose Your Eyewitness”) This quote demonstrates how the author tries to report and draw the story as accurately as possible based on the eyewitness reports that were given to the police. One gets an idea of how the drawings re ect Archer’s understanding of the crime scene. Even if he names his references, quotes the sources, and inserts some hyperlinks, the visual interpretation of the recordings is restricted to his artistic license and drawing talent. In the creation of FF , he also explains that “[t]he speci c locations of the eyewitnesses were generated based on rst-hand visits to the scene, cross-referenced with footage that some of those witnesses made publicly available” (Archer, “The Michael Brown Shooting: Choose Your Eyewitness” n. pag.). Compared to Archer’s other piece NSS , this case study uses virtual reality, which adds a new dimension to the eld of comics journalism insofar as the recipient immerses herself in Michael Brown’s crime scene from the very beginning. Second, for a full experience of this incident, the recipient wears an Oculus Rift (see Ch. 3.1) and is thus also physically immersed in the storyworld. Third, next to some other media sources, the comics journalism is embedded in the storyworld. Each of the eight eyewitnesses of Michael Brown’s murder receives a storyline which is drawn entirely as comics. All in all, in both examples, FF and NSS , the eyewitnesses become ‘key gures’ of knowledge, because only they seem to know what really happened. The German philosopher Sibylle Schmidt ascribes this interpretation to the gure of the witness when she contends that eyewitnesses become key gures of our dealing with knowledge and culture (cf. S. Schmidt 47). 70 Furthermore, 70 The original reads, “Schlüssel gur unserer Kultur und Wissenspraxis.” 200 one can notice that the recipient takes over a more active role and has to be a critical reader in both examples. The reader has to trust, because “those who do not trust cannot know” (Hardwig 693). According to Schmidt, trust should no longer be opposed to knowledge because all our knowledge of the world is constituted by di erent disciplines and is interconnected (cf. S. Schmidt 59). There is no single discipline that knows everything. Therefore, one can argue that the self-determined role of the reader as an active and participating gure will probably become even stronger in future works with a similar use of hybridity, transmediality, and multimediality. These examples also stress the importance of the author’s strategies of authentication. The incorporation of as many di erent sources, people’s perspectives, and hyperlinks as possible is a further strategy to inform readers and verify the credibility of the comics journalist and her work. No single medium remains capable of satisfying the curiosity and lifestyles of the citizens on its own, now that we are surrounded by an unprecedented world of contents, products, and leisure opportunities. It has often been great stories and articles that win hearts and minds. However, not much research has been done on the intersection of the concept of transmediality and digital or (web-)comics journalism yet. 71 Telling stories across multiple (visual) media formats has become very popular not only in novels (cf. Weigel-Heller), though, but also in digital journalism in recent years. Using techniques of transmedia storytelling (cf. Jenkins; cf. Weigel-Heller) could be a fruitful way to guarantee journalistic transparency and high-quality journalism in new media, but this is a research desideratum that is beyond the scope of this study. 3.2.2 The Relationship between Autobiography and Comics Journalism Despite the paradox that comics with their vivid visual-verbal nature immediately challenge the idea of non ction, autobiography has become a crucial genre in today’s comic book sphere (cf. Hallet, “AutobioGraphic Novels”; cf. Hirsch; cf. Hallet, “Autobiographies: Selbst-Erzählung und Selbst-Darstellung in der Fremdsprache”; cf. Kita-Huber and Kupczynska; cf. Rugg). 72 The cultural 71 I discuss ‘interactive graphic journalism’ by emphasizing the role of transmedia storytelling (cf. Schlichting, “Interactive Graphic Journalism”). I analyze how interactivity is transformed into di erent works. Therefore, I distinguish between two degrees of interactivity in web-comics journalism—storytelling and storyworld-exploring. 72 One of the pioneering works in this eld is American Splendor , which is a series of autobiographical comic books written by Harvey Pekar and drawn by a variety of artists (cf. Pekar). The rst issue was published in 1976, with publications occurring at irregular intervals. “Pekar, more than any other comics author, has demonstrated the interpretation of life and art that autobiography can achieve” (Hat eld 109-110). American Splendor is about the underpinnings of everyday life; it is about class, gender, cultural life, and social observation. A second out- 201 recognition of the comic book is closely linked to autobiographical writing because “the graphic novel format has been especially conducive to memoir comics” (Duncan and M. J. Smith 214). Charles Hat eld confesses that autobiographical comics “can hardly be said to be ‘true’ in any straightforward sense. There’s the rub. But therein lies much of their fascination” (Hat eld 112), and Jörn Ahrens observes that “[t]urning one’s own life into literature belongs to an old tradition in Western writing” (Ahrens, “Imagine Reality: Negotiating Comics with David B.’s ‘Epileptic’” 75). Hence, to what extent and how do autobiographical elements and the author’s subjective position intersect with each other in comics journalism? With regard to formal issues, a straightforward answer is that every comic has autobiographical traces due to its handmade character; with regard to the content, it is not that simple. Drawing on autobiographical studies and life writing (cf. Sidonie Smith), and being particularly inspired by Philipp Lejeune’s pathbreaking monograph on autobiography, this section discusses potential points of intersection of autobiography with comics journalism because “[a]utobiography [. . . ] gradually became an important tool by which marginalized individuals of all descriptions could make their voices heard and claim validity for their unique experiences of the world” (Refaie, Autobiographical Comics 15). Although there is a connection between marginalized groups and giving them a voice by comics journalism (see Ch. 3.1.1), I argue that comics journalism cannot be equated with “graphic memoirs” and “autobiographics” (Schröer) for the following two reasons: First, I do not consider life writing a non ctional genre. And second, even if one encounters some autobiographical features in comics journalism, which is partly due to the fact that personal viewpoints are allowed and intentionally inserted in comics journalism, the author is not the protagonist of her book; she remains at best a character in her story. What is part of the entire picture, however, is that “a writer is necessarily implicated in his or her work, [thus] it is possible to read any text as at least partly autobiographical” (Refaie, Autobiographical Comics 16). Autobiography has “muddied boundaries” (Chaney 3), but its underlying claims to truth help to distinguish it from ction. A fundamental distinction that has to be made in the analysis of any autobiography is the separation of the “narrating I” from the “narrated I” (cf. Chaney 3), which also marks the distance between the experiencing and the narrating subject (cf. Schwalm standing, and often quoted example was created by Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist who came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir See Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , which was later adapted as a musical. It chronicles the author’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, and a complex, dysfunctional family life. 202 n. pag.). The “narrating I,” that is, the rst-person narrator, is also known as “the self that tells the events of a life and gathers together stray details of experience into the legible structures of a story” (Chaney 3). The “narrated I,” in contrast, functions as an “actor in the story” (3), personifying the agent with the point of view, the overall position from which the story is rendered, “although the autobiographical narrator may temporarily step back to adopt an earlier perspective” (Schwalm n. pag.). 73 But in contrast to comics journalism, autobiography merges the “narrating” and the “narrated I.” Authors of autobiographies promise to tell life stories that are at least “emotionally truthful to the way they perceive, remember, and make sense out of their lives” (Chaney 3). Readers discern emotional and subjective truths di erently, depending on a variety of discourses, genres, and narrative conventions. Moreover, one key feature of an autobiography is that it privileges details of the author’s life. Many critics have argued that an autobiography is no more privileged or truthful than ction but, according to Hat eld, “it is this intimacy that authenticates their social observations and arguments” (Hat eld 114). In addition, according to Leigh Gilmore, the power of autobiography lies more in its cultural power to tell the overall truth than in a mimetic depiction of the real life (cf. Gilmore). In this respect, that is, with regard to the fact that it is about the representation of an “essential” or “overall” truth (see Ch. 2.2.2), the autobiography is connectable to comics journalism. As already mentioned, Philipp Lejeune has developed an “autobiographical pact” between the author of an autobiography and its reader (cf. Lejeune). His pact is based upon the textual criterion of the identity of the author’s name with those of the narrator and the protagonist (cf. Lejeune 27). This triad that creates the autobiographical pact is, then, the assertion of this identity in the text, which ultimately refers to the name of the author on the cover (cf. Lejeune 27). The forms of this pact are manifold, but they all bear witness to the intention to live up to this signature. The reader can criticize the similarity but never the identity of these elements (cf. Lejeune 27). Even if comics journalism necessarily touches upon a few autobiographical elements, the author is not the protagonist of the work; otherwise comics journalism would be about the author’s personal life, which it is not. To brie y recall what has been stated in Ch. 3.1.3, by not ascribing the status of the protagonist to the author but to the narrating character, one can argue that this allows for other characters who narrate parts of the story, without challenging the author’s strong position and manifold roles in the process of authorship. This is an advantage for stories that either have happened long before the investigation process, or stories that the comics journalist could not 73 Schwalm’s admission that an author can have several perspectives is similar to my premise that a comics journalist can have several ‘selves’ and still be the same person. 203 have experienced herself. Furthermore, switching between narrating characters is possible, but only if the majority of verbal narration can be attributed to the comics journalist. In those cases that exhibit the insertion of other characters who contribute to the narration, the comics journalist functions as a supervisor, recounter, documentarist, and a collector of multiperspectival viewpoints which enrich the story and, eventually, contribute to the narration’s coherence, complexity, and reliability (see Ch. 3.1.2). Although one has to accept that comics reportages come along with some autobiographical traces, one essential condition for the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is that the comics journalist as the authoring and narrating character must not be the protagonist. This means that despite some autobiographical facts in the story, the plot and the narration are not centered around the comics journalist herself. Studies from life writing assume that the self and its identity are only created in acts of autobiographical narration (cf. Hallet and Freitag- Schild 2-6; cf. Quesenberry and Squier). The majority of current ‘novel-length’ comics reportages can subscribe to this observation, and Rolling Blackouts serves as a pertinent example of illustrating autobiographical traces in comics journalism: 74 This is the beginning of a two-month trip that will take us from Turkey to Iraq to Syria. I [Sarah Glidden] would be lying if I said that some of those places don’t make me a little nervous. Mostly, I’m not sure if I’m ready for what I’ve signed up for. But I have complete faith that my friends Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill know what they’re doing. [. . . ] Sarah had been writing articles for some small local newspapers while attempting to pay the rent. Alex was working for a wine distributor full-time, but had an interest in photography. [. . . ] Jessica Partnow, Sarah’s best friend [. . . ] had no experience with journalism at all. But the three of them decided they were going to save up some money, quit their jobs, and travel to Asia to do reporting on issues that were being ignored by the mainstream media. [. . . ] I [Sarah Glidden] wanted to be a supportive friend. . . [. . . ]. It didn’t end in failure at all. Over the course of six months [. . . ] they reported close to thirty stories, many of which were picked up by news sites, magazines, and public radio stations. By the time they returned, they had decided to devote themselves 74 These lines are taken from RB ’s caption script of the rst few pages. I have compiled them to give a glimpse at what we are dealing with here. The caption scripts mostly follow one by one, if not indicated otherwise by “([. . . ]).” 204 completely to their new collective. They moved back to their hometown of Seattle and led as a non-pro t, calling themselves the Seattle Globalist . Within a few years, they had become a xture of the city’s journalism scene [. . . ]. By then I was one of [their] [. . . ] biggest fans. I loved visiting my friends and listening to the stories behind their stories. [. . . ] For some reason, my friends at the Globalist agreed to let me follow them on their next reporting trip so I could make a comic book about how journalism works. [. . . ] The Iraq war has always been present in my friendship with Sarah. [. . . ] If I were working on another memoir, all of that would have to go in. I’d have to be honest and show all of my aws. But this isn’t a memoir. I’m here to report on Sarah and Alex and Dan and whoever else we meet. (last sentence p. 43) ( RB 11-26, emphasis in original) This verbal-narratorial caption script stretches over several panel pages and can be attributed to Sarah Glidden. As one can draw from her quote, she is the author, journalist, and cartoonist. Moreover, these lines already imply that she will not be able to take an emotionally neutral position towards her subjects of interest—on the contrary; Glidden is a friend of the journalists she is traveling with, and even shares memories of their past with them. But “this isn’t a memoir” ( RB 43), as Glidden herself emphasizes. Her friend Sarah Stuteville utters loudly what Glidden thinks: “[She] know[s] the boundaries on this trip are weird. Just something to consider moving forward” (26). As the short initial sentences show, there is an intentional personal and (auto-)biographical aspect to all sides of this story, not least because Glidden’s friend openly addresses a journalistic taboo, namely that “[o]ther journalists think I’m [Sarah Stuteville] crazy to bring a vet [ex-marine Dan O’Brian] back to Iraq, one I have a history with” (16). This gives the reader the impression that as a journalist, Stuteville is very likely to not be as impartial and emotionally independent as she would like to be. Glidden’s aim of doing a drawn journalistic reportage about a reportage— which I label ‘meta-comics journalism’—also intersects with other personal matters. Some of the reporters have been friends since they “were growing up” ( RB 17). “From talking about Families for Peace to stories about their parents, to other friends they knew, Sarah and Dan talk their way through their childhoods together, making up for lost time” (201). Because Sarah Glidden travels through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, the ‘novel-length’ comics 205 journalism also negotiates her own views on politics, journalism, and life in general. Close to the beginning of the story, Glidden admits that “[t]he wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been grinding on for most of [her] adult life” (18). She is afraid that the ex-marine, Dan, will complicate her story. The rst time she sees him, she immediately searches for stereotypical military behavioral anomalies on him (cf. 19). However, what is important here is that Glidden does not claim that RB is about her identity or her own life but about others. 75 Although Sarah Glidden is neither the protagonist of the story nor the central character who moves the plot forward, she stays a character in her own story because RB is based on the sameness of the authoring with the visually and verbally narrating character. This is, for instance, especially visible in the very rst Chapter “Starting Out,” in which Sarah Glidden introduces the main characters and describes what the journey is going to look like (cf. RB 11-14). Both in the preparation and in the aftermath of the journey, Glidden switches between the production and the reception side. She turns from a more ‘observer-like’ gure, who always stays tuned to what happens but who does not play a prominent role throughout the journey in the rst place, into a more ‘active participator’ (see Ch. 4.1.3). Eventually, she becomes a character in her story, as the nal chapter reveals. It shows Glidden compiling and editing her book project. This brings to mind the ‘meta-level’ I have mentioned in Ch. 3.1.4, which contributes to the complexity and uniqueness of RB . Furthermore, the intentional choice of using narratorial caption script instead of thought balloons for mediating the comics journalist’s opinion is a formal feature that can be identi ed as a trace of autobiography in Rolling Blackouts . For example, the third to last and the second to last page (cf. RB 296-297) are worth looking at because the reader is informed about Glidden’s thoughts. They are not represented in thought balloons, which would be typical for ctional comics, but in caption script. 76 The switch to the rst-person perspective and thus to the more autobiographical side is now visible not only on the level of the storyworld but also on the diegetic level. Interestingly, on this side, Glidden’s memories switch between her “remembering self ” and her “experiencing self,” as Daniel Kahneman di erentiates (Kahneman 381). 77 75 Things are di erent in her book How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less , in which she is uncertain of her identity and her family’s roots. Here, already indicated by the paratext’s title “graphic memoir,” Glidden writes about her family life that she encountered in Israel on a birthright tour to experience the land and politics of her ancestors. 76 If there were thought bubbles in a piece of comics journalism which could not be attributed to the author but to a character in the story, the comic author would reveal herself as an unreliable narrator insofar as it should not be possible for her to anticipate the thoughts of other characters in the story. The author is not an omniscient narrator but a collector of facts and information. 77 In his international bestselling book See Thinking, Fast and Slow , Kahneman points to the di culty of distinguishing memories from experiences. He states that memories are the results 206 Applied to RB , this means that what Glidden remembers is written in the text, whereas her experiences are drawn by referring to speci c moments of her journey. If one looks at these panels on their own and separates the text from the image, the meaning does not reveal itself immediately due to the “non-sequitur transitions” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 72), which do not have a logical relationship to each other. Instead, each panel stands for itself and functions as a kind of ashback of Glidden’s memory. This, in turn, may imply to the reader that these memories are her personal highlights of the journey and will stay in her mind. Eventually, autobiographical traces in the form of snapshots of one’s memory can be identi ed here without turning the book into an autobiography. 3.2.3 Visual Self-Reflection and the ‘Cartoon-Me’ As already mentioned, in comics journalism of single authorship type, the author is also the one who writes, narrates, and draws ( rst part of the pact). As in traditional journalism, each author has a personal, political, institutional, and professional background, which in uence the production process to di erent degrees. Understanding comics journalism, then, does not mean neglecting the link to the creator of a piece of work. The question of how and to what extent the author visually appears in the storyworld remains to be addressed in the following. The hypothesis is that comics journalism, especially comics reportages by a single author, is characterized by the visual self-representation of and by the author herself. I label this drawn authorial self-representation a ‘cartoon-me.’ This is why I assume that the author’s self-representation—verbally and visually—has special signi cance in comics journalism, especially in comics reportages, because in postmodern times, stressing the author’s perspective is more authentic and trustworthy than a pseudo-hidden authorial narratorial voice due to the fact that one does not deal with “hypothetical,” “implied,” or “ ctional” authors (see Ch. 3.1.2). In the following, I will address di erent forms and functions of the visual self-representation of the author within the diegetic world. In this regard, the face is one of the most important parts of the author’s expression. I will explain my choice of terminology before analyzing the forms and functions of the ‘cartoon-me’ in more detail. of the experience of living; the perspective with which one thinks about one’s own life is introduced as “remembering self.” While this form of the self refers to the description of a past experience as a whole, the “experiencing self ” asks about one’s actual feelings in the present (cf. Kahneman 381). “Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion” (381), which leads to the fact that the “remembering self ” is sometimes wrong; yet, it is this self that governs what one learns from living (cf. Kahneman 381). 207 Figure 3.17: Page Exerpt, Fieldwork ( Europe’s Waiting Room: Visiting the Refugees on Lesbos n. pag.) Alter Ego, Avatar, and Cartoon-Me In autobiographical comics, questions about the protagonist and the mimetic relation to the author’s view of herself occur. The self-portrait is perhaps the autobiographical comic’s most important means of identi cation, persuasion, and self-re ection, which can 208 result in a self-caricature of the author. 78 “Prerequisite to such caricature,” as Hat eld notes, “is a form of alienation or estrangement, through which the cartoonist-autobiographer regards himself as other, as a distinct character to be seen” (Hat eld 114). Thon points out that if readers of a comic attribute the non-narratorial verbal-pictorial representation to the author of the comics, “this has very little to do with the real author(s), but rather with the image of these author(s) that the readers have formed in the process of reading” (cf. Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? ” 89). I will not follow this view, and I disagree with it because things are di erent with non ction comics. If comics journalism is both a speci c mode of reception and address with which one tries to persuade and sensitize other people for one’s own view of the world, then the genre of comics reportage makes this visible by envisioning the comics journalist as her ‘cartoon-me’ in the diegetic world. The recipient sees how the author sees herself, and how she performs in the panels. It is also about how the author has perceived her own behaviour in the events she portrays. In Fig. 3.17, the recipient encounters the ‘cartoon-me’ of a young woman, Aimeé de Jongh, walking around, talking to people, taking notes, and exploring her surroundings. But why do I call the visual representation of the comics journalist of herself by herself a ‘cartoon-me? ’ Much research has been done in literary studies on the representation of the author in her ctional work. Whenever an author lives more than one life, has a secret identity, or takes on more than one personality in the diegetic world, this personality is called her “alter ego.” The term is of Latin origin and is believed to have been coined by the author Cicero, who loosely describes it as “a second self, a trusted friend” (cf. “Alter Ego” n. pag.). It is also used to designate a hypothetical “doppelgänger” to a character in a story. Theoretically, both ctional characters and real people can have “alter egos,” but I will focus on the author’s visual “alter ego,” or ‘visual I’ as I call it for the moment. However, one can postulate that scholars refer di erently to the same thing. While Charles Hat eld calls this form of representation “cartoon self-image,” or “cartoon self ” (Hat eld 115), Moritz Fink uses the term “author avatar” (cf. Fink 267), Sidonie Smith uses “autobiographical avatar” (cf. S. Smith), while Achim Hescher and Elisabeth El Refaie opt for the term “alter ego” (cf. Hescher 163; Refaie, Autobiographical Comics 1). Wheras in comic books, superheroes are often considered to be “secret identities” and thus “alter egos,” game and animation studies speak of “avatars.” This term can be de ned as an arti cial, visual representation of a real person from the extratextual world (cf. Beil), which mostly occur in the realm of computer games. In games, 78 For a thoughtful account of autobiographical comics and their development out of the underground comics tradition (cf. Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling ). 209 the recipient chooses an “avatar” for her own appearance. Furthermore, the term “avatar” also implies “to overcome, to remove, to bring down, to cross something” (Monier-Williams 90), and refers to the embodiment of the essence of a superhuman being, or a deity in another form (cf. Sheth 98-125). However, neither the term “avatar” nor “alter ego” does justice to what we encounter in comics journalism. First, comics journalists do not play with secret identities. Being professional journalists and authors, they follow journalistic rules and methods; they guarantee the authenticity of what they write with their name (see Ch. 3.2.1). Second, “avatar” can also refer to a non-anthropomorphic object or form. This would imply that one equates a human journalist from the extratextual world with, for example, the symbol of a mouse cursor, which can also be called an “avatar.” And third, because of the usage in literary and game studies, I want to avoid any underlying connotations of ction and thus consider the terms “avatar” and “alter ego” to be inappropriate. Similar to the “narratorial I” and the “narrated I” in autobiographical comics, one has to take into account the visual rst-person narrative in the narratorial caption boxes, in particular of comics journalism created by one author. The comics journalist as the author has a ‘verbal I’ and a ‘visual I.’ On the one hand, the reader encounters the comics journalist as a “person seeing” (Hat eld 116). On the other hand, she is also a “person [being] seen” (116). The recipient sees the comics journalist, who, in turn, experiences the storyworld 1 with her own eyes (see Ch. 3.1.2, see Fig. 3.2). The self-assertion of the author rests on the plasticity of her self-image and on her awareness of the slipperiness of individual identity. Because of the artistic mediation, the potential of the author’s feigning of her self-presentation and self-staging—whether for good or evil purposes—complicates the belief in the author. Consequently, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is all the more necessary because it guarantees that the author is also the narrator, journalist, and creator in general. Moreover, the term “autobiographical self ” is connected to autobiographical comics but, as argued before, comics journalism has to be distinguished from memoirs. In my mind, the term “self ” implies a strong re ection on and concern with one’s life. The strong cognitive and psychological self-interpretation that is inherent to autobiographical writing cannot be found in comics journalism. Rather than “self,” the term “me” is more neutral and has less psychological connotations. One might also include the argument that ‘me’ points to a stronger self-participation in creating a visual image of oneself. Harvey Pekar, for example, who talks of the “self,” has actually never drawn a graphic icon himself but had others do it. Another observation is that the self-representation of the comics journalist in her work does not necessarily have to correlate with her age. If one might 210 (a) “Kushinagar” In: Journalism 160 (b) “Kushinagar” In: Journalism 167 (c) “Kushinagar” In: Journalism 167 (d) “Kushinagar” In: Journalism 167 (e) “Kushinagar” In: Journalism 166 (f) “Chechen War, Chechen Women” In: Journalism 69 (g) “The Unwanted” In: Journalism 137 (h) Schlichting, “Photo of Joe Sacco” Figure 3.18: Compilation of Joe Sacco’s Body Postures has successfully developed one’s own brand, it is less likely to change one’s selfrepresentation during one’s man-years. In addition, the degree of abstraction also in uences the self-representation. A less mimetic self-representation is less prone to aging than an already detailed image. Joe Sacco’s earlier ‘cartoonme,’ for example, still resembles the one in his latest work very much—despite some small changes in his “bigfoot-style” (Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition ix)—it has been supporting his recognizability over decades. For one thing, my approach to drawing has evolved. The rst few dozen pages of Palestine: The Special Edition are in [. . . ] “bigfoot” style. [. . . ] I simply drew people that way back then; [. . . ] I was never formally trained to draw at all. [. . . ] I realized that the drawings had to re ect the weight of the material I was presenting, 211 and slowly but surely I forced more realism out of my pen though I could never shake—nor did I desire to lose—my ‘cartoony’ line. (Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition ix) In this sense, using the same term for the journalistic and the autobiographical visual self-representation is problematic and to some extent also confusing, because autobiography and journalism are two di erent genres and modes of record (cf. Mickwitz). Anyway, the way of drawing—which includes the ‘cartoon-me’—can become an author’s trademark (see Ch. 4.3.2). Based on all these reasons, I suggest the term ‘cartoon-me,’ which should be thought of as a kind of ‘visual clone’ of the comics journalist instead of ascribing deep psychological and cognitive self-re ections to it. I would not overemphasize the pictorial representation of the comics journalist because she does not have the intention to create a perfect image of herself in the work. All in all, the appearance of the author’s image in the diegetic world is a particular feature of comics journalism. Things are di erent with Glidden’s cartoon-me. Although she belongs to the next generation after Joe Sacco—she was born in 1980, Sacco in 1960—and although her oeuvre is just about to start growing, she has already developed di erent visual self-representations. Fig. 3.19 shows her “multiple selves” (Hat eld 126) to the recipient. 79 Glidden sometimes wears a short haircut. In RB , she wears her hair loose. Moreover, her hair color di ers from time to time—sometimes even within a single work, which might be due to a pragmatic reason, such as her use of watercolors. Yet, it is also necessary to consider that, depending on the drawing style and the color technique, drawing in black and white, or utilizing di erent hatching and contrasts (as Sacco does) appear less laborious than drawing in color. Then, the author does not have to make sure that the colors stay consistent over time in order to ensure a recognition e ect. 80 What can be deduced from Glidden and Sacco is that there are di erent forms of a ‘cartoon-me.’ First, there are works of comics journalism in which the author can be seen now and then in full-body posture (see Sacco, Fig. 3.18). One can encounter half-body images in medium size close-ups of body parts. All bodily postures can, of course, be drawn from any angle and are utilized by every cartoonist. Second, the most often represented part of the cartoon-me is the face (see Glidden and Sacco). That is why the following section examines this in more detail. 79 Hat eld speaks of “multiple selves”; I would concretize the term and prefer to speak of ‘multiple outer selves’ because a comics journalist cannot properly judge other people’s inner feelings. 80 The coloring complicates issues of depicting race (and eventually identity), speci cally regarding the color of the skin. For example, the skin can be dark brown as with native Africans, or light brown because the parents have di erent racial backgrounds, etc. 212 (a) “Sarah Glidden: The Cartoonist Drawn to Life on the World’s Frontlines” (Cooke) (b) Twitter Post (Glidden, “Google: ‘Trump Refugee Order Executive’”) (c) Twitter (Glidden, “Pro- le Photo”) (d) Page Excerpt ( RB 296) (e) Book Cover Excerpt ( How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less ) (f) Avatar on Personal Webpage (Glidden, “Personal Webpage”) Figure 3.19: Sarah Glidden’s Change of Her ‘Cartoon-Me’ The Importance of the Face However, the most distinctive and critical feature of the body which contributes to the perception of the ‘cartoon-me’ is the face. The face is the upper part of the human body whose outward appearance and surface allows interpretations of various emotional expressions. In this respect, it is an important visual frame and icon of the author’s selfrepresentation in comics journalism. 81 The Austrian philosophers and cultural studies scholars Thomas Macho and Gerburg Treusch-Dieter (died in 2006) remark that we are living in a facial society producing faces all the time. The human face proves to be the measure of all things (cf. Macho and Treusch-Dieter 26). Yet, the face itself says little about a person’s state of mind or character. It receives an interpretation and description only through the attribution by the recipient. Moreover, one could also connect the concept of “essential truth” to drawing faces and bodies. Sacco stresses that it is important to him to individualize each face; “essential truth” then stresses the most symptomatic features of a face. 81 In comics, the face is often referred to as “icon,” which according to McCloud, refers to “any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 27). A “symbol” is “too loaded” for him, even if it is one category of icons. In his view, pictures are images “designed to actually resemble their subjects” and are thus speci c icons (27). 213 The body, in general, and the face, in particular, can be abstracted to di erent degrees. Consequently, the level of abstraction varies in authorial ‘cartoon-mes’ and seems to depend on the drawing style. Contemporary examples prove that there are pictures that “closely resemble their real-life counterparts as almost to trick the eye” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 28). McCloud suggests a scale of abstraction: on the left extreme, one can nd all the icons that resemble their real-life counterparts most, for example, like a photograph. The more one abstracts and simpli es the real image, the faster one moves towards the right pole, which McCloud calls “the cartoon” (29). For him, cartooning is a “form of ampli cation through simpli cation” (30). More problematically, McCloud condenses the argument into a naïve model of reader response; because selfrecognition involves a degree of simpli cation, he claims that highly simpli ed, cartoony images necessitate reader involvement. In other words, cartoons are supposed to become loci for identi cation through their very simplicity (cf. Hat eld 116). (a) Photograph March 2007 (Grendelkhan) (b) Excerpt, Understanding Comics 36 Figure 3.20: Scott McCloud’s ‘Cartoon-Me’ Given the need for simpli cation, drawing a cartoon should be understood as focusing on speci c details instead of eliminating others, which is an important a ordance of their special characteristics. By stripping down an image to its essential core meaning, McCloud argues that “an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art cannot” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 30). 82 This means that the human mind can recognize two dots and a line as a face—a phenomenon that is called pareidolia . In other words, “[w]e assign identities and emotions where none exist” and “see ourselves in everything” (33). 82 In McCloud’s view, words are the ultimate abstraction because any resemblance is gone (cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics 47). 214 As a preliminary conclusion, a cartoony style of the ‘cartoon-me’ leaves opportunities for visual commentary, commemorative function, emotional distance, and thematic disinterest up to the readers. Even if not every ‘cartoon-me’ has to appear as an abstract self-presentation, the cartoony way of seeing coincides with the comics journalist’s mode of seeing, witnessing, and researching, which might be one of the greatest a ordances of comics journalism because “[c]artooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 31). Hence, one can argue that attaching a face to comics journalism adds a new meaning to it. The new meaning of the face in the panel contributes to a personalized and non-objective type of journalism. Authors assert that ‘I stand for what I have seen and experienced.’ Thus, using ‘cartoon-mes’ for authorial visual presentation ful lls various functions, such as: • identi cation and memorability of the comics journalist throughout the narrative • as a carrier of attention and director of the line of sight of the story • as a ‘re ection- gure’ for the recipient • as a protection mask for the author in case of emotional or physical attachment • as a ‘what if ’-mask for worldmaking Precise Identification of People and Memorability In RB , there are two characters called Sarah. One person is Sarah Glidden, the author of RB , and the other one is Sarah Stuteville, the journalist from the Seattle Globalist , who is also a character Glidden is reporting on. As one can see in Fig. 3.21, both women are often drawn from the perspective of a half-body posture and physically resemble one another a lot in the drawings. From a semiotic perspective, the reader only sees di erently arranged and colored lines and dots. While the left gure has a more pointed nose, the other nose is slightly curvier, which indicates a round nose, or is perhaps just due to pragmatic reasons. To quote McCloud again, the human being can make much cognitive e ort to see not only concepts but combine them to form characters out of them that live in the readers’ minds. In addition, there is the possibility that the recipient can identify with them (cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics 34-40). Considering the verbal narratorial caption script in RB , Glidden is confronted with a duplication of names in RB . As can be read in her “Note on Names,” which is a part of her preface “About this Book,” Glidden changed Sarah Stuteville’s name with her permission to “Sal” in order to avoid confusion. However, because Glidden had a “gut feeling that it wouldn’t be right to change a person’s name for the sake of clarity” ( RB 6), Glidden did not change anything at all. Therefore, a distinction could only be reached on the pictorial level by 215 Figure 3.21: Page Excerpt, Sarah Glidden and Sarah Stuteville ( RB 20) employing di erent types of strokes and colors. 83 While Sarah Glidden is drawn with short dark blond hair, Sarah Stuteville is represented with dark brown hair tied to a ponytail. This example highlights the importance of the pictorial ‘cartoon-me’ of comics journalists in distinction to other characters’ visual representation, particularly in the case of doubling. Additionally, a consistent display promotes the memorability of ‘cartoon-mes’ and their details because facial images prove to be helpful for precise identi cation and memorability. A ention Carrier and Director of Line of Sight The face itself has become a medium of information control (cf. Barck and Beilenho 7). Depending on the detailedness of the drawing, the face not only draws attention to the center of the panel but can also moralize through its (expressive) visual representation. Eventually, it also directs the recipient’s sympathies in one way or the other. McCloud, for example, claims that whenever recipients enter a di erent realm, they “don’t just observe the cartoon, [they] become it” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 36). Hence, the less complex and realistic an image, for example, a face, is drawn, the more fascinated the recipient will be and recognize herself in the cartoon icon (see Fig. 3.20). Despite pragmatic reasons, this is one reason why McCloud and many other comics journalists draw 83 This also means, however, that in the case of an identity of names and the same outward appearance, a representation as close to reality as possible would cause further confusion. 216 themselves in a rather simple style, perhaps hoping to get as much attention as possible from the audience. McCloud even claims that readers would not have listened to him if he drew himself in a more realistic and photograph-like way, “Would you have listened to me if I looked like this? ” (36). He is afraid that the content could become less important and that readers might be distracted by the messenger’s appearance (cf. Understanding Comics 37) because of personal tastes and subjective preferences for outward appearances. In other words, if the background of the panel was reduced to an empty plane, the ‘cartoon-me’ of the character in the story would develop into a critical agent. Pose and face, then, turn into a physiognomically and psychologically determinable area of expression, catching the reader’s attention and directing the line of sight and reading. The Reflection-Figure: Identifier No matter how realistically drawn a ‘cartoon-me’ is, one has to acknowledge that the visual self-representation of an author will always remain mediated. Consequently, this image is not neutral because, theoretically, anything can be feigned, simulated, and manipulated. In this regard, the ‘cartoon-me’ transports visual information for purposes of storytelling and already o ers a speci c way of an interpretation, particularly of the comics journalist’s emotional state. In this regard, ‘cartoon-mes’ as a “drawing in and out [of the panel] speak to an engrossment in and an examination of a politics of a ect” (Bakkes et al. n. pag.). In contrast to autobiography, I assume that the occurrence of the comics journalist in the storyworld and her visible bodily presence has less to do with the aim to act in the storyworld or perform something one is not than with the intention to be seen as a strategy of authentication (cf. Weber and H.-M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism”) and immersion instead. The drawing in the panels is, then, an act of testimony to the reader about one’s eyewitness experience: ‘Dear, reader. This is what I have seen with my own eyes. This is what I encountered when I was there.’ For example, being seen in the panel frame can suggest attraction, engagement, or involvement with an object, or a topic. To keep oneself out the frame can “suggest an enticement to speak or act, a revelation of things hidden, or an extension of, but can also be a literal or gural removal of one thing from another” (cf. Cour et al. n. pag.). This assumption of a cartoonish iconicity, which increases the potential of the identi cation of the reader, can also be critically challenged because of the cartoony line and its potential to abstract things. Sacco’s cartoon-eyes often serve as an example of this discussion. The reader never sees his eyes in the storyworld; his round glasses cover his eyes. While for Tristram Walker, this hiding serves as a “screen” for the projection of the interviewees’ trauma (T. Walker 76), Dragana Obradović posits that the hidden eyes might refer to 217 the blindness of Sacco as an outsider in speci c war areas and con ict zones (cf. Obradović 101) he is just visiting and not living in. In the end, the comics journalist provides a possibility to (visually) introduce herself. On the one hand, this will remain an individual question of taste, that is, of whether one trusts an author more, or whether one gets emotionally closer to her if the author portrays herself more mimetically. On the other hand, comics journalists who show their faces guide the recipient through the panels and the entire piece of comics journalism, as Vanistendael does with her study of di erent facial expressions (see Fig. 4.12). Moreover, in many other cases, the author’s eyes reveal the perspective from which to look at the scene in question. The author’s body posture signals where something relevant takes place, or what the author wants her reader to pay attention to in the panel. Protection Mask and Distance Keeper Like many other (war) journalists, comics journalists are often very close to the events, if not right in the middle of them. Depending on the topic and the area of operation, they may be confronted with horrible and impressive pictures. On the one hand, the ‘cartoon-me’ functions as a mask to protect oneself. On the other hand, in order to maintain professionalism, comics journalists must keep a certain level of distance, but this Janus-faced character of their role also implies the risk of producing an unreliable narration, even if unreliability is a journalist’s death. This is why I would also like to discuss the idea of the face as the author’s mask, which can be understood as a kind of camou age. Therefore, I apply Wolfgang Iser’s metaphorical image of the mask, which he introduces in the context of the Renaissance pastoral novel (“ Schäferroman ”) (cf. Iser 10), to the ‘cartoon-me.’ A mask is an object that is usually worn on the face. It covers essential facial expressions. In comics journalism, the mask should not be understood as a material object added as a second layer to the face. Instead, it is a kind of abstract cover-up tool for the comics journalist to keep a distance from the experiences she has made. From a journalistic perspective, this would allow less emotional involvement in the topic at hand and a higher degree of impartiality. It may serve as a kind of protective shield to not let emotions take too much control of oneself because the face can reveal the author’s well-being (keep in mind, for example, Sacco’s blank and hidden eyes. Because of his indi erence, he does not give the reader a hint at his own interpretation). In contrast, Kate Evans works a lot with facial expressions, and, thus, she in uences the reader. That said, the author always decides on her own how much she reveals of her face (and body), and the majority of comics journalists draws their eyes and reveals their emotions. 218 However, ‘giving oneself a cartoony face’ is already some kind of masquerade and, in this regard, can be ascribed to Iser’s idea of feigning. He suggests that cloaking is the form of ambiguity that always says something di erent from what it actually means in order to create something that is not. This results in an ecstatic state of the character, which means that the person a ected is simultaneously in and out of herself. Hence, literary feigning becomes the “signature of a state that is mostly impossible to achieve in reality” (Iser 16, my translation). 84 In Iser’s words, if through masking the respective determination of what one is is exceeded, feigning helps to achieve what one wants to be (cf. Iser 17). 85 The author’s wish to be what she always wanted to be is highly problematic in non ctional narrations and all the more so in journalism, which brings me to the last form a ‘cartoon-me’ can take. Wishes and Worldmaking: What If? What happens if the ‘cartoon-me’ becomes a projection screen of the comics journalist’s wishes and desires that do not correspond to reality but which are depicted as if they had happened in reality? This type of feigning can also be linked to the concept of “worldmaking” introduced by Nelson Goodman in his theory of the social construction of reality (cf. Goodman) as discussed in Chapter 2.3.1. Although this type of a ‘cartoon-me’ is very rare in comics journalism due to its status as journalism and reality narration, it still appears in the primary works and is worth analyzing because, strictly speaking, this form does not change the ‘cartoon-me’ itself but the context in which it is used. The story leaves the realm of factuality and drifts o into possible worlds. In the broadest sense, the ‘what-if ’-category can therefore also be associated with dream worlds and desires—pretending to be what one would like to be but what one is not. Working with the example of Threads , I will brie y discuss the topic of worldmaking and show that although the comics journalist is committed to the truth, she is still able to feign and ctionalize speci c aspects. As such, this form of the ‘cartoon-me’ is reminiscent of the references to reality narration discussed in Chapter 2.3.2. There are two remarkable passages in Threads . In the rst example, Evans’ visual panel di ers from her verbal caption script. There is one situation in which she has to guard the “art dome” in the refugee camp. The recipient sees Evans’ ‘cartoon-me’ depicted in a powerful posture (see Fig. 3.22). She seems 84 The original reads, “[v]erhüllendes Entschleiern ist die Form des Doppelsinns, der ständig etwas anderes sagt, als er meint, um dadurch etwas zu gurieren, das das überschießt, was ist. Daraus ergibt sich der ekstatische Zustand [. . . ] und das heißt [. . . ], daß die Protagonisten gleichzeitig bei sich und außerhalb ihrer sind. Literarisches Fingieren wird zur Signatur eines Zustands, der in den Vollzügen der Lebenswelt weitgehend unmöglich ist.” 85 The original reads, “Wird in der Maskierung die jeweilige Bestimmtheit dessen überschritten, was man ist, so kann man sich im Fingieren auch zu dem machen, was man sein will [. . . ].” 219 Figure 3.22: Page Excerpt, “I’m a [B]ouncer” ( Threads 90) to feel very strong and tries to imitate an angry police o cer (or bodyguard) because she snarls and shouts “[s]tep back away from the [art] dome.” Although this sentence is written in capital letters in the panel (like a speech balloon), the narratorial caption box contradicts this, “I don’t say this” ( Threads 90). In this example, Evans admits that she would liked to have said this, but she did not in reality. Whereas she marks the di erence of her behavior between the storyworld and reality in the rst example, she does not do so in the second example. Here, the text (panel) itself says nothing. Evans only speaks of this feigned incident of reality in an interview she gives to a news station during her promotion tour. Evans’ role in the extratextual world demonstrably deviates from the storyworld. Evans herself emphasizes this fact in reality, even if she conceals it in the book. Yet, in interviews with television stations, she describes the situation that can be seen in the very last panel at the bottom right of Fig. 3.24: a young man tries his luck eeing across the English Channel to England. He is suddenly stopped by ve border guards and—according to Kate’s drawings—exaggeratedly and disproportionately detained on the ground. Evans and her companion want to intervene and visually document the police’s brutal procedure, but the British Border Force tells Evans that lming is forbidden on their premises. While the border guard is doing her job, Evans is outraged and points out that “[i]t’s not a story . This is reality ! ! ! ! ” 220 ( Threads 109, bold in original, see Fig. 3.23, 3.24). She draws as if she directly responded like this in the very situation. In reality, she admits, though, that she has never said the last sentence. In retrospect, Evans regrets her behaviour and wishes that she had replied this way. This is why she wanted to have it changed in the book’s storyworld when she was drawing the panels (“Video. Threads: From the Refugee Crisis - Kate Evans” 0: 33 min). One cannot have this knowledge if one only reads the book and does not include her authorship on the extratextual level. In this incident, it is Evans’ desire to be perceived in the storyworld as someone she is not; she wants to present herself as physically and emotionally strong enough to cope with the camp’s misery and, in this case, to guard parts of the refugee camp. The remorse she feels towards the refugees, for example, because she can simply get a car and drive across the border, or because she has a warm and loving home, inevitably causes her to play with her own identity and situation, to start masquerading and ask ‘what-if ’-questions. For example, she entitles her last chapter in Threads “Fairytale” and invents an alternative story she considers to be a happy ending for the real world’s problems, which unfortantely does not take place the way she hoped for in reality. All in all, I want to stress that this is not the rule in comics journalism, but it is a good example of the degree to which comics journalism can ctionalize. What I would like to point out is that the reader’s encounter with speci c persons, topics, and events is ltered by envisioning and remediating the comics journalist as a ‘cartoon-me.’ Due to this representation and articulation, the comics journalist uses this means to draw herself in the frames, which enables her to express her meanings and views, to narrate and construct, as well as to perform and articulate her opinion. Hence, to speak of a ‘performance’ of authorship instead of a mere representation might not be wrong at this point. In comics journalism with single authorship, comics journalists are very likely to draw themselves in the panels. The recipient can see how they draw, sketch, take notes, and talk to people (see also Fig. 3.17). The representation of these activities is therefore a method of verifying the author’s credibility (cf. Weber and H. - M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 10) and of immersing the reader into the storyworld. Moreover, the visual foregrounding of authorial subjectivity forms a tangible element in comics journalism and has become a eld of interest rather than a problem to overcome, as traditional journalism has criticized it so far. The insertion of the verbal voice of the author in tandem with a visual self-depiction, which used to be perceived as highly questionable in the journalistic context, has become more likely to be conceived of as a serious means of the author’s authentication in the storyworld. 221 Figure 3.23: Page, “It’s not a [S]tory” ( Threads 138) 222 Figure 3.24: Page, “It’s not a [S]tory” ( Threads 139) 223 3.2.4 The Challenge of Collaborative Authorship Since the beginning of the modern age, authors have been the sole creators of their unique literary and artistic works whose originality is guaranteed by copyright law (cf. Woodmansee and Jaszi, “Die globale Dimension des Begri s der ‘Autorschaft’” 391). While in the average comic book, authorship is “fragmented into a multitude of creators” (Ahrens, “Imagine Reality: Negotiating Comics with David B.’s ‘Epileptic’” 66), in auteur comics, “the author is doubled through the combination of the twofold artistic dimension of the medium” (66). In comics journalism, the roles of the author are even multiplied but can mostly be ascribed to a single person. The pact developed so far refers to the case of single authorship and states that the comics journalistic product comes from the author who acts as journalist, narrator, eyewitness, creator, and drawer of the comic. 86 Yet, what happens if the comics journalist did not experience the setting and space she is writing (or drawing) about herself ? How authentic is her piece of comics journalism in this case? No matter how well the investigation process and the subsequent handling is done, is it still truthful and reliable when experiencing, drawing, and writing do not come from the same author? 87 There are good arguments for and against a monitoring of the work process among colleagues. It can be less prone to error than single authorship but does not necessarily have to be. The questions of the narrative voice and view become particularly relevant. In other words, in ‘collaborative authorship comics journalism,’ the concepts of narration (‘Who tells? ’), focalization (‘Who perceives? ’), monstration (‘Who draws? ’), and ocularization (‘Who sees? ’) occur quite di erently and challenge the idea of the pact. Why should the recipient believe someone who has not seen and experienced the events herself ? For example, in the German piece Weisse Wölfe 88 , the illustrator Feindt did not experience the situation at all but only drew the panels and designed the book based on his colleague’s stories. It is the same case with David Axe and Matt Bors, as already described in the introductory chapter. For them, it seems, the reliability in collaborations is not a problem. Similarly, Elisabeth El Refaie speaks of the “multiplications of the authorial self ” (Refaie, Autobiographical Comics 53), arguing that there is “no such thing as the one, true, coherent, and constant self ” (53). She admits the possibility that 86 Apart from Susie Cagle and Joe Sacco, who are legally trained journalists with a talent for drawing, the opposite case is more common—trained illustrators, cartoonists, or designers adopt journalistic methods and professional ethos to create comics journalism, such as Archer, Glidden, Evans, Neufeld, Polgreen, Rall, and Warner, to name but a few. 87 Hat eld has pointed to “the problem of authenticity in autobiographical comics” (Hat eld 115). 88 David Schraven and Jan Feindt are working for Correctiv and were awarded the Reporterpreis in 2015 in the category “innovation.” 224 an author has di erent selves with which she can express herself. I understand El Refaie’s words in the sense that she would have no credibility problem with collaborative authorship. I, however, am more skeptical of working in teams or groups with regard to issues of reliability and authentication. As a matter of fact, the authorship in collaborations is divided between different bodies. Consequently, the idea of the ‘comics journalistic pact’ does not apply with regard to human physicality here. However, one way to approach the question of whether ‘collaborative comics journalism’ can still be seen as reliable and abiding by the pact which does not hurt or mislead the reader and her expectations is to argue with the respective forms in which comics journalism may occur. One could then postulate that ‘collaborative comics journalism’ does not work well whenever it occurs in the form of reportage. Ch. 2.6.3 on classifying comics journalism has shown that the reportage is one of the most personalized journalistic genres. It requires an author who functions as experiencing, witnessing, drawing, and narrating instance at once. In contrast, all other types of comics journalism with collaborative authorship might seem to be incompatible with the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ because they do not seem to harmonize with regard to division of labor and issues of drawing and narrating. To recapitulate brie y, a comics journalist is a person who takes responsibility for the visual and verbal tracks on her own. Consequently, the pact only works for collaborative authorship if all people—those who narrate and draw and investigate—were eyewitnesses. In War Is Boring and Weisse Wölfe , the reader has to trust the person who narrates all the more, because she is the only one who has experienced and witnessed the events. Then, it seems as if the illustrator only ful lls an additive function, because the panels are closer to illustrations based on hearsay—namely, the stories as told by the journalist who witnessed everything. What I call ‘challenge’ with collaborative authorship may not seem important at rst glance, but I feel there is a tension, though. It is probably dependent on the reader and a question of taste whether or not one places the journalist and illustrator on the same level and considers them as one entity, regardless of any narratological questions. Even if there is a lack of empirical evidence to formulate a thesis that examines internal communication and the division of labor in collaborative authorship, I would still like to o er the opposite way of reading. It can also be argued that the credibility of the content does not depend on collaborative authorship, or at least, that it does not signi cantly a ect it. The recipient then assumes that the journalist has the authority as an eyewitness and decides upon the pictures by the illustrator. The reader is likely to assume that the journalist looks over the illustrator’s shoulder, demands changes, 225 and accepts the nal result. With this way of reading, the reader will face no challenge regarding the authenticity in comics journalism with multiple authors. If the reader acknowledges the rst way of reading, it means that the narrators/ eyewitnesses David Axe and David Schraven perform a much stronger type of authorship although their names are written to equal shares with those of the illustrators on the covers. Nevertheless, one cannot get rid of the impression that the cartoonist only has an additive function. First, this can be explained by the fact that the illustrator is always named second after the author. One could, of course, counterargue that this is just a coincidence in the examples due to alphabetical order. However, the second reason is more veri able, namely that only the journalist appears as a ‘cartoon-me’ in the storyworld in collaborative comics journalism. Hence, one could claim that the importance of the ‘verbal I’ triumphs over the ‘visual I’—a surprising observation, because rst, comics are a visual medium, and second, we are always speaking of an age characterized by a high degree of visuality and imagery. So far, the still widespread idea that only single authorship is authentic has held true (cf. Woodmansee and Jaszi, “Die globale Dimension des Begri s der ‘Autorschaft’” 391). However, since the emergence of webcomics and digital comics, comics journalism is increasingly practiced in teams and collaborations, and the “‘solitary author’ model is often not an adequate description” (H. Love 33). In my opinion, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ does not work well with collaborating authors; at least, it creates some sort of tension. Future research can take a closer look at this and negotiate the concepts of “authenticity” and “truth” in collaborative comics journalism. A starting point could be the model by Harald Love, who suggests a rather performative model of authorship which is conceptualized “not as a single essence [. . . ] but as a repertoire of practices, techniques and functions—forms of work” (33). He introduces “authemes,” which he de nes as a “set of linked activities” (39). 89 The next chapter will therefore deal with the question of how authorship in comics journalism can look like in practice, still analyzing single authorship. 89 For example, he di erentiates between “collaborative,” “precursory,” “executive,” “declarative,” and “revisionary” authorship. (cf. H. Love). 226 Chapter 4 The Author in the Extratextual World Authorship is a fundamental and meaningful category for all elds which deal with copyright issues and create a body of thought. It is particularly crucial to the humanities and arts. Authorship as a “form of human work [. . . ] to validate individual agency [of the author]” (H. Love 32) becomes even more topical under the conditions of the media society in the digital age. The nature of authorship has varied considerably over the centuries with di erent roles and degrees of importance of the author. Many re ections on theories of authorship base their ideas on the model of the single author as the originator who creates a work on her own (cf. H. Love 33). In comics journalism, ‘single authorship’ is also widely common. The comics journalist as the creator of the work mostly shoulders all responsibilities on her own, and accepts the bene ts that come with it. While Ch. 2.6 identi es di erent forms of the author’s involvement and Ch. 2.2 dismantles the concept of truth, this chapter elaborates on a model of authorship that is understood as a repertoire of practices, techniques, and phases by considering them in the extratextual world. This is neccessary to nd a way to identify the credibility of the comics journalist. In such, looking at the author and authorship in the extratextual world might entail a shift from the nished product (the piece of comics journalism) to the process of how an author deals with the way she constructs, narrates, and researches her story, and eventually, how and where she makes it available and accessible. This chapter is twofold. First, it examines the third part of the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ which I call ‘hands.’ The part of ‘hands’ has a special role because it oscillates between the author in the storyworld and the author in the 227 extratextual world. It is a chapter in which the blurring of generic boundaries, such as that between the narator and the author, becomes more visible than elsewhere. The third part of the pact also investigates on the physical and emotional distance between the comics journalist and her subject of reporting. I will develop a scale which shows di erent degrees of the author’s engagement in the events, ranging from a mere observing position of the author to a political activist stance (see Ch. 4.1.3). In this subsection, it will become very clear that drawing a strict line between the levels of the storyworld and the extratextual world is hardly possible in comics journalism; this is also what turns it into a very hybrid phenomenon and an outstanding genre. Moreover, this chapter also wants to discuss the questions of which authentication strategies on an extratextual level can be identi ed, and to what extent the disclosure of the production process correlates with the credibility of the author. Hands are everywhere, but I am mostly interested in the role of the author during (and sometimes after) the production process. At rst glance, the production of comics journalism might not be special, but compared to the production of ctional comics and journalism, it is indeed. For example, in contrast to traditional ways of selling ction, comics journalism can seldom rely on established ways of distribution or advertising because many comics journalists are freelancers and face di erent challenges than their permanently employed colleagues of renowned newspapers. Even if the trend towards new methods of working and distributing can also be seen in traditional journalism, it is much more pronounced in comics journalism. This is mainly due to the Internet and its social media, which have a strong impact on comics journalism for three reasons: First, the Internet and social media, in particular, allow a fast checking of facts to verify the content; second, the Internet allows for authenticating the author’s credibility in the extratextual world; and third, the Internet supports advertising and distributing the pieces of comics journalism to its readership. 4.1 Hands This section deals with the third component of the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ alongside “voice” (see Ch. 3.1) and “face” (see Ch. 3.2), and analyzes the forms of the author’s engagement and involvement in comics journalism; how involvement is represented, and to what extent comics journalism is in uenced by activism, especially by political activism. Although this topic of “hands” also relates to the concepts of “witnessing” and “point of view/ focalization” (see Ch. 3.2.1), this part emphasizes the author at the extratextual level. The choice of the word “hands” is motivated by two aspects. First, the hands stand for the entire creation of comics journalism. And second, the hands symbolize 228 the involvement and interference of the comics journalist during her work both in and outside the text, elaborating on the author’s functions, which oscillate between someone who merely describes and observes, and someone who participates in the event she tells, because, usually, the journalist should not intervene in the story she tells about and should stay outside of it (see Ch. 2.2.4). In this regard, the combination of activism and journalism is the subject of critical debate. Often, the choice of the topic is already a statement in itself. This holds true for many comics reportages, and becomes particularly visible in ‘migration comics’ because a journalist with an anti-migration view is not likely to voluntarily visit a refugee camp for reporting (like Evans). In this sense, I nd it particularly di cult to draw a line between journalistic observation and reporting on the one hand, and (almost) political activities on the other. With regard to the hands, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ thus aims at equating the author with a person who is engaged and actively involved in the story to di erent degrees. Like the discussion on the face, the notion of hands in comics journalism is manifold. The German language o ers a nice pun with the word stem that expresses an increasing action, namely from “ Hände ” (‘hands’), to “etwas hand haben” (‘to handle’), to “ hand eln” (‘to act’). I will develop a scale and show that comics journalists can be involved in the story to di erent degrees. Some scholars even argue that all journalism is a form of activism. “Every journalistic choice necessarily embraces highly subjective assumptions—cultural, political or nationalistic—and serves the interests of one faction or another” (Keller n. pag.). One may agree with this statement, as long as it is limited to the context of journalistic reportage, because other genres require di erent types and styles of writing (see Ch. 2.6.3). These are the four possibilities which show how the aspect of “hands” can occur in comics journalism: • The hands are not visible in the storyworld, but the recipient knows that the comic must have been created by someone’s hands. • The comics journalist’s hands are visible in the storyworld. They are represented with regard to the production, that is, while she is writing, researching, sketching and so on (see Ch. 3.1.4). • The hands and thus the comics journalist are/ is in action and function/ s as a kind of messenger between di erent positions. The comics journalist becomes part of the story, which was not planned or initiated by herself. 1 • The comics journalist’s hands are in action and start to dissolve the boundaries between the real world and the storyworld because the comics journalist actively intervenes and participates in the story, for 1 Krämer uses the “Botenmodell,” a media-theoretical approach of conveying information with the help of media, and combines it with the gure of the witness (Krämer 126). 229 example, by drawing portraits of people and talking about their lives, and by giving art workshops to o er people distracting from their everyday misery. While in the rst two points, “hands” have to be understood in a literal sense, the last two aspects refer to a more symbolical sense that describes the comics journalist’s interference in the story. An “ideal reader” is aware of the fact that even without visible signs of the author’s hands in the panels, every comic is hand made. What is also interesting is a situation in which the comics journalist reveals herself in the story, which can change her position from a merely ‘experiencing’ and ‘observing’ author to an ‘intervening’ and ‘highly engaged’ author, who is unable to keep a physical and emotional distance to a great extent (see Ch. 4.1.3). 4.1.1 The Comics Journalist as a Handicra swoman Having explained the notion of “hands” in more general terms, I will now highlight the aspect of the handmade character of comics journalism. In digital, image-heavy times, when it seems natural to capture and communicate what has been experienced even before it has actually been experienced [...], self-critical skepticism about whether there are also experiences that are not so easy to tell, threatens to disappear. 2 (Emcke 21, my translation) Images are often said to transform the seemingly unspeakable into comprehensible approaches. In this context, the transition from words to pictures is a main a ordance of comics journalism: show what is happening and make it visually accessible. Comics journalists sometimes describe traumatic and horri c events not in an inhuman way but by guaranteeing some distance which is caused by the degree of the pen’s abstraction. That is why I want to emphasize the handmade nature of comics because, in the end, all comics are created by somebody. In other words, both comics and journalism are handmade. Similar to the production of journalism, the making of comics is a handicraft. Kate Evans is a British cartoonist and non ction visual artist operating at the intersection of several of the most exciting generic developments in comics in recent years, including political cartoons, graphic memoir, graphic reportage, comics journalism, and educational comics. She has become a leading gure in 2 The original reads, “[i]n digitalen, bildlastigen Zeiten, in denen es selbstverständlich scheint, das Erlebte festzuhalten und mitzuteilen, noch bevor es eigentlich erfahren ist [. . . ,] droht die selbstkritische Skepsis, ob es auch Erlebnisse gibt, die sich nicht gar so leicht erzählen lassen, zu verschwinden.” 230 Figure 4.1: Right Part of the Splash Page, “1st October 2015” ( Threads 7) 231 the contemporary non ction comics eld, because her comics address a wide variety of pressing contemporary, sociopolitical issues, such as climate change, the migration crisis, the Corona virus, and women’s rights. 3 Evans’ ‘novel-length’ piece of comics journalism is entitled Threads: From the Refugee Crisis and is a comics reportage from and about the French refugee camps in Calais and Dunkirk. Compared to her other non ction comic book Red Rosa , which is the product of months of research and entailed reading of nineteenth-century socialist theory, Threads documents only ten days of Evans’ direct experience in the French camps. She states that she needed the space “to depict everything, and not leave anything out” (Davies). Evans traveled to the Calais Jungle to document life in the impromptu city/ refugee camp near the French port town. While living and volunteering there, Evans met many volunteers and police o cers but, rst and foremost, (traumatized) people eeing from di erent parts of the world, particularly from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and several African states. As an established British daily newspaper The Guardian was so intrigued by Threads that it published parts of Threads on 20 June 2017, to mark the UN World Refugee Day. Some days before, on 16 June 2017, Threads was already published on the comics platform The Nib . Threads was awarded the “John C. Laurence Award from the Society of Authors” in 2016. 4 Calais is known not only for the refugee camps but also for its former thread industry and lace-making tradition. Literally, this is the thread which the author adopts as introduction to her narration. The rst splash page of Threads immediately starts with a powerful image (see Fig. 4.1). While the left side of the splash page shows the nished product—the bobbin lace—the right side shows how the work process begins; four women use their hands to make runners of bobbin lace. The lace-making as a symbol of the cultural heritage of Calais is linked to the actual subject matter of the book, and is visually processed throughout the story. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the women are building fences by means of lace-making. Here, the lace functions as a visual metaphor. The white sheets of bobbin lace ow into the book as white border walls, which are supposed to shield the port area of Calais from illegal refugee crossings. The threads, as the eponymous book title suggests, come and knit everything 3 Evans’ publication of Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg from 2015 can be classi ed as a documentary comic book because it is a piece of visual life writing grounded in scienti c research of the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Moreover, she also regularly uploads cartoons satirizing contemporary politicians on her online blog (cf. Evans, “Online Blog by Kate Evans” n. pag.). 4 There have been several publications about the refugee experience, such as those by the project of PositiveNegatives, or Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan’s ‘Welcome to the New World,’ which was published as a series in The New York Times between January and September 2017. 232 together. Using a geopolitical interpretation, this could mean that the tradition of the locals meets the new and the unknown from other parts of the world. Moreover, the threads run together in the hands of ordinary women. Surprisingly, they are portrayed as if they are not happy about what they are doing. In my interpretation, this could mean that the shortcomings of international and European politics are carried out as the expense of the local people in Calais. In this respect, one already realizes on the rst splash page that this book will become highly political, even if the author has not revealed herself verbally yet. 5 This visual metaphor shows that walls and borders which cannot be overcome by asylum-seekers are built. Just as lace-making and the production of lace is a craft and a cultural asset, comics journalism is, too. In interviews, comics journalists are also often asked whether what they do is art, or journalism, or literature. The German cartoonist Isabel Kreitz, who was awarded the Wilhelm-Busch-Preis in 2019, evaded this question by answering that it is, rst and foremost, a handicraft (cf. ComFor-Facebook page; last retrieved 18 November 2019). The Surplus of Drawing: The Proof of the Handmade There is nothing literal about a drawing. “Drawings are interpretative even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally,” remarks Sacco (Sacco, Journalism XI). The cartoonist intentionally selects and frames the content, panels, and all other visualities on the page. That is why the following section will highlight the a ordance of drawings in comparison to photography. 6 In comics studies, Hillary Chute contrasts the documentary value of comics and explores how they may function as instruments of a witness in contrast to photography. Based on a broad historical overview, which also considers examples from art studies, she makes an interesting observation because, in her opinion, the tide has turned. The evidential value of photography has been considerably weakened by mechanical manipulation, and this has led to a strengthening of drawings: “Why, after the rise and reign of photography, do people yet understand pen and paper to be among the best instruments of witness? ” (Chute, Disaster Drawn 2). However, given the expertise and di culty of altering photos in the early photographic era, it was generally thought that photographs were viable or, at least, supplementary evidence of fact. In the post-photographic digital age, “in 5 Evans plays with the style of the panel frames. For example, in the further course of her work, the panel frames are represented by means of lace, which she arranges like a collage to create the gutter. 6 “Comics o er a multitude of connections and shared characteristics with other forms, from cross-media characters and genres to iterations of seriality” (Mickwitz 6). 233 which photographic manipulation is easy and routine [and can be done nearly by everyone], few images can be thought of as evidence of fact without some external form of veri cation” (Duncan et al. 118). But despite the manifold possibilities of photographic manipulation, photography is still attributed a much higher credibility. A media-conscious and literate reader is aware of the importance of fact-checking visual images (cf. Polgreen and Rice, “How do sexbots fall in love? ”). Symptomatic of the increasing strengthening of the credibility of the drawn image is the reuse of draftswomen, such as at court and in press conferences. In June 2017, for the second time in four days, the Trump administration prohibited cameras and live audio broadcasts from press brie ngs. 7 “O camera brie ngs are becoming a regular occurrence in the Trump White House, especially on big news days,” notices journalist Callum Borchers from The Washington Post (Borchers n. pag.). Hence, the US news station CNN sent the sketch artist Bill Hennessy, who normally draws the Supreme Court proceedings for the network, to the White House. 8 The idea is to create a picture for news readers, who could not physically participate and be in the room. “Some conservative media voices dismissed it as a stunt, but CNN argued that the sketch session did serve a journalistic purpose, in the same way, that courtroom sketches do,” justi es Brian Stelter from CNNmedia (Stelter n. pag.). Hennessy stood in the back of the brie ng room to document the scene (see Fig. 4.2). For the past quarter-century, press brie ngs by Democrats and Republicans were regularly held on camera. However, since June 2017, the coverage of conferences looks similar to those in the time of the development of the Constitution. Hennessy’s presence mirrors the signi cant change in US media that has taken place recently. Generally, under Trump’s presidency, the US media networks are concerned about their place in today’s politics and in American society. Although this example does not count as comics journalism, it nonetheless supports the increasing attribution of the power, in uence, and reliability of drawn images for journalistic purposes whenever digital recording equipment is forbidden. Moreover, the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger argues in a review of Joe Sacco’s The Fixer , which is a drawn series of reportage on Sarajevo in 1995, “that in an age of the sheer endless possibilities of manipulation of photography, drawing as a medium of reportage is experiencing a renaissance, precisely because it seems more subjective, thus reminding us that a ltered reality 7 In Germany, in contrast, the press—and not the government—is the host—and not the guest—of the Bundespressekonferenz (Federal Press Conference), a German institution that has no counterpart anywhere in the world (cf. Droesser). 8 Hennessy has covered a wide range of cases, including Guantanamo Bay hearings, terror suspect trials, and the Clinton impeachment proceedings. 234 Figure 4.2: Friday Press Brie ng at the White House by Bill Hennessy (Stelter n. pag.) lies at its foundation” (qtd. in Berg and Groos 6-7). It should surprise no one that the limit of the human eye’s peripheral vision is closely related to the panel as it is used by the artist to capture or “freeze” one segment in what is in reality an uninterrupted ow of action (Eisner 40). Indeed, this segmentation is an arbitrary act. The arrangement of the elements within the frame and the rendering of images therein as a sequence are the basic ‘grammar’ from which the narrative is constructed. Drawn images are speci c; they obviate interpretation (cf. Eisner 147). The obvious and straightforward subjectivity turns news illustration and thus drawing in general into a new ‘old key medium’ for receiving reality. According to Berg and Groos, it is “the sensory contact that ties the eye and the drawing utensil to the reality being recorded, allowing for a completely di erent free artistic space than could ever be possible in (unmanipulated) photography as a result of the direct chemical-physical linkage of world and apparatus in the latter medium” (Berg and Groos 6). Moreover, the inherent part of the drawing is the processuality, the moment of the temporal development, which can be represented better than in photos (cf. Roob 64). In contrast to photography, however, a cartoonist is not dependent on the ‘right moment’ to capture something; the cartoonist chooses the moment to draw, and also what to draw at that moment. Hence, the particular moment remained bound to the drawing hand for so long (Glasmeier 36) because photography could only partially o er di erent atmospheres and perspectives in the nineteenth century. 235 A cartoon might be more of a fabricatio —a cartoonist can inject emotion through body language or gesture, or combine e ects to create a stronger image where photography (if you disallow manipulation) is usually more actual. The ‘poetic’ availability of cartooned imagery can therefore be a plus or a minus, depending again on the integrity and skill of the author. (Duncan et al. 9) Another a ordance of drawings is that one can get a glimpse from below or through things. Despite a high technological progress, a photograph cannot provide a cross-sectional view of another object (cf. Glasmeier 36). Fig. 4.3 illustrates what a tent looks like in cross-section, which allows to show the objects inside. Conveying this information with photography would require at least two pictures (or X-ray), while the drawing expresses everything in one image and thus saves space in the piece of comics journalism. Figure 4.3: Screenshot, A View into Hassan’s Tent ( Kawergosk - 5 Sterne n. pag.) Despite all bene ts of photography, comics can also remediate photography. In my master thesis, I have ascertained that photography in comics can occur 236 on the diegetic level 9 , as remediation of original sketches, and as copies of original photographs (cf. Schlichting, “Formen und Funktionen von Fotogra e in Graphic Novels”). The better the author’s talent for drawing, and the better the technical gadgets are, the fuzzier the distinction between a drawn photograph and a real one becomes. Like photography, drawings function as a graphic recorder. Due to the non-immediateness of production and the mediation through a ‘visual, mental, and material translation’ of reality into the nal product, drawings seem to be advantageous in speci c situations. In a YouTube video about her work, Evans remembers an incident in which border o cials made her remove her smartphone and forbade her to lm in the ‘Jungle: ’ I took photos of the incident. And they told me that I had to take them o my phone. And I was like ‘OK? ’ I will delete them o my phone. I will not have delete them o my eyeballs. [. . . ] You cannot make me delete this. I can still recreate this image. (“Video. Threads: From the Refugee Crisis - Kate Evans” 0: 30 min) Mental images are long-lasting; they stay in once mind independent on any technical medium and recording gadget. In Evans’ case, she eventually deleted the photo from her camera, which she still was able to draw from her memory. The following list does not claim to be complete; yet, it shows the situations in which drawings are preferred to photography in primary literature. One can claim that drawings are very likely to be used whenever photographs • are not allowed due to o cial rules, for example, at court, press briefings, in prisons: Pyonchang (Guy Delisle); Reaktor 1F - Ein Bericht aus Fukushima 1 (Kazuto Tatsuta); Hedo Berlin: Skizzen aus dem Berliner Nachtleben (Felix Scheinberger), which is quite peculiar because the prostitutes are underage; At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: Guard’s Story , and Aimée de Jongh’s Europe’s Waiting Room , because photography and lm are forbidden in the refugee camps. “Very few images have been seen in the media. That’s why I will be drawing the daily life in the camps this week” (cf. Schlichting, “Questions to Aimée de Jongh” n. pag.). • are not welcome , 10 which means that taking pictures is not forbidden but due to moral and ethical views of the author should rather be omitted: Nepal: ‘I was 14 when I was sold’ (Dan Archer), Mon Bataclan: Vivre encore (Fred Dewilde); The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule (Igort). 9 Diegesis stems from the Greek term for “narration” and is taken here to denote the narrated storyworld. 10 Sometimes, the dividing line between ‘not allowed’ and ‘not welcome’ is not fully clear. 237 • are not possible , due to technical or photo-immanent properties, such as bad exposure: The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frederic Lemercier). My list is in accordance with the aim of “harm minimization,“ which has been postulated by the Journalism Code of Practice (cf. FourthEstate n. pag.). It says that authors should be mindful of the fact that certain works may cause harm. Many ethical standards of journalism strive for the acceptance of people’s right to privacy. Journalists should show “sensitivity when dealing with children, victims of crime, or people who are especially vulnerable due, for example, to trauma, injury, illness, or other factors” (cf. FourthEstate n. pag.). Generally, journalism is to avoid “the gratuitous use of o ensive, confronting, or harminducing sounds, imagery, or words” (cf. FourthEstate n. pag.). That said, another a ordance of the drawing resulting from its mediated character is that comics journalists work along the proposed ethical standards and minimize harm due to the medium of comics and the abstraction of cartoonicity (cf. FourthEstate n. pag.). Figure 4.4: Page Excerpt, Two Dead Men ( War Is Boring 66) Furthermore, the mediation of the world helps to reduce the directness between the viewer and the person being viewed in the image. The reason for this is the degree of abstraction, which varies between authors. The drawn image appears to be less aggressive, even if it is still mediated. In Fig. 4.4, one can see blood coming out of the dead men’s heads. The essential message is conveyed, namely that two men are dead. However, their anonymity and thus their privacy is preserved, because otherwise one could get the impression that photographing the dead would be irreverent and immoral. By showing drawn copies of photographs, and thus less mimetic in its realistic style, one bypasses this ethical dilemma. 238 Photography in Favor of Drawing There are, however, situations in which copies of photographs are included in the panels. This use of multimodality might seem confusing at rst glance. On the one hand, comics journalism privileges the handmade character. On the other hand, to do completely without photography does not seem to be an option either. While the insertion of photography sometimes seems to be arbitrary, there are often causes that compel the author to insert them instead of the drawings. Possible reasons are, among other things, situations in which comics journalists have to draw a lot in a short amount of time, or in which many details need to be included (see Fig. 4.5, 4.6). Figure 4.5: Screenshot, The Jewelers at the Camp ( Beldangi n. pag.) Ideally, other media from reality subconsciously con rm the authenticity of facts and the author’s trustworthy depiction, which also contributes to the reliability of the representation. This is what happened on 1 March 2016—a situation which Kate Evans took up in the chapter “Armageddon” 11 in her book Threads . While the book depicts the inhumane living conditions of the refugees in the camp, this chapter is particularly dedicated to the French police’s violence against migrants. Similar to the lm Armageddon , an armada 11 This title is ambiguous and an allusion to the site of a battle during the end times in the Bible. It can also be an intermedial reference to the eponymous American science ction disaster lm directed by Michael Bay in 1998, which is about a massive meteor shower destroying the orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis and bombarding a swath of land around the North Atlantic. 239 Figure 4.6: Screenshot, The Repair Shop ( Beldangi n. pag.) of people in heavy riot gear shows up in the camp one day. But unlike the astronauts wearing orange space suits in the lm, the crowd of police o cers appears as black-clothed, heavily-armed, cruel authorities who were instructed to destroy and demolish everything in the camp. What might seem exaggerated at rst and was hardly covered by the news is veri ed only one year after this incident. On 23 October 2017, the French administration and the internal investigations departments of the French security forces, under pressure by Human Rights Watch, have released a report that found convincing evidence proving that the police used excessive force and committed other abuses against innocent child and female adult migrants. For example, the police routinely directed tear gas against migrants while “they were sleeping and in other circumstances in which they posed no threat, and regularly sprayed or con scated sleeping bags, blankets, and clothing, apparently to press them to leave the area” (Human Rights Watch n. pag.). The reader might get the impression that this story is made-up and did not happen in reality, which is triggered by Evans’ extensive use of loud colors, the zooming-in on people’s scared faces, the representation on splash pages to emphasize the meaning of this incident, and the use of elements from a ctional lm. However, these scenes indeed turned out to be true (see Fig. 4.7). Other examples in which other media verify the comics journalistic content include Evans’ drawing of how asylum-seeking men protest against the living conditions in the refugee camp by stitching up their mouths in 2016 (cf. P. Walker et al. n. pag.). Moreover, the panel on the lower left side of page 108 shows hands holding a smartphone to show photographic proof of mountains of garbage and dirt in the warehouse. The interesting thing about this is that the smartphone is 240 Figure 4.7: Page, Refugees’ Protest by Stitching up Their Mouths ( Threads 158) 241 drawn and a photo has been incorporated as a screen. Again in the form of a collage, the photo was embedded in the panel, and the scene was drawn around it (see Fig. 4.8). Another reason for the use of photographs in the panels can be the need to imitate pictures from television (see Fig. 4.9). This proves to be another strategy of authentication because, by including media from the extratextual world, the photographs can verify the author’s content in the storyworld at the same time. Back home, Evans watches the news and sees Hoshyar’s home (see Fig. 4.9, 4.10). 12 The large television screen shows that a re has broken out in the camp in which she was volunteering. Memories emerge. Her ‘remembering self ’ is activated. The fact that she does not let go of the situation in the camp becomes clear when Evans later picks up her daughter from school. Four elongated panels in which her hands hold a smartphone are shown. They are supposed to represent the moving images of a video. The photos themselves form a sequence and tell a story on their own, namely whether or not the people can save themselves from the re. Evans looks worried and the incident keeps her occupied even after she has turned o the TV. From a narrative point of view, this double page is also highly interesting because it combines two levels of action; although the actions take place in di erent places around the world, they are going on at the same time. One strand of the plot narrates how Evans is standing in the schoolyard, waiting for her daughter. The other plotline, which is derived from the images in the video, shows whether people emerge from the dense smoke. The last of four panels reconnects the two storylines by showing Evans’ daughter standing right in front of her, and an adult with a child emerging from the smoke. The tension relaxes because everything turned out well. To sum up, the inclusion of photographs is often found in comics journalism; sometimes for pragmatic/ graphical reasons, sometimes to verify the content and corroborate its claim to truth. Then, these photographs are drawn like a montage into the panels and become a part of the storyworld. However, one sometimes can get the impression that comics journalism surrenders to the still widespread assumption that photographs are more credible than drawings. Pens and Lenses as ‘Dangerous Weapons’ Even if one speaks of “shooting” photographs and “photo shootings,” there is almost nothing dangerous about a photograph, a pen, or a video regarding their technical and physical materialities. 13 Interestingly, (photo and video) cameras are sometimes 12 Hoshyar is a man she drew in the camp and got in contact with. 13 I speak of ‘almost’ because you can also hurt people with a sharp pencil, or you could violently beat people with a camera. 242 Figure 4.8: Page, Imitation of a Photograph Shown on a Smartphone ( Threads 108) 243 Figure 4.9: Page, Imitation of a Video Shown on a Smartphone ( Threads 156) 244 Figure 4.10: Page, Imitation of a Video Shown on a Smartphone ( Threads 156) 245 perceived in a negative way. This is mostly the case when pens and lenses are considered to be dangerous in a metaphorical sense by people who try to prevent democracy and undermine the freedom of the press and free speech. For these cases, it often holds true that journalists, war reporters, satirists, and cartoonists are seen as the enemies of the state, which is why they have to be fought against. The self-referentiality and re ection on the status of reporters is repeatedly expressed through the following images from Proud of You Burundian Journalist by Floribert Nisabwe. Fig. 4.11a shows the direct juxtaposition of an armed soldier with his gun and the journalists with their microphones and cameras. (a) Page Excerpt, A Juxtaposition of a Photographer and a Soldier with Their ‘Weapons’ ( Proud of You Burundian Journalist n. pag.) (b) Page, Militias of a Regime Face O with the Reporter ( War Is Boring 124) Figure 4.11: The Camera as a ‘Weapon’ Another example can be found in War Is Boring , which also represents these immediate encounters when a journalist directly faces a soldier (see Fig. 4.11b). Although the arrangement is kept very simple with ve panels on the book page, the narration succeeds in rendering David Axe’s encounters. This panel page does not use words, but it shows the drama and tension of the incident. 246 The rst frame depicts the situation in a mid-size angle. At night, Axe is standing opposite a truck full of members of a militia. Holding his camera before his upper body, Axe faces the armed soldiers, who stand on a truck and light him up. Panel 2 and 3 zoom in on the situation by focusing only on the faces. Both the journalist and the other man hold their ‘weapons’ in front of their bodies before Axe is able to position his camera in panel 4 and eventually holds it in front of his face, suddenly pressing the release button. This noise is indicated by the word “CLICK.” While the rst panel takes the size of half a page and introduces the reader to the encounter, the following four smaller panels are again in juxtaposition to each other. Whereas panels 2 and 4 represent the soldiers’ perspective, panel 3 and 5 are drawn from Axe’s point of view. The fact that this situation creates two opponents is not only visible through the content but is also supported by the black and white coloring and contrasting. While the soldiers illuminate him and thus make him appear in bright light, Axe looks into the darkness. White panel background, evoked by the light, faces the gray-black night sky. Opposites clearly oppose: good and evil, black and white, advocates of free speech and its opponents. In the last panel, the unique strength of comics is revealed. What happens in the gutter between panel 4 and 5 is up to the imagination of the recipient. The only verbal utterance on the entire page creates a tense situation at night, which is marked by the greatest skepticism on both sides. Because panel 5 is also the very last panel of the whole comic, it is easy to assume that the soldier also pulled the trigger and red a bullet at Axe. Here, the caption box can be assigned to Axe’s rst-person narration. The question of whether Axe dies in the end remains unanswered, which might be an indicator of unreliable narration, just as the recipient does not exactly know how the situation ended in reality. To obtain a logical explanation or resolution, one has to leave the text-immanent world and look at the extratextual world. Obviously, Axe is still alive because otherwise, he could not have told the illustrator Matt Bors about his experiences, and asked him for a collective authorship. 14 4.1.2 The Comics Journalist as a Messenger Introductory books to journalism teach the reader that journalists should not be part of and emotional about the objects and subjects they report about. And 14 I wanted to present this example, even if one could question its classi cation as a piece of comics journalism because it includes more ctional elements than are common for this genre. A comics journalist would give an answer, whether the soldier shot or not. Moreover, War is Boring also dispenses with precise disclosure and strategies of authentication, which are not indicated and revealed at all. In addition, the collaborative authorship between Axe and Bors challenges the work and its clear attribution to comics journalism. 247 yet, empathy is indispensable to all human beings (cf. Emcke 20)—so, too, for comics journalists. The following lines are taken from the narratorial caption script in Rolling Blackouts and can be attributed to Sarah Glidden, who is also a comics journalist in reality, and who wonders about an appropriate distance between the journalist and interviewee: Is it even possible to report on a person’s life without intervening in it? There are rules to journalism that are common sense: do not deceive; work independently; minimize harm. But from there, lines start blurring. What is journalistic distance? Can it be measured? How much does it even matter? RB 211 Even if the recipient expects to receive answers, Glidden leaves these questions unanswered, and admits that she is “beginning to see that so much of the practice of journalism comes down to questions that may be unanswerable” ( RB 212). In other words, some level of emotionality will always be there and must be allowed in comics journalism. 15 It is not my intention to conduct an in-depth analysis of the representation of emotions in comics journalism—this would be another research desideratum—but I point out that the role of authorship in comics journalism is a complex and sometimes complicated interplay between journalistic rules (distance and objectivity), activism, emotions, subjectively interpreted values, as well as art. Often enough, whether the comics journalist likes it or not, she is involuntarily tempted to get involved in something she does not want to play an active part in. Then, the comics journalist can function as an intermediary between di erent positions and parties. The following examples of emotional closeness between the author and the subject of investigation are taken from the work of the Belgian artist Judith Vanistendael, who has created a “human rights refugees reportage,” entitled Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos , and from Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden, as well as from Joe Sacco’s collection Journalism , because these authors illustrate the interconnection between emotions and professionalism and openly refer to them in their works. In October 2017, Vanistendael went to Lesbos to visit the refugee camp Moria. Published on Drawing the Times , her last panel page “Home” (see Fig. 4.12) 15 For a discussion of emotion and a ect, I refer to Mickwitz’ lecture in Amsterdam in November 2018. According to her, a ect as a feature of a documentary is a paradox. One’s personal feelings a ect, and a ect is at the heart of the documentary. She also encounters a connection of entertainment with emotions and a ects. While for her, a ect is an embodied response that is more immediate than cognitive thought or language, emotion is an amalgam of feeling and thought. 248 Figure 4.12: Page, “Home” ( Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos n. pag.) mirrors the most personal and emotional section of her entire piece of comics journalism. The page, which is drawn without clearly marking separated panel frames, appears as a self-talk. It is not clear who the other person is and who is addressed—perhaps the reader? Alternatively, one could interpret it as a kind of interview situation in which she talks about her experiences on Lesbos. Nevertheless, due to the way she is portrayed, one can assume that she is sitting at a table, which has to be imagined, though, because of the blank background. It is not the only gap that the recipients need to ll. By using a kind of meta-language, she does not directly address things, for example, but stays super cial in her memories of the grievance. Her speech balloons, which are presented like a monologue, are limited to only a few words and elliptical fragments. The panels focus on her upper body and face, directing 249 the recipient’s attention to her facial emotions. It would be possible for the recipient to infer the content from the visual images. The reader gets a glimpse of her inner feelings as she allows herself to show emotions. However, why does Vanistendael draw herself in such an emotional state? One possibility of understanding this is that she wants to generate attention and sensitize the reader for the topic of migration. In her opinion, she has experienced things in the refugee camp that are intolerable and inhuman. Unlike the refugees she met there, she can y home and ‘escape.’ Moreover, she would like to change things but seems powerless against the (political) system. These con icting feelings of helplessness and the wish to help, as well as anger mix up to create an overall mood of in nite sadness, eventually causing a psychological overload, which makes her cry. Even though she might feel this way in reality, she could have left it out in storyworld, but she decides not to hide her emotions. In this regard, Vanistendael functions as a messenger who conveys not only content but also emotions. Another state of emotional closeness is illustrated by a passage from Rolling Blackouts . One night in Sulaymaniyah (Iraq), the journalists Alex Stonehill, Sarah Stuteville, and Sarah Glidden head to the bar of the Luxe Palace Hotel ( RB 99). While sitting together, the former friends Dan O’Brien (ex-soldier) and Sarah Stuteville remember their past and talk about the gang they formed with Jessica and Nick when they were kids. Taking a drink, Stuteville also remembers her “romantic interest across those relationships between [her] and Nick and Jessica and Dan, in a kind of puppy-love, teenagery, sort of way” ( RB 100). While speaking, Sarah is sitting at the table, smoking and crossing her arms in front of her face. She is drawn as if she feels desperate. After a while, she also talks about their friend’s death, remembering how Dan was there for her when she needed him to cope with this situation: This is a moral shitstorm for me [Stuteville] because Dan is my link to that time in my life before Nick died, when I was the bad in uence because I smoked cigarettes and we just spent time walking around in parks irting with each other. So the idea of painting him [Dan, the ex-Veteran] in a bad light or doing anything disloyal toward him? I can’t believe that I didn’t even consider how much I couldn’t do that. RB 101 Her emotional closeness to Dan—even if they “haven’t spent more than an evening together since [that time]” ( RB 100)—confuses Sarah Stuteville. She admits that she is in a moral dilemma. Stuteville underestimated the possibility that she would not succeed in this dual role and does not feel well telling Dan’s story to a public readership: “I’ll feel like I’m losing my own moral center in a story like this” ( RB 196). As a journalist, she is still trapped in her 250 relationship, which took place exclusively in the past, and she still cannot ask journalistic questions with her usual professionalism as she would do with other interviewees because she doubts Dan’s behaviour of being a ‘nontraumatized’ US veteran. As much as a journalist strives for emotional distance, sometimes it seems to be unavoidable to not become either physically or emotionally involved in a story, as Rolling Blackouts and Moria (and many other comics reportages) show. When the journalists visit another refugee camp in the Saddam barracks of Sulaymaniyah, they are asked to help the family of the refugees they are talking to. Stuteville insists that their translator explain to Hadi Abdullah Ali, a Kurdish man from Mosul, that they are “only journalists and not NGO workers and that [they] probably can’t [help]” ( RB 209). The translator “totally agree[s] that you shouldn’t give your subject stu . But sometimes they need help” ( RB 211). The translator agrees to buy Hadi’s family a heater. Sarah Glidden acts as a more passive observer in the storyworld (and presumably also in the extratextual world). She seems to be surprised, because earlier she was taught about “the ethics of journalism and how you’re not supposed to intervene or give gifts to your subjects” ( RB 211). 16 Unlike Stuteville, Glidden can take a more objective than personal stance, because she has often emphasized that Dan “isn’t [her] subject” ( RB 212). Thus, when Dan and Glidden are alone in a cab in Damascus at night, Dan reveals his thoughts and re ects on the conversations and encounters with the people who lost a lot or everything because of the American invasion of which he was a part. Within two pages and eighteen panels, Glidden asks a single question, the rest of the conversation is conducted by Dan in a monologic way, asking open-ended questions while staring outside the car or glancing at Glidden, who does not engage in the situation at all but only listens. Glidden admits that “[t]his is the conversation Sarah [Stuteville] should be having with Dan, not me” ( RB 254). This is represented in such a way that the caption box belongs to a panel which shows the passengers of the car from the recipient’s point of view. They directly look the reader in the face, which immerses the reader in the situation and gives her an impression of the atmosphere in the conversation. Due to the lack of speech balloons in this panel, which is the only one without any speech balloons in the entire sequence, the recipient can perceive the tense atmosphere. Glidden seems to be uncomfortable, while Dan unburdens his heart to her. However, why is he nally talking about his time in the military to Sarah Glidden—the story that Stuteville has been hunting for such a long 16 Another example dissolving boundaries and possibly endangering journalistic objectivity is when alcohol comes into play: “[e]very glass of Syrian wine helps dissolve the barrier between subject and journalist” ( RB 264). 251 time? One reason might be that Glidden lacks the shared past of their friends and thus the memories and honorable responsibilities towards Dan. Other than Glidden, Stuteville admits that “[she] probably messed up in a lot of ways with [Dan]. [She] could have been less emotionally invested or more emotionally invested or more hands-o or more hands-on” ( RB 280). Because it was also her rst time with a childhood friend in a research constellation like this, she does not know any better and concludes that she has some regrets: “[I]f [she] had []to do [it] over again, [she] would do it di erently” ( RB 280), by which she means that choosing people as protagonists for a good story is di cult. To add a third example, in all his years as a reporter, Sacco was often asked for help; his professionalism was often tested. In Journalism , Joe Sacco depicts how he is asked for help at least twice. In part IV—Zara—of “Chechen War, Chechen Women,” Zara asks “if there’s anything [he] can do” ( Journalism 59, see Fig. 4.13). Figure 4.13: Page Excerpt, “No, I [D]on’t [W]ant [Y]our [M]oney” ( Journalism 59) The panel in the middle of this row shows two hands—one holds a wallet, the other one reaches for bills. Because Zara directly addressed Sacco earlier, one can assume that these are Sacco’s hands. Moreover, the panels are drawn in such a way that it is very likely that the moment he reaches for his money, Zara sees it and replies, “[n]o, I don’t want your own money,” which is indicated through a speech balloon in the upper left panel corner. Its tail connects to her in the previous panel and is only interrupted by the panel frame. One notices that the panel with the wallet is depicted very prominently—not only due to its blank white background but also due to its special place at the center of the page. 252 The arrangement of panels on a page might carry meaning that goes beyond the literal. With the panel at hand, one can assume that everything is always about money—money is not only at the heart of the page but also the center of the world. Though essential for everyone’s livelihood, it is not what Zara meant, as the third panel of this row shows. It is more important to her that Sacco functions as a messenger, an intermediary to the o cials asking “someone at an N.G.O. to help [her]” ( Journalism 59). Zara’s wrinkled face and her serious look substantiate the family’s misery and the urgency of her need for help. Sacco’s gesture and behavior, however, are not visually represented. For the moment, it remains unclear whether he will become engaged and ask for help, or not. Nevertheless, the reader gets to know his attitude towards Zara’s request through his voice in the caption box, but he does not utter these words loudly in front of Zara’s family. Even if Sacco does not reveal any powerful facial emotions in the rst panel, his words seem to con rm his helplessness in such situations: “I never know what to say to someone who thinks I have connections with important o cials who can tend to her special case” ( Journalism 59 ). Figure 4.14: Page Excerpt, “I’ve [K]icked a [H]ornet’s [N]est” ( Journalism 142) 253 In “The Unwanted” from Journalism , one year after Sacco published “Chechen War, Chechen Women,” he is asked the same question—to intercede with o cials—again by di erent people. This time, he immediately agrees to mention the refugee’s name, Omar, at the camp‘s o ce ( Journalism 142). However, his goodwill did not meet with everyone’s approval, and he feels that—by mentioning the refugee’s name—Sacco “kicked a hornet’s nest” (see Fig. 4.14). Even though it is not explicitly stated anywhere, the reader can feel that the o cials are annoyed because the name Omar is probably already known at the o ce. The recipient can only guess that Omar seems to beg external people to drop his name too often. Sacco did not know that he “carried such weight” ( Journalism 142). What is interesting is that the verbal-narratorial track is di erent from the visual-pictorial track. The white circle around Sacco’s head could be interpreted as a halo, which would mean that Sacco sees himself as a ‘good Samaritan’ who helps people in need. In reality, as far as the verbal script states, his support was not that helpful at all, because the next panels show how angry the o ce sta is about this incident and Omar’s case. Sacco is explained how immigrants try to “game the system” to get access to asylum ( Journalism 143). This kind of authorial self-representation seems to be authentic insofar as the author visually relativizes and verbally corrects her self-perception. Consequently, the recipient is likely to trust the author as the narrator. In addition, this also shows that there is no self-glori cation of the author. In Sacco’s case, this means that he is able to realistically assess himself and his in uence on o cial decision-making as an intermediary. To sum up, in comics journalism, the interrelation between the visual and verbal representation of activism and journalism, as well as emotional closeness and distance often cannot be strictly separated from each other. Whereas Sacco seems to be actively involved as a messenger, the group of journalists around Stuteville in RB tries to restrain itself and avoids helping people in need. This causes remorse, which, however, is most signi cant in Vanistendael’s piece. She performs as an observing gure at the camps, but when it comes to the mediation, to the drawing of the book, she gives up her emotional distance and reveals her true inner feelings. She experienced deep sadness and strong emotions. Her tears are running, and sentences appear either in the form of ellipses or as rhetorical questions (see Fig. 4.12). However, in all the examples mentioned so far, the reader will immediately notice the journalist’s predicament—the moral ‘imprisonment’ and dilemma between ‘only’ being a reporter, the desire to help, and the actual ‘real’ help. 254 4.1.3 The Comics Journalist as an Engaged Person Subsequent to the discussions of the comics journalist as a handicraftswoman (see Ch. 4.1.1) and a messenger (see Ch. 4.1.2), this third subchapter of ‘hands’ will examine a further function of the author that is linked to the issue of ‘hands’ and that characterizes comics journalism: the degree of involvement and participation of the author in the story she tells, because comics journalism is not a separate undertaking, which is located outside of all political or social spheres, and journalism is not only a mode of communication but also a social activity. Depending on one’s understanding of journalism, it covers a story and gives readers the facts, allowing them to form an opinion on the respective subject matter. However, the fact that there are also types of journalism clearly expressing an opinion and an attitude has already been discussed. Hence, probably one of the most extreme forms of more subjective journalism is politically in uenced journalism, which blurs the dividing line to political activism. Then, in some cases, the author even reveals herself as an activist and a politically interested and committed person, but this attitude is not unproblematic. I think it is necessary to talk about this kind of involvement of the author because the comics journalist not only appears in the form of her ‘cartoon-me’ in a vacuum panel space but is also often presented on a kind of meta-level in such a way that she—often unintentionally—participates in the story more than she intended to. Traditionally, the division between journalism and activism is motivated in part by a fear of being perceived as biased (see Ch. 2.1). However, the polarized mediascape raises new questions about the dividing line between mere reporting and so-called “advocacy journalism” in newsrooms. Even as journalism overlaps with activism in some way or other, some activists are playing with the generic boundaries of journalism. As a recent story in the Columbia Journalism Review illustrates, the democratization of the Internet has caused activist organizations, including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace, to post original content that goes beyond mere press releases (cf. Blending n. pag.). Furthermore, this tendency is also shown in the fact that these organizations also work together with or hire comics journalists to report about their issues (see Ch. 4.2.3). Hence, impartiality is given up to some extent. The questions of who is a comics journalist and who is an activist, and whether one can be both at the same time is di cult to answer, if it is possible at all. One of the most prominent examples outside comics journalism points to the dilemma and complexity of the ambivalence of an engaged journalist. When, for instance, Glenn Greenwald reported for The Guardian on the secrets revealed by Edward J. Snowden, an American computer professional and former CIA employee who copied and leaked classi ed information from 255 the National Security Agency in 2013, detailed discussions of practices and norms concerning a wide range of issues in the mainstream media followed (cf. Revers 2). 17 Among others, questions about the distinctions between journalism and activism occurred. Would it have been better if the journalist had not taken care of Snowden’s material? Would it have been better to not make these con dential documents public? David Carr, American writer and columnist of The New York Times , states that “[i]n a refracted media world where information comes from everywhere, the line between two “isms”— journalism and activism—is becoming di cult to discern” (cf. Carr n. pag.). For Carr, “‘activist’ has become a code word for someone who is driven by an agenda beyond seeking information on the public’s behalf.” Yet, he also acknowledges that a journalist should be neither a “political and ideological eunuch” nor an ideologue (cf. Carr n. pag.): 18 [It is] not a matter of being an activist or a journalist; it’s a false dichotomy [. . . ]. It is a matter of being honest or dishonest. All activists are not journalists, but all real journalists are activists. Journalism has a value, a purpose—to serve as a check on power. (Carr n. pag.) Even if he does not speak of comics journalism, I think that his statement can also be transferred to it. This is why the dependence of comics journalists on institutional conditions and realities on the spot is worth looking at. Therefore, the comics journalistic pact not only includes the trust between author and reader, but also aims at the relationship and in ow of information between institution and author, and thus in some way between institution and reader. Institutions can be NGOs or publishing and media houses. A comics journalist who works for national newspaper companies (like Chappatte) will be trusted more than a comics journalist who publishes on her personal 17 Greenwald comes from a more activist tradition: First, he was as a lawyer, then a blogger and columnist, and later a member of the new and independent journalistic venture nanced by the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar. What becomes obvious here is that there are two very di erent views of how journalism should ful ll its mission. Carr, however, also warned in his text that “[a]ctivists can and often do reveal the truth, but the primary objective remains winning the argument. That includes the argument about whether a reporter has to be politically and ideologically neutral to practice journalism.” Greenwald’s writing proceeds from a clearly stated point of view, which is similar to the intended view taken by comics reporters. One could say that some pieces of comics journalism are placed closer to “advocacy journalism” than to conventional reporting due to a high degree of physical, emotional, and social commitment by the comics journalists (cf. Gutiérrez et al. 48). 18 Revers has found out that there is a more diverse and lively debate on journalism and advocacy in the US coverage than in the German one, which he sees as one consequence “of the more rapid and profound weakening of the institutional authority of legacy news media in the USA since the early 2000s” (Revers 3). 256 website. A comics journalist who is hired by an NGO or Doctors Without Borders for a coverage of a speci c topic (like Kugler and Schaad) will hardly be totally impartial. A comics journalist who works for a renowned national daily newspaper will have to subordinate herself to the fact-checking authorities and hierarchies. Yet, the reader can then be sure that the facts are accurate and have been read by many eyes beforehand. In this regard, quite a few publishers have to question themselves again and again about their attitude, ethos, and moral rules regarding standards of investigation, methods and styles of writing, and the coverage of speci c topics: “How much stance [of the magazine’s editorial o ce] is good and helpful, and how much opinion is too much? Where does journalism end and where does activism begin? ” (Hülsen 70, my translation). 19 An honest self-assessment of the comics journalist towards the recipient about her practices is indeed not the worst strategy for creating transparency and credibility. However, the man who has worked in this business the longest, Joe Sacco, argues that it is not journalism that goes well with activism but art, because it allows clear views by the author without neglecting journalistic methods: I’m going to be more of an artist than a journalist. With an artist, advocacy isn’t a problem. With journalism, I’ve always had a problem where I might have sympathies and I have very de nite views. Now I’m just at that point in what I want to do that I just want to approach things more directly. Talk more in an essay form about some of the things you’re mentioning: power, authority, the state. (cf. Spurgeon n. pag.) In my view, this ties in nicely with the claim that comics journalism is not only literature and journalism, but also art, and—as described in the rst part of this chapter—also a craft. Similar to Sacco, the creators of Barcelona: Los Vagabundos de la Chatarra , for example, observe that “activists and journalists around the world are embarking on unapologetic hybridization, crossing the lines between journalism, campaigning and art” (Gutiérrez et al. 43). 20 Hence, one encounters a kind of ‘triple hybridization’ in comics journalism: the hybrid formal layout and design of comics journalism, the uid boundaries between journalism, literature and art, as well as the increasingly overlapping methods of activism 19 The original reads, “Es gibt vermutlich nicht wenige Redaktionen, in denen Journalisten nicht immer wieder anmahnen, das eigene Blatt brauche eine klare Haltung damit der Leser wisse, wo das Medium seines Vertrauens steht. Wie viel Haltung ist gut, wie viel ist zu viel? Wo hört Journalismus auf, und wo fängt Aktivismus an? ” 20 The comic part is published in a novel-length format and produced by using journalistic techniques, “including interviews, observations from reality and investigative techniques” (Gutiérrez et al. n. pag.). 257 and journalism. The fact that someone is both an activist and a writer is not irrelevant, but it does not necessarily imply that these authors do not stick to journalistic research and writing methods. Because the nancial remuneration for traditional journalism has eroded (see Ch. 2.1.5), it should not come as a surprise that “advocacy journalism” has gained new traction (cf. Carr). In this regard, Bill Keller argues that the relevant distinction is not that between journalists who have opinions and those who do not. It is more fruitful to distinguish between journalists who honestly disclose their subjective stance and political values and those who dishonestly pretend that they have none or conceal them (cf. Keller n. pag.). In this regard, one might agree with Carr that this is rather a “matter of being honest or dishonest” (Carr n. pag.). Drawing the Times once posted the following on Facebook: Some artists make drawings because they want to make something that is nice to look at. Others make drawings because they are activists and want to achieve something with their drawings. Mas Hab is one of them. She made this comic on the refugees at the Italian-French border, that cannot go across. Right now Mas is back in Ventimiglia, distributing soup and helping where she can. Go Mas! (Drawing the Times) The comics journalist Masha Blaauwendraad alias Mas Hab wants to inspire many other people to become involved or at least interested in migration. The last page of her comics journalism Ventimiglia represents a man who directly asks what he could do. The answer is given partly in the narratorial script, and partly in images because Hab uses symbols that can be decoded without verbal text. These small images stand for music, food, clothes, and company. Becoming more actively involved in the story and expanding the author’s roles of ‘fact nder’ and ‘fact collector’ in order to help in reality can occur in di erent ways and to di erent degrees, which are explained in the following: Degree of the Author’s Engagement Eventually, as already mentioned, I suggest that there are di erent levels of engagement of comics journalists. I have illustrated the author’s di erent levels of involvement with the following gure (see Fig. 4.15). An interesting observation can be made when the comics journalist reveals herself in the story, which can change her from a merely ‘experiencing’ and ‘observing’ author to an ‘intervening’ and ‘highly engaged’ author, who dismisses the physical and emotional distance to a great extent. On the left side of the scale, one can situate the author as a silent observer and witness who documents her experiences and who refrains from getting involved in the story she tells about. The more one moves to the right end of the scale, the 258 engaged like an activist physically and/ or emotionally engaged (‘messenger’) silently observing Kate Evans Ted Rall Joe Sacco Sarah Glidden Dan Archer Olivier Kugler Josh Neufeld Aimée de Jongh low high less/ more Figure 4.15: The Author’s Di erent Levels of Engagement higher the degree of the author’s involvement becomes. While somewhere in the middle of the scale, the author starts to lose her physical and emotional impartiality, the right extreme resembles an emotionally and physically highly involved comics journalist who actively participates in the real world of which she is making a piece of comics journalism. Regarding the degree of the author’s involvement, I suggest speaking of a ‘more’ or ‘less’ instead of strict dichotomies. This means that one might talk about an author who is ‘less’ activist-like but ‘more’ observing, in contrast to one who is ‘very active and helping.’ The gure represents a scale with the position of ‘activist’ at one end. The other end should be a ‘non-activist’ position. However, even if the comics journalist does not behave like an activist, she is still involved and engaged in her story. Hence, the naming of the left side of the scale can vary accordingly. I have chosen the word ‘observing’ because I think it describes both, a less engaged position and still being involved as a kind of ‘silent’ observing person who records the story. Although the area on the right side of the scale is very interesting due to the fact that it slowly dissolves the boundaries between journalism and activism, it can also be problematic because the reader can no longer be sure about the impartiality of the author. However, there will always be the objection that the reader cannot know whether the situation or the event has happened in reality in the same way as it is represented and mediated in the panels (see Ch. 3.2.3). It has become evident that drawing a strict dividing line between the levels of the storyworld and the extratextual world is often hardly possible in comics journalism, which contributes to its status as a very hybrid phenomenon and an outstanding genre. Therefore, the use of strategies of authentication by the author is all the more necessary to guarantee the ‘comics journalistic pact.’ 259 A certain level of involvement is indispensable in comics journalism. In my mind, the most signi cant form is an active intervention, which means that the author engages in any form whatsoever in the story. Often, the author helps; her hands help in a literal sense. This kind of engagement can turn into a political action or be interpreted as one. I suggest three possibilities in which a political notion of comics journalism occurs—the author’s participation in demonstrations (see Ch. 4.1.3), as well as the author’s involvement by portraying refugees (see Ch. 4.1.3), or by teaching drawing workshops (see Ch. 4.1.3), for example, in prisons, and refugee camps. On a general level, one could say that the decision to create a piece of comics journalism about refugees (Evans, de Jongh’s, Vanistendael, etc.), or environmental issues (Glidden’s Inctober ) is already a political statement in itself. Evoking Immersion through Portraying Similar to Mas Hab, Kate Evans believes that the only proper response to Europe’s refugee crisis is action. In her publication Threads: From the Refugee Crisis , Evans tells the stories of marginalized and unwelcome refugees in today’s European Union with heartbreaking clarity, emotional intensity, and unvarnished truth. 21 Her book o ers an experience from the perspective of someone who wants to help people and who wants to get an overview for herself, because Threads is about an unprecedented humanitarian crisis combining compassionate and moving dispatches from the camps in the form of reportage with art. Evans’ close-toreality drawn pictures draw attention to the squalid conditions faced by all people searching for a place to belong to. 22 Evans strives to educate and politicize readers with a journalistic mode, while still using the power of visual metaphors and humor, which also in uences political comics and cartoons in particular (cf. Davies). As she says, her interest in politics and activism goes back to her time at Sussex University in Brighton, where she studied English literature and where she became involved in political opposition to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994. There, she also became associated with the SchNEWS DIY activist publication, editing and contributing artwork to several of its annual editions (cf. Evans, “Online Blog by Kate Evans”). According to Evans, Threads “was a very easy book to write,” in that she “was simply recounting [her] experience. In a way [she] was returning to [her] roots of graphic reportage from the roads protests, which is where [she] started as a cartoonist back in the 1990s” (Davies n. pag.). Like Sacco, Evans is aware of the artistic advantage that comics journalism o ers. 21 Alison Bechdel, who is the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home , describes the book as “gripping and beautiful [. . . ] comics journalism at its nest” (paratext of Threads ) 22 The book is published by Verso, which sells it for 40% o and donates £1 from every purchase to the NGO Doctors Without Borders . 260 However, in contrast to Sacco, who speaks of himself as an artist, she considers herself an activist: I probably see myself more as an activist than as a journalist or an artist. Although I am happy to work with newspapers and magazines, I have an uneasy relationship with the journalistic profession, born from a distaste acquired when I was a roads protestor and the subject rather than the author of journalistic enquiry. Graphic journalism implies that the writer makes a stab at objectivity. I don’t believe that objectivity exists. I like my comics to do something, I have an axe to grind, I will use every tool in my toolkit to engage the reader with the story, to take them on an emotional journey, and so I will enhance the drama of the situation as much as I possibly can insofar as it is consistent with the facts. (Davies n. pag.) Evans helps out in various areas of the camp. Among other things, she supports the art center with her talent for drawing. Hence, she o ers asylum-seeking people to draw portraits of them. This is why Evans has “armed herself with pen, pencil, eraser, sharpener, Tipp-Ex, brush” ( Threads 75). In advance, she thought about what she could give to someone “who has very little and is about to lose even that” ( Threads 75). Portraiture as a way of doing something instead of siting around idly and helplessly not only helps to relieve Evans’ conscience, it creates some kind of distraction and time out for the refugees. Let us look at Evans’ strategy of authentication for Fig. 4.17 to verify. How do I know that it is not ctional? In this speci c case, such a veri cation actually cannot be accomplished because there is no other video or audio material of the boy, which is because of the fact that other media were prohibited in the refugee camp. Hence, this is a situation which is prone to feigning, and that is also where the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is needed: to believe the comics journalist. However, on a textual level, one can observe that Evans uses two di erent styles of drawing. While she draws the panels in the storyworld 1 with crayons and pencils, she holds a portrait of the boy in her hands, which is probably made of watercolors to indicate the di erence between the levels of storyworld and reality. Furthermore, it is also true that the change of the drawing style is not su cient to con rm that the boy looked like that either. However, the reader is more inclined to believe that if an author can create two similar portraits, each with di erent styles, the portraits resemble the boy in reality. This is why in Fig. 4.18, Evans goes one step further and draws a smartphone that displays the portrait of the young man called Jahan. The panel is preceded by Evans drawing the man. But when Jahan looks at Evans’ result, he is 261 Figure 4.16: Page Excerpt, Evans Is Portraying Refugees ( Threads 76) sceptical about it, whereupon Evans takes a picture with a cell phone as a proof. She dispenses with a collage and draws Jahan three times: as an imitation of a photo on a smartphone, as a portrait that she hands over to him, and as a character in the panels of the storyworld. It seems as if, through her talent and the resulting portraits, Evans gives back their pride and dignity to some of the traumatized refugees. This is particularly remarkable in the situation in which she draws Arab men, who are not used to being portrayed by a woman. Another strategy to testify the author’s credibility consists in the creation of immersion. “Immersion” is a well-known concept in virtual reality research, and it describes an e ect that makes the user’s awareness of being exposed to illusory stimuli fade into the background to such an extent that the virtual environment is perceived as real. For comics journalism, this means that immersion occurs verbally and visually when recipients become invested in a story, that is, when they have the perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. Then, they absorb the visual density of the panels and perceive the visual imagery of the storyworld as real. This feeling—in which the actions by the author in the storyworld start to become so real that the recipient perceives them as real and as happening at this very moment, which makes the reader believe that the story took 262 Figure 4.17: Page Excerpt, Looking over the Author’s Shoulder ( Threads 78) place as shown—is due to immersion. The dividing line between reality and a representation of reality, fact and ction, between the real world and the storyworld, and between what happened and what should happen is a highly complex play with or in reality. Once again, this shows the extraordinary character of comics journalism, which could not be pursued and understood to this extent without the introduction of a pact, that is, a certain reading attitude of the reader towards this mash-up genre. There are four ways to create immersion in comics journalism: rst, through language; second, through the content of the panel drawings (what is shown); third, through the ‘looking-over-the-shoulder’ perspective; and fourth, through the spatio-temporal representation that the medium allows for. 263 Figure 4.18: Page, Handing Over of the Portrait ( Threads 77) 264 Figure 4.19: Page, Portrait Study of an Afghan Kid ( Threads 106) 265 In the case of the boy in Fig. 4.19, it takes Evans seven panels from the start to the nished portrait (the gure only shows the rst ve panels). The rst panel on the page represents the situation. The panel extends over the entire width of the page. The following panels are much smaller but zoom into the young man’s face. One part of the body is inspected more closely per panel: the eye, the mouth, the hand, the ears. Evans comments on each panel in the narratorial caption script. There is no clue how long it takes Evans in reality to draw the portraits, but one can assume that she does not have much time at her disposal, because the people who want to be portrayed are already queuing and shouting, “Draw me! Draw me! Draw me! ” ( Threads 79). Furthermore, the use of the present progressive contributes to immersion and gives the reader the impression that what she is reading is happening just now; happening like a lm in one’s mind, or the impression that the reader is becoming a part of the storyworld. For example, in Fig. 4.16, the gure dialogue and the direct speech act between Evans as the drawer and the boy as the person being drawn are complemented with meta-elements that, for example, show Evans sitting there and sketching. The panel is drawn in such a way that the reader gets the impression that she is standing behind Evans and can observe the situation by looking over her shoulder. Additionally, the perspective of the second panel is interesting because the reader sees what Evans’s eyes see: her gaze is directed to the white sheet of paper before her and shows how she begins to sketch the boy’s eyes. In combination with her statement, which reads “Hold still a minute—I’m drawing your eyes [.],” the impression that the portraying is happening right now is evoked. The following panel tells us that there must have been a short time lag because Evans says: “There—you can move now. I’m just doing your collar.” The narratorial caption script is consistent with her direct utterance that comes without the typical frame of a comic’s speech balloon, and which is also consistent with the content of the panel inasmuch as Evans’ right hand holds the brush, which is dipped in blue paint to nish the boy’s collar. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that even a progressive tense is adapted from the painting style, because the paint of the brush is just about to drip down. Being at the same eye level as the comics journalist, or literally looking through and with the author’s eyes, can be found in every single piece of comics journalism. However, I would like to analyze a further example by another author. As the scene in Fig. 4.20 reveals, Glidden also chooses a ‘behindthe-scenes’ approach, which means that although she is always participating in interviews, and recording all she is listening to, she is not in the middle of the event but still observing. Her behavior stays the same during the journey and the book, respectively. She says: 266 I [. . . was] observing and documenting [the people] and capturing as much as I could with my little digital recorder. I recorded our conversations as we ate our meals, walked around cities, conducted interviews, and unwound at the end of the day with a beer or three. ( RB 6) Figure 4.20: Page, Interview with Dan ( Rolling Blackouts 35) In Fig. 4.20, one sees how a train compartment serves as place for conducting the interview. Stuteville as interviewer sits vis-à-vis Dan, who is the person being interviewed. Alex takes cares of the media equipment and is responsible for the camera and audio le. One sees him sitting on the bench on the other side of the aisle in the train compartment. His camera tripod is right in front of him. Glidden positions herself on the bench behind Stuteville, which is shown on the previous pages in the book. She seems to be looking over her shoulder, 267 hiding behind the others, and taking her own audio le. Dan is drawn from the perspective Stuteville, and thus also Glidden, see him. Hence, the recipient also looks directly at Dan. Being drawn frontally creates an impression of being in the immediate situation. It seems as if the reader directly talks to Dan. This type of panel and the angle from which it is drawn create a speci c kind of point of view, which leads to a high immersion of the reader. This can be seen as another feature of comics journalism. By giving the reader the feeling that she is looking over the shoulders of the comics journalist and doing journalistic work (for example, conducting interviews), in combination with a speci c choice and style of the drawing perspective (for example, mid-size, half-body posture, the comics journalist is presented with the back to the reader, allowing the recipient to adopt her position), a feeling of immediacy is created, which makes the recipient feel attached to the storyworld and to the topics that are discussed. The choice of the angle and perspective also holds for the examples of Threads that have been discussed above. These examples have shown that immersion is mainly created by the following means: The language used in the gure dialogue and the narratorial caption script is present and present progressive tense (see Fig. 4.16, 4.18). In addition, a perspective is used that allows the viewer to look ‘over the author’s shoulders’ (see Fig. 4.17). Furthermore, the arrangement of the panels and the perspectives from which the viewer looks at the panels can also create immersion (see Fig. 4.19). However, even if the portraits testify the authenticity of the comics journalist, they say little about the author’s credibility. It would be interesting to know whether a more realistic drawing style in uences the perception of the reader and suggests that a more realistic drawing is truer than an abstract sketch. Compared to Glidden, Evans’s drawing style is less abstract than Glidden’s; yet, as the example of Jahan has shown, there is no other means or medium to verify the boy’s appearance. What I want to point out and what connects to what I have discussed earlier, however, is that it is interesting to note that Evans ascribes increasing importance to photography, which is still generally considered to be more trustworthy than a drawing in our society. Whereas Evans rst drew a boy by showing him in the panels and in the portrait (see Fig. 4.17), in another portrait study, she shows a drawn smartphone which shows the copy of a photo of the man in order to validate her ability to draw and the resemblance of the portrait to the real man (see Fig. 4.16, 4.18). In another drawing session represented some pages later in the book, Evans eventually takes a photograph on the smartphone to prove her well-done drawing and the resemblance of the man with her portrait (see Fig. 4.21). 268 Figure 4.21: Page, Verifying Her Drawn Portrait with a Photograph ( Threads 113) 269 Chapter 4.1.1 has already addressed the use of photography in the storyworld. The last example also illustrates the multimedia use of photographic images. This insertion of images from smartphones with non-drawn, photolike pictures creates a way of immersion and authentication that blur the boundaries between the storyworld and reality. Teaching Art Workshops Comics journalists’ activism is also re ected in teaching art workshops. This is mostly the case when the comics journalist visits places which are di cult to access, such as prisons, war zones, refugee camps, and other areas of crisis, misery, and instability. A look at the list of works that were published after 2014 reveals the fact that in Europe, in particular, the topic of migration and the so-called refugee crisis have increasingly been adopted by comics journalism. The need to devote oneself to this topic and to initiate a social discourse is all the more remarkable when comics are used for this purpose. Apart from reporting on the challenges volunteers face, the way o cials and police authorities are dealing with asylum seekers, or highlighting the cultural di erences between nations, comics journalists provide pens, paper, and other materials to teach workshops on how to draw. In the following, three examples are examined in more detail—the rst example is by the German Reinhard Kleist (see Fig. 4.22), the second one by the Frenchman Nicolas Wild (see Fig. 4.23), and the third, by the Briton Kate Evans (see Fig. 4.24). Reinhard Kleist and Nicolas Wild were members of the “Refugee-project” by the German and French TV station ARTE. They were sent to the refugee camps Kawergosk in Iraq (Kleist), and Beldangi in Nepal (Wild) to visually report about the circumstances and living conditions of the camps’ residents. 23 The comic by Kleist describes the atmosphere in the camp and visually shows the living conditions of the people. Additionally, this example depicts the break with the mere role of journalistic observation, which was described earlier. Kleist admits in the panels of the storyworld that his work in the camp was highly emotional for him, and that he often had to “ ght back his tears” (see Fig. 4.22). Yet, many other comics journalists, who report on the misery in refugee shelters also have a hard time. Additionally, he is not alone in violating the norm of the physical distance between the journalist and the interviewee, as Chapter 4.1.2 has illustrated. Above all, the encounters with the children, for whom he o ers painting lessons, remain in his mind. By bringing along painting equipment, Kleist 23 Four groups of authors were sent to four di erent camps. Each ‘team’ consisted of a photographer, a writer, a lmmaker, and a comics journalist from the Western world. All of them had to ful ll the same mission; yet, each artist should approach the subject with a di erent medium. This transand multimedia work was the rst of its type to be carried out—and it still is unique. 270 interrupts the children’s daily solitude, and seems to have brought some joy to the kids, at least for a short period of time. In order to verify his presence, he does not refrain from incorporating the children’s pictures into his own work, which makes his piece also multimodal and more credible (see Fig. 4.22). Nicolas Wild experienced the same during a drawing workshop at the camp’s school. He wanted the children to draw their teacher. Because the teacher refused, Wild himself posed as a model. Like Kleist, he included some of the children’s drawings in the storyworld, which contributes to a strengthening of his authenticity as an author. For example, when Arjun Rai, one of the children, paints Nicolas Wild with a sketchbook, he testi es Wild’s attendance. Therefore, the insertion of the children’s drawings and their publication is another strategy of authentication on the part of the author. In addition, Wild’s glasses and beard are recurring elements that can be seen in all of the children’s drawings. Unlike Kleist, however, Wild comments on the sketches with an ironic view. This not only makes the situation credible, but also generates sympathy for his person. The question of why comics journalists give drawing sessions and for what purpose remains unanswered so far. Kleist gives us a hint when he says that “it’s better to put [the things the kids have seen] on paper, than to keep them in [their] heads” (see Fig. 4.22). In this regard, the next example by Evans might bring us closer to an answer. In Threads , Evans engages with art to di erent degrees. Whenever she accompanies other volunteers and walks through the camps, she is an overt but silent observer of the story. Even if the reader does not know what really happened and how Evans behaved in the camp, her eyewitness reports should mirror her experiences in the eld in the extratextual world due to the ‘pact’ between the author and the recipient. Hence, both in the extratextual world and in the storyworld, she is a comics journalist who observes the camp’s life and who witnesses many di erent incidents herself. Later in the text, Evans seems to be more engaged in the story she narrates because she leaves her observing role and becomes more active. For example, she starts to get in direct contact with the refugees as soon as she is portraying them in the Jungle’s art dome (see Fig. 4.21) because art does something “that [breaks] through linguistic and cultural boundaries” ( Threads 35). Evans’ friend Suzanne Partridge initiated this place—which is actually just a tent—and provides pens and papers for creating some kind of art (see Fig. 4.24). In doing so, volunteers provide a safe space where refugees—young and old, male and female, etc.—can take their minds o the misery they have been experiencing. For example, on the following splash page, one can see how adult men enjoy themselves in the colorful art dome for a short period of time. One of them comes up with the idea to roll out the wallpaper on the oor and to draw 271 Figure 4.22: Page Excerpt, Children Draw Reinhard Kleist ( Kawergosk - 5 Stars n. pag.) 272 Figure 4.23: Page Excerpt, Art Workshop with Children ( Beldangi n. pag.) man-size mannequins (see Fig. 4.24). The cut-out mannequins were hung out by Partridge to dry on “Red Tape between Power Lines” ( Threads 162-164, see Fig. 4.25). 24 This kind of performative art was created in March 2016. Eventually, the following panels pick up an emotional and haunting image because the mannequins whirl and y through the air—disordered, chaotic, faceless and characterless, with no aim, and no home to go to. They are qualitatively indistinguishable but in the mass, this image raises emotions, which is also due to the narratorial caption script that reads: “129 lone children disappeared from the camp during the evictions. No-one will ever know what happened to them all” ( Threads 166). Here, however, it is not clear whether this art action can also be attributed to Partridge, or whether Evans has ru ed up this image and further developed it into her art on the comic book page as 24 The title is a play on words, ‘to hang [someone] out to dry’ means to leave (someone) in a di cult situation, especially when she is taking blame for a failure or an act of wrongdoing. 273 Figure 4.24: Page, Leisure Time at the Jungle’s Art Dome ( Threads 162) 274 Figure 4.25: Page, Flying Mannequins at the Camp in Calais ( Threads 167) 275 a visual metaphor. However, to some extent, this situation of unaccompanied and underage refugees is reminiscent of the incidents at the American-Mexican border in 2019, where minors were separated from their parents and families were split up while eeing from their home countries. Similar to the children and young adults in refugee camps, sometimes no one knows what happened to these migrant children blocked at the Mexican border. 25 In my view, this image is already an allusion to the political dimension, a topic on which the next section will focus in more detail. The Comics Journalist as a Political Activist At the beginning of this chapter, I described that activism in the sense of the involvement and engagement of the author in the story is located more on the right side of the scale I have introduced. In my view, political activism is probably the most pronounced form of activism, especially because it tries to in uence other people and to motivate them to act and participate. Moreover, political activism and calls for engagement on the Internet have the potential of having an impact on or, under certain circumstances, of causing a storm of protest among those who think di erently. In a free democracy, free speech and freedom of demonstration are basic rights and taken for granted. Nevertheless, given the blurring between journalism and activism, there is certainly nothing wrong with maintaining a critical view. In other words, a political outing as a comics journalist sometimes not only generates advantages and may not only be evaluated positively. For example, there is a risk of freelancers losing their standing or institutional a liation because of their public positioning for or against something. I am thinking, for example, of Ted Rall, who has been actively campaigning for Bernie Sanders since the end of 2019, and who has also visually captured this time in non ction comics on his Facebook page (T. Rall, “Facebook Page: Syndicated political cartoonist and columnist. Graphic novelist, comics journalist, author.”). Political Dimension One can postulate that journalism, activism, and politics often intersect in comics journalism. Some scholars argue that the political dimension in comics journalism is far higher than in other comics genres (cf. Hahn 83). If one links the concept of witnessing to the observation of political involvement, following Schmidt and Voges, the witness and thus the comics journalist owns the most objective knowledge as possible. She is also an ethical-political actor (cf. S. Schmidt and Voges 11) acting as a “medium” 25 In 2018, more than 49,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended at the US border, according to the Department of Homeland Security (cf. Kinosian and Holpuch). 276 and a “messenger-person” at once (11). 26 One could even go a step further and argue that if it is about form and marginalized groups, it must be about politics, even if comics journalist are not obliged to and many do not reveal their favor of political parties. It would not be false to argue that politics always resonates in comics journalism due to its still not-mainstream-form. Sometimes it is more, sometimes less; sometimes this happens more obviously, sometimes more covertly; sometimes through the actions of the comics journalist, sometimes through the mere thematic presentation of topics that require more attention than many other media seem to o er. 27 However, one should di erentiate between having an opinion on politics and being politically involved, which are two di erent things. In the following case, art attempts to refer to a political imbalance with the power of comics. Four authors use this medium to attract attention and encourage other people to engage in activist imitation. In the following case, The Nib published these pieces of comics journalism, which consist of four parts and are entitled “History is Happening: Four Cartoonists on Organizing and Activism” (cf. Palmer and Taylor). Roxanne Palmer, who is one of the contributing comics journalists, remarks that “[a]fter the 2016 election, [she] knew [. . . ] [she had to] [. . . ] join the Democratic Socialists of America” (see Fig. 4.26). Whit Taylor, for her part, believes in the power of comics “to tell and promote the stories” that “need to exist in this world” (see Fig. 4.27). In Taylor’s view, activism exists in many forms. In the real world, she is using her background in public health and anthropology to cover her ghting for a free press and Donald Trump’s removal from o ce by the means of non ction comics. Call for Engagement and Participation In the following, I will examine the political dimension of comics journalism, and consider the author’s call for engagement and participation in contemporary discourses, rst, as the ultimate form of the author’s involvement, and second, as another method to authenticate her persona. In this respect, this section shows that approaching comics journalism exclusively on the textual level is not su cient, and that a complete picture of authorship and the author’s roles can be obtained only by 26 The original reads, “[E]r ist Träger von möglichst objektivem Wissen, aber auch ethischpolitischer Akteur, und das Zeugnis ist authentische Spur eines Ereignisses, aber auch soziales und diskursives Produkt.” 27 cf. “South Sudan: Who Got What? ” by de Waal and Ndula, “How Voter Fraud Works - and Mostly Doesn’t” by Cagle, “The Honduran Coup: A Graphic History” by Archer, “This is what a Brexit smells like: Reek of discontent continues to permeate Britain’s relationship with EU” by Hall, Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classi ed US History by Hoerger et al., “Winding up the Window: The End of the Australian Auto Industry” by Wallman 277 Figure 4.26: Screenshot, “History is Happening: Four Cartoonists on Organizing and Activism,” Third Part by Roxanne Palmer (Palmer and Taylor n. pag.) taking the extratextual world into due considerations as well. In other words, by calling for the recipients’ commitment, involvement, or participation in politics, in particular in demonstrations, via social media channels, the author, rst, reveals parts of herself, second, creates publicity, and third, allows the crowd to fact-check and prove her work. One can observe that many comics journalists engage in politics in the real world—some more covertly, some very overtly. As explained above, Evans belongs to those who speak of themselves as activists, and who use comics journalism to raise awareness in society. The Russian Victoria Lomasko, in comparison, actively expresses her stance by participating in activist events. According to her, she was once invited to be a member of the jury at the “Side by Side LGBT” lm festival in Saint Petersburg, although she was neither a member of the LGBT community nor an expert in cinema, “[b]ut given what was happening in Russia, the festival had become a political event, and being 278 Figure 4.27: Screenshot, “History is Happening: Four Cartoonists on Organizing and Activism,” Fourth Part by Whit Taylor (Palmer and Taylor n. pag.) involved in it was a clear way of expressing [her] civic stance” (Lomasko 225). Moreover, especially under the Trump administration, artists, among them Sarah Glidden, and Josh Neufeld (see Fig. 4.28a, 4.28b), started to position themselves against the latest US politics in public. For example, both Ted Rall and Josh Neufeld participated in the “Women’s March” on January 21, 2017. The goal of this worldwide protest was to advocate legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues, including women’s rights. Before and during the demonstration, Rall, Neufeld, and other comics journalists made a plea to participate in the protests in their social media accounts (cf. Rall’s and Neufeld’s Facebook pages, see Fig. 4.28a, 4.28b). This commitment also entails risks. For example, their calls or participations in demonstration could 279 damage their professional reputation, obstruct new projects, or eventually reduce their fan base. As will be shown in due course, the ways of production and distribution are organized di erently from those in traditional journalism, with a greater in uence of the comics journalist’s own authorship and thus readership (see Ch. 4.2.3). (a) Screenshot, Josh Neufeld Participates in the Women’s March, Standing in the Crowd (Rosler) (b) Screenshot, Sarah Glidden Participates in the Women’s March, Preparing Signposts (Glidden, “Getting ready”) Figure 4.28: Engagement of Comics Journalists in the “Women’s March 2017” However, there is an ethical dividing line between a journalist who is investigating and expressing her point of view on the one hand, and a journalist who is clearly biased and driven by a political agenda on the other. While many newsrooms have guidelines, for example, on marches, authors who are working as freelancers have to set their own rules and are committed to them. Does waving a poster, or joining a political demonstration violate the journalist’s obligation of impartiality? The answer is anything but simple. Often, it is also about individual decisions. In such cases, the comics journalist’s calling for involvement, interest, or (political) action is as much a tactical and personal decision as it is a moral judgment. Consequently, following what activists go through can lead to a rich, sympathetic, and authentic coverage. Nevertheless, it can also lead to questions of maintaining a proper distance and emotional impact in journalism. Let us look at what happened in the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson in 2014. Stephen Barnard, a professor of sociology at St. Lawrence University, 280 analyzed the use of Twitter by activists and journalists during the events. According to Barnard, in the chaos of the protests, which sometimes turned violent, the boundaries between journalists and activists vanished, which produced a hybrid form of ‘citizen journalists.’ “[ J]ourno-activists,” as he calls them, often report on breaking news on social media, mixing personal with professional opinions (cf. Barnard). In this confusion of di erent voices, Dan Archer chose the path of the more neutral narrator in Ferguson Firsthand (see Ch. 3.1.2). To brie y recall, as a comics journalist, Archer does not appear on the storyworld level but rather collects the facts, which are based on the statements of journalists, witnesses, and the police in a documentary way. Each reader is given the neccessary information and has to make up her own mind. All in all, one can note that there is a di erent degree of calling for engagement. Some authors just point at a controversial topic by verbally mentioning it; others encourage readers to get actively involved whatsoever. The Form of Comics Itself Research has shown that comics interact with the spheres of politics and the political in many ways. Hence, another way of looking at the political dimension of comics journalism—without reference to the content—consists in examining the choice of the medium itself, because the comic can already be seen as a political statement in itself. Moreover, as a form of artistic expression, and as a partially popular, alternative, and marginalized genre, comics have speci c political dimensions (cf. Packard, “Politisches im Comic und Comics in der Politik: Einleitung”). Caroline Levine suggests that “form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics” and that forms can, indeed, transport political meaning as well (Levine 2). She understands “form” as “all shapes and con gurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and di erence,” because in her opinion, “forms are the stu of politics.” For her, politics is “a matter of distributions and arrangements.” She concludes that “if the political is a matter of imposing and enforcing boundaries, temporal patterns, and hierarchies of experience, then there is no politics without form” (3). The political dimension in and of comics has to be located in the eld of social commentary. However, comics—like cartoons and caricatures, too—can be a useful tool for gauging the political climate of our contemporary culture. They can o er a satisfying glimpse into the world of politics from a di erent perspective. Such political visual commentaries have a lot to do with the popularity of the persons depicted but also with the political stances of the writers, as well as with the political and moral guidelines of the institutions and newsrooms. There are di erent places to talk about the form of comics. It has already been mentioned in the theory section, but I would like to take a closer look at the 281 political dimension of comics and, consequently, of comics journalism here by introducing another form of comics journalism that I have intentionally left out because of its ‘atypicality.’ Other Russias by Victoria Lomasko is a special case for at least two reasons: First, this piece of comics journalism challenges the basic idea of what a comic book should look like. In the narrowest sense, it does not ful ll the requirements of sequential art, and thus does not count as comics per de nitionem because it lacks the sequentialized panel structure on every page. Second, and more importantly, the place of publication and the Russian nationality of the comics journalist seems to matter more than the content. In such, it in uences and privileges the form of Lomasko’s work because comics journalism is almost not presented at all in the states of the former Soviet Union. 28 The paperback publication consists of 320 pages. Lomasko does not like the panel-by-panel-structure of the comics medium—the most important criterion to disqualify comics journalism. Hence, she decided to publish her graphic reportages, which is a collection of her non ction work from 2008 to 2016. Moreover, the format of the work is quite untypical for ‘novel-length’ comics journalism; it is 13x19.5 cm, which is a bit smaller than DIN A5. Additionally, the images are rather sketches and not detailed drawings which makes an understanding of comics journalism even more challenging because her drawing style does not resemble reality very much, compared to the other comics journalists I have discussed in this study. In this regard, I do not consider Lomasko’s work of comics journalism as a prototypical example. However, if one treats each small page as a single frame, one has still to do with some kind of sequential art, although in a very broad and liberal de nition of comics that is very seldom in the current comics journalistic mediascape. Generally, looking at the Russian market reveals that there are almost no non ction comics. Keeping in mind that the freedom of press in Russia is very limited compared to Western Europe, choosing comics as a connotated form to transport sociopolitical ideas and opinions is a message in itself. In this regard, the rich history of comics with (counter-)political statements, especially the Underground Comix scene, comes to mind. Consequently, Lomasko’s statement on the form and on the way she is doing non ction reporting also mirrors a way of protest against Russian politics and the social discourse with art. The usual methods of Western documentary comics were not conductive to what I wanted to do, either, since their frame-byframe layout felt at odds with the sense of immediacy that I was after. [. . . ] I turned to the practices of the 19th and 20th centuries— 28 There is a research gap about Eastern European and Russian comics journalism, even though comiXconnection exhibits the recent independent comics from Serbia, Croatia, Slowenia, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Hungaria, and Romania in March 2020 at the Museum of European Cultures. 282 namely to the albums produced by Russian soldiers, concentration camp inmates, and people who experienced the Nazi siege of Leningrad. In many cases [. . . ] this was the only kind of reporting that was done in these brutal conditions—these albums were the sole act of witness. [. . . ] What I was trying to do [. . . ] was to break through to a more direct grasp and re ection of the reality around me. (Lomasko 8) In Lomasko’s case, dealing with artistic freedom and intellectual property is more precarious, as compared to European comics journalists. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been “an unspoken taboo on realistic gurative art, especially life drawing” (Lomasko 8) by Russian art institutions. Pursuing this kind of life drawing in a non-Western tradition can be seen as Lomasko’s protest. She wants to present a “true picture of Russian society” because the “people from di erent social groups whose lives [she] reported on also had scant notion of how other social classes in their own country lived” (9). Due to several other reasons, Lomasko, then, decided to become “an independent researcher, journalist, and activist. [She] made working at the crossroads of journalism and human rights activism [her] creative method” (9). Lomasko’s example shows that in our time, critics, especially in the Marxist tradition, have often read literary forms “as attempts to contain social clashes and contradictions” (Levine 4). Applying Levine’s idea that “politics also means enforcing hierarchies of high and low, white and black, masculine and feminine, straight and queer, have and have-not,” the political is a matter of imposing and enforcing boundaries. In Lomasko’s case, it is a matter of formal creativity, which can be read as an artistic protest against Russia’s norms. In such, it eventually approves Levine’s argument that there is no politics without form (cf. Levine 3). In this regard, forms, methods, and hierarchies also play a role in the analysis of authorship in comics journalism, which will be analyzed in the following section. 4.2 Practices of Authorship in Comics Journalism It has already been shown that comics journalism is characterized by a strong authorship with a multifaceted role of the author. Moreover, it has also already been analyzed that comics journalism has many means at its disposal to prove the truth and accuracy of facts on the textual level. To expand on this, the following part is intended to give more insights into the creative world of comics journalists and to give an impression of the practices authors use in 283 comics journalism. I pursue, among others, the following questions: ‘What working methods and practices do comics journalists use? How do they approach the creation of comics journalism? What problems do they face, for example, with regard to institutional dependence, or nancial issues? ’ While the rst section of this chapter has taken a special role and discusses both the textual and the extratextual world, this part will exclusively describe how authorship is handled (here one can see the link to the third part of the pact) and how it is performed in reality. I argue that the disclosure of the author’s working process, her environment, and working conditions promotes the authenticity of comics journalism. Therewith, it introduces another way to strategically generate and support the credibility of facts and the authenticity of authors. The consideration of the extratextual world inevitably suggests a look at the author’s methods and strategies of presenting herself credibly, as well as of verifying the content she conveys. The ‘comics journalistic pact’ already aims at trust and credibility, and emphasizes the great responsibility of the author towards her readership. However, in order not to end up in a no-man’s-land of woolly hypotheses, my starting point is to ask how comics journalists can demonstrate their credibility at all? In this context, Gladstone asks a legitimate question, namely whether one trusts journalists more if one knows more about them (cf. Gladstone and Neufeld 112, see Fig. 4.29). Figure 4.29: Page Excerpt, “[W]ould [Y]ou [T]rust [T]hem [M]ore [. . . ]? ” ( The In uencing Machine 112) The question that follows is then what kind of information would help the reader to con rm the credibility. Is it about getting to know about the author’s way of education, her professional experience, or a list of previous employers; 284 or should journalists also reveal more private information, such as their political and religious views, preferences, hobbies etc., as some bloggers already do? Because the position is increasingly gaining ground that “[t]ransparency is the new objectivity” (see Fig. 4.30). Introductions to factual journalistic genres, such as news reports and longform articles, call on credibility, honesty, truthfulness, ethicality, competency, preciseness, and accuracy—terms that are often also morally and emotionally charged. At the same time, these characteristics can be linked to the multifaceted term “authenticity,” which can be treated as the opposite of ction, fake, or the unreal (cf. Weber and H. - M. Rall, “Comics Journalism and Animated Documentary” n. pag.; “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 5). “Credibility,” which might be explained as the (comics) journalist’s genuine appearance, focuses on the degree of expertise and trustworthiness of the author. In general, “credibility” refers to the quality of being believed or accepted as true, real, or honest, which is also an essential feature of a journalist’s work. But as Matthias Kohring, professor of journalism theory, science journalism, and public media, remarks, there is no reliable tool to measure the author’s trustworthiness and credibility (cf. Kohring 18-19). 29 There are doubts as to whether science will nd a way to measure credibility at all, but the bottom line is that journalism remains a matter of trust—within editorial o ces and between journalists and their readers (cf. Büchsenmann n. pag.). 30 In this regard, credibility is particularly crucial to a (comics) journalist’s career, as well as to the prestige of media institutions, and should be a principle and a pro ciency at the same time (cf. “Credibility”). However, the question remains what comics journalism o ers to prove the author’s credibility. While some scholars suggest that the age, life experience, position, and leadership role of the author are indicators of credibility (cf. Dernbach 309), I doubt that these aspects do justice to comics journalists, because what is problematic about Dernbach’s categories is that, in my view, age and (life) experience can only help to assess an author’s credibility to some degree. It would be wrong to conclude that older and more experienced and trained people (with regard to their age and job experience) have more life experience, or write better than their younger colleagues—especially in the context of comics journalism, which is a relatively new eld with mostly young practitioners. 31 29 Kohring distinguishes four dimensions of credibility in journalism. These are the selection of issues, the selection of facts, the accuracy of the description, and the trust in validation (cf. Kohring 171-172). 30 The original reads, “Unterm Strich aber bleibt Journalismus eine Sache des Vertrauens: Innerhalb der Redaktionen und zwischen Journalisten und ihren Lesern.” 31 Besides the comparatively young age of the research eld, many comics journalists are not only at the beginning of their careers but are relatively young themselves. For example, 285 In my mind, a helpful way to check on the comics journalist’s position and authenticity requires an innovative approach to the so-called new media. Our life is characterized by digitality and digitalization, as well as by an appropriate handling of social media that allows formerly separate areas of life to merge more and more into each other. This can be seen in the fact that although large publishing houses and media institutions use their own o cial social media channels, the majority of journalists also use their own private accounts to make statements, provide facts, or participate in online discussion. Building the reader’s trust in the authenticity of the journalist requires the know-how necessary to use the di erent multimedia platforms and social media channels, and to select appropriate target groups, as well as knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of these media. This is not to say, however, that the author’s experience in the professional world and in writing articles do no longer play a role, but in my opinion, this experience should be supplemented by su cient skills in the ‘use of social media.’ The Internet does not forget, and, if used correctly, journalism and comics journalism can bene t from it. This includes, for example, especially the disclosure of the production process, the evidence of its sources 32 , the traceability of how much emotionality and distance one allows towards the subjects, how and what criteria one sets to make choices, etc. In my view, even if I agree to the claim that a transparently working journalist is more likely to be credible and reliable, expecting transparency does not mean to get a full X-ray-like image of the comics journalist, as it is presented in The In uencing Machine (113, see Fig. 4.30). It is not about being conveyed an intimate, con dential, and highly personal disclosure of the comics journalist by herself. Instead, it analyzes the author’s willingness to show her working method and her transparent dealing with the issues surrounding the production context, funding, and way of working. A willing declaration by the author herself and her assessment of what she considers appropriate to disclose or not should be handled di erently for each individual and each piece of comics journalism. Should someone visit a refugee camp and not be pro-asylum, the reader will certainly expect to be told. For example, it would have had serious consequences if Evans had not indicated in Hilhorst, Archer and Kramer are in their early 40s, Glidden was born in 1980, and the authors of “Alphabet of Arrival” are in their mid-20s and mid-30s. Apart from Sacco, who was born in 1960; Delisle, who was born in 1966; as well as Neufeld and Chappatte, who both were born in 1967, many of the comics journalists belong to a new generation of comics creators who started to read comics not as lowbrow literature. Their socialization with comics has been di erent from that of their parents decades ago. 32 The protection of sources is a broad and extremely important topic in journalism in general. Often, there are good reasons why sources cannot or may not be openly named, like in investigative journalism, or when privacy is at stake. 286 Figure 4.30: Page, “Transparency [I]s the [N]ew [O]bjectivity” ( The In uencing Machine 113) 287 Figure 4.31: Page Excerpt, “[I]s [T]hat [T]oo [M]uch [I]nformation? ” ( The In uencing Machine 111) Threads that she sees herself as an activist. Hence, extra background knowledge about the author contributes to the topic or the research process but, in my mind, it is a sense of what is good and appropriate. Private issues, in contrast, are “too much information” and may appear unprofessional and out of place, because then they would have to be relegated to the genre of “memoir” (see Fig. 4.31). 33 4.2.1 Staging of the Authorship? At this point, I would like to discuss the degree of authenticity of authorship itself because it can turn into a very important aspect that in uences the reception of comics journalism. What if the author only plays her authorship despite all markers of reality? What if she uses the textimmanent representation of authorship for her own purposes? What if she pretends to be in the text what she is not in reality? The questions do not seem prudent to me because from a sociological point of critique, there remains a residual risk that authorship can 33 This reminds me of the situation in which Sarah Glidden hears her own voice for the rst time during the production of RB and she notices that it is “unbearable” listening to herself “trying to impress [her] friends” ( RB 42-43). She thinks she sounds like an “idiot” and remarks that “this isn’t [another] memoir” ( RB 42-43). 288 be staged indeed. Therefore, I would like to use the following case to illustrate that not only facts can be feigned, but that authorship can also be staged. The a air caused by journalist Claas Relotius, who used to write for DER SPIEGEL , has brought to light various aspects. 34 What is of most interest is the relationship between the individual journalist and the system of journalism because in the course of the revelation of this scandal, it was often argued that especially reportage journalists would aestheticize the world. For many journalists, the only way to cope with the pressure caused by the journalistic system, including the expectations of editors in chief and jurors, as well as the readers, who are willing to pay only for ‘good’ stories, was an aesthetic transformation of reality into a written text. In her article, Hülsen explains how some journalists believe to have no other option than to escape into their imagination and ctional world when they are writing their articles, which are thus not based on facts at all. Thus, since December 2018 at the latest, the entire profession of (German) reportage journalists has been placed under general suspicion. Even if one cannot deny the high responsibility of the media institution and its weak supervision, in Relotius’ case, however, it remains primarily the guilt and fallibility of the individual ; and, yet, the individual journalist is anchored in the traditional journalistic system. If a journalistic brand functions so smoothly, you thus have to ask what a system must be like so that lies and deception do not attract further attention (cf. Assheuer 42). Relotius’ case has underlined that facts are and should be sacred to readers, writers, and editors. But theory and reality are often di erent from each other. The importance of fact-checking—particularly when it comes to details—is based on the long-held theory that if one is meticulous about the ‘little’ aspects of a story (such as many details) the reader is more likely to trust the author about the ‘large’ facts. To check the facts is to assure recipients that great care is being taken. 35 Clemens Höges, member of the editorial board of DER 34 Claas Relotius was a former journalist who received many awards in journalism for his supposedly brilliant writing style. In 2018, his colleague Juan Moreno revealed that Relotius cheated in about 55 texts in the magazine, invented stories for better narrative arcs and dramatic suspense, and has never talked to people he mentioned in his reportages. As one of the most prestigious magazines in Europe, DER SPIEGEL was shocked and deeply su ered from a loss of readership and a signi cant decline in the readers’ trust in the institution of DER SPIEGEL in particular and the media in general. Relotius’ background, his writing style, his rhetorical brilliance, and his keen instinct for great stories caused all the authorities to trust him. Everybody trusted him because of the reliability he seemed to have developed over the years, his persona, and later also his ctive e-mail correspondence with people he had never spoken to or met. He was characterized by his colleagues as a polite, friendly, and inconspicuous young man. In the end, Relotius, his head of department, and the editor in chief had to leave o ce. The fact-checking documentarist at DER SPIEGEL left the news magazine at his own request. 35 Colin Dickey, an American author, curator, and critic, describes in his article “The Rise and Fall of Facts” in the Columbia Journalism Review the history of fact-checking by drawing on the 289 SPIEGEL , declares, “I would actually be happy if the ‘Relotius’ a air did not disappear, but if it always tells us—and our colleagues in other houses as well—what could happen [. . . ]. Relotius—I think this incident will not quickly disappear—and this is a good thing” (Bouhs n. pag., my translation). 36 Sociologist Erving Go man uses the imagery of the theatre’s “stage” to analyze the importance of human social interaction and the relationship between them. 37 In his dramaturgical account of human interaction, which is entitled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Day Life , he argued that people display a series of masks to others, enacting roles, and controlling, and staging how they appear. Whenever they are in the presence of others, they adopt particular strategic roles in order to evoke the desired responses from their audience. He challenged the idea that each of us has a more or less xed character. In his view, people are concerned how they come across, and how they can set themselves in the best light. According to Go man, authenticity is not so much about choosing a role which readily accords with a person’s innermost self. Rather, it lies in the choice of the most appropriate role for the di erent types of social interaction in which people engage, as well as how convincingly they perform their roles in front of others. In this regard, he argues that there is no true self, no identi able performer behind the roles. The roles just are the performer (cf. Go man). 38 However, I am not suggesting that comics journalists deliberately stage their authorship. (Relotius, for sure, was an extreme example here.) I think that it is not about the fact that authorship is staged, but rather how and to what extent it is staged in comics journalism. Hillary Chute also writes quite appropriately that comics texts “eliminate the question of ‘staging’ entirely: they are evidently staged, built, made images as opposed to ‘taken’ ones” (Chute, Disaster Drawn 21). This is why I assume that the transparency of the work process and production conditions as comics journalists reveal them on the Internet are crucial for an analysis of comics journalism and reduce the impression of a staging of authorship. Comics journalists are su ciently professional to know the e ects of the media and their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, a e orts of the Associated Press , the New York World , the Time , and Harper’s , among other things. Dickey suggests that too often, the accumulation of veri able minutiae can become an end in itself (cf. Dickey n. pag.). 36 The original reads, “Ich wäre eigentlich froh, wenn die A äre ‘Relotius’ nicht verschwinden würde, sondern wenn sie uns, aber durchaus auch Kollegen in anderen Häusern immer sagt, was passieren kann [. . . ]. Relotius—ich glaube, das wird nicht schnell verschwinden. Und das ist gut so.” 37 Moreover, in following Go man’s analogy of the theatre and the application of masks, I again see the link to my concept of the ‘cartoon-me’ (see Ch. 3.2.3). 38 Caroline John-Wenndorf has written about the self-representation of ctional writers from a historical, discourse-analytical, and representation-critical point of view (cf. John-Wenndorf). She explores the question of how writers of ction present themselves in public. 290 perfectly written article, after all, can still be fundamentally wrong about its facts. Here again, the question regarding the complexity of the presentation of facts mentioned in Ch. 2.2 comes full circle. From the point of view of a journalist, “facts themselves lack the ability to deliver one to the truth. But unlike beliefs or opinions, facts are quanti able. They can be agreed upon. They are communal property” (Dickey n. pag.). Journalists have to contextualize the facts but what does this tell us about their dealing with credibility? Consequently, in order to overcome (or even avoid) a possible ‘staging’ of the authorship, authentication strategies become tremendously important. This is where comics journalism di ers from traditional news media because these insights often remain inaccessible to the reader, and comics journalism tries to improve this aspect. Hence, authorship on the extratextual level can be characterized by the following properties—subjectivity instead of false neutrality, a coherent depiction of reality, an individual approach instead of a strong institutional power, as well as the disclosure of the research process, which to some extent or other also includes the disclosure of assignments, and opinions by authors. The following list shows the most frequently used options by comics journalists to create credibility and authenticity: • comments on the methods of working and the production context (understanding of journalism, reasons for this topic, possible di culties while creating, etc.; see also Ch. 3.1.4) • disclosure of the assignment and speci cations of (institutionalized) a liation (type of funding, freelancing, reputation of the institution one is working for, etc.) • an extensive use of social media channels (for feedback, networking, advertising, distributing, branding, etc.; see Ch. 4.3) 4.2.2 Phases and Methods of Working Naturally, the creation of a piece of comics journalism varies depending on the size of the topic, the sources, the equipment that is available, and other aspects. In the US-American comics industry, the functions of an individual “writerartist” (Harvey 26) are divided into many work steps and thus distributed to di erent persons. A di erent claim is to be made for comics journalism because it deals di erently with the hierarchical structure of traditional journalistic newsrooms due to several institutional, personnel, and occupational requirements. Compared to the US way of doing journalism, and compared to the creation of ctional comics, in comics journalism, one encounters almost no hierarchy during the production; and if at all, it is only a very at one. This can be explained by the fact that comics journalism is more situated in the eld of independent journalism than corporate journalism. Moreover, 291 apart from multiand transmedia projects, the majority of comics journalists tends to work independently, which is very similar, if not identical, to the Autorencomics / auteur comics (see Ch. 2.3.1). Nevertheless, it can be assumed that a comics journalist who writes for a renowned newspaper also faces a certain level of hierarchies and dependencies than a comics journalist who edits and publishes her own book. Figure 4.32: Screenshot, Building Comics (Lefeuvre n. pag.) Fig. 4.32 shows the persons involved in creating ctional comics. In contrast, in the case of single authorship, these functions are all performed by the comics journalist herself. Statements by comics journalists have revealed that their work process can often be distinguished into di erent phases, because authorship describes a process of thinking, working, and editing over a period of time that requires a certain set of activities (cf. Weaver and Willnat). Although a splitting of authorship into several phases will not hold for all times, because, similar to the theory of genre, a theory of authorship is also subject to historical discussion and very likely to change over time, it is a helpful starting point to access the practices of comics journalists. Many comics journalists give insights into their way of working in interviews, on their social media accounts, or in introductory chapters of their pieces of comics journalism. I have classi ed these phases and suggest the following distinction: • pre- eldwork (idea, research, planning, searching for funding) • eldwork (the actual trip: researching, collecting data, talking to people, making notes and sketches) • post- eldwork (drawing, writing, scripting, lettering) 292 • publication (editing, announcing, advertizing, releasing) 39 It always starts with the idea and the desire to understand things more closely, to draw attention to them, or to give marginalized people a voice. 40 This process of ‘ eldwork’ is followed by a research journey of varying duration, deepness, and length. Often, the reason or the motivation for a topic is also mentioned in the beginning of the work itself. For example, Joe Sacco’s works thematize the necessity of his trips related to the sociopolitical circumstances at that time. In his joined work with Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt , one can read that they wanted to show in words and drawings “what life looks like when the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize pro t.” They wanted to look what the ideology of “unfettered capitalism means for families, communities, workers and the ecosystem” (Hedges and Sacco XI). Sarah Glidden also dedicates the rst book chapter of Rolling Blackouts to this second phase of ‘ eldwork,’ sketching her central ideas and motivation for her project. Another example is Weisse Wölfe , whose creators Schraven and Feindt are part of the German investigative network correctiv.org . They think that there is no point in believing that evil things in the world will disappear themselves just because one ignores them long enough. Their motivation was that they felt obliged to ght the right-wing racial terrorism in Europe (cf. Schraven and Feindt). 41 Hence, the second phase involves all things surrounding the conduction of a eld study and is very similar among the majority of comics journalists. What comics journalists do, and which is an essential part of their creative process is, immersing themselves in real communities impacted by the issue they plan to report about. For example, in 2013, Dan Archer traveled to Nepal to get rst-hand accounts about human tra cking. He did not want to be the person “who parachutes in, takes pictures of poor desperate people, and then returns to his comfort zone” (cf. “Interview. Illustrating struggles”). He listened to “ rsthand stories instead of taking clichéd snapshots” (cf. “Interview. Illustrating struggles”). The main tools of a comics journalist for working are pen and paper. Depending on which of the categories an assignment falls into, comics journalists also take along an audio recorder, or most simply the smartphone phone which 39 The dividing lines between ‘post- eldwork’ and ‘publication’ sometimes overlap. Hence, one could also combine the third and fourth stage. 40 The intrinsic motivation between freelancers and employed sta might di er, because employees have less choice than self-employed comics journalists. Anyway, this does not a ect my subdivision. 41 In the comics reportage, they critically, intellectually, artistically, and narratively deal with the content of the “Turner Diaries,” which are actually forbidden to quote, even if they are the ideological foundation of the right terror in Germany. 293 they have on them anyway, a sketchbook, perhaps some other pencils, and a (travel) color set if there is enough time to already add the color (cf. JSK). The information gathering process is the same as in traditional text-based journalism. They have conversations, record them, and, ideally, always ask for permission before turning on the recorder (cf. JSK; cf. comic.de). They note down quotes and, if possible, take reference photos and audio records. Glidden and Kugler, for example, always try to use the original sound. Neither do they use dialogues that had not happened, nor ctionalized persons. The most important rule is, according to Glidden, to never deceive the reader (cf. comic.de n. pag.). In many cases one can observe that the author is sitting and sketching, being fully immersed into working. For example, the photograph that shows Felix Schaad is taken while he is drawing in the Ebola camp in Sierra Leone (see Fig. 4.33). Some comics journalists sketch their interviewees and their body posture to capture their personality better when they later draw up the nal artwork (third phase), or they make sketches of events, places, and some of the details the interlocutors mention in their accounts, to ensure accuracy, as Archer remarks (cf. JSK). 42 Quite often, all visual and textual notes come together on the same page, and—if there is time—get colored. Archer, then, takes those pages home and arranges the structure of the piece: This stage involves sketching up thumb-nailed pages to give my editors a rough outline of the page composition and pacing. Once they approve it, then I draw up the artwork at original size, scan it in, color it in Photoshop, apply the lettering digitally for easier edits and turn everything into nished pages to send, either as TIFFs for print or JPEGs for the web. (cf. JSK) Based on readings, interviews, and authors’ websites, the following conclusions can be drawn. One can observe two di erent strategies of working methods while being on a research trip during the second phase: 43 42 In contrast, Glidden who experiences the following, “‘I thought I was going to be doing a ton of sketching on site, so I brought this thick sketchbook with me. But that book ended up getting lled with notes instead! I was constantly writing, and there was no time for drawing, which is too bad. But I also took a ton of photos, so I used those for reference a lot. I really wanted to give the comic a sense of place, and to show people what the country looks like, so it was important to me to get the details right’” (qtd. in Wolk, “Interview: Sarah Glidden on How to Understand Israel ” n. pag.). 43 Generally, Grünewald di erentiates between two sorts of authors: Those who reproduce the material collected after the journey as authentically and faithfully as possible (it is equivalent to my option B), and those, who, through precise observations though, reproduce their material in reportages that are nevertheless realistic at their core message (it is equivalent to option A) (Grünewald, Der dokumentarische Comic: Reportage und Biogra e 12). 294 Figure 4.33: Collage, Insights into Felix Schaad’s Sketchbook (Schaad, “Die Comic-Zeichnung aus der Todeszone”) 295 • Option A: The rst step is to collect and document data and information by drawing and taking notes in sketchbooks. The second step consists of nal writing, lettering, coloring, and editing at the desk back home. Photographs and other visual media have only a supportive and commemorative function to create the story. • Option B: The rst step is to take photographs and record audiovisual media for note-keeping, which is the main technique. A few sketches every now and then might support the testimony. The second step consists of the nal writing, lettering, coloring, drawing, arranging, and editing back at home. Russian cartoonist Victoria Lomasko “felt the need to complete [her] drawings on the spot, to serve as a conductor for the energy generated by events as they happened” (Lomasko 8). She sketched in public places, and immediately added to the drawings what their subjects were saying (8). In contrast, German comics journalist Olivier Kugler, who lives in the UK now, pursues option B because, in his view, drawing takes too much time and requires more attention to create. This is why his work cannot do without photos as a basis: His method of working involves little in the way of pre-planning. He simply walks around looking for objects or settings that he would like to draw [. . . ]. Instead of a sketchbook, he carries a digital recorder to tape his interviews, and a camera. Sketching, he says, is ine cient when he has such limited time on the ground. Instead, he takes hundreds of photographs. Each evening, he reviews the day’s work and plots scenes in a notebook, sketching rough compositions and page layouts. (cf. Humphreys n. pag.) This phase, which I call ‘post- eldwork,’ depends on individual habits and might overlap with the working steps of the second phase. One can state—and this possibly comes without little surprise—that the editing process almost always takes place in the aftermath of a trip. To stick to this example, which is representative of many others, only when Kugler is back in his East London studio, he begins the drawing based on the photographs he took. He, then, scans his often large drawings and edits them with a computer program which allows Kugler to move elements around onscreen in search of the ideal composition and also to add color (cf. Humphreys). Although each author proceeds di erently, the editing in the aftermath at home (the ‘post- eldwork’ or ‘publication phase’) is important for many reasons, especially with regard to time. It o ers the possibility to classify what comics journalists experienced and have seen during their journey. This passing of time between being on the ground and editing enables the author’s cognitive processing of what she has seen, which seems to be particularly 296 helpful for reportages on human su ering, natural disasters, and other misery, such as sex slavery, human tra cking, or the living conditions of refugees in camps. Thus, one has to speak not only of a spatial but also of a temporal distance. Moreover, comics journalists are very likely to process their impressions during this phase psychologically. In an interview with The Comics Reporter , Joe Sacco says: ‘It’s also good for me personally, because when you’re drawing you’re really thinking about it. If anyone gets a bene t out of those landscapes, it’s me drawing them. Probably more than any single reader does. [laughs] It’s kind of for my edi cation. If you’re drawing something, you’re really thinking about it.’ (qtd. in Spurgeon n. pag.) I have analyzed the temporal e ects of drawing because of pragmatic reasons in more detail in Ch. 2.6.2. Furthermore, one can argue that this personal process of mental and cognitive processing must be presupposed in comics journalism because even if one has an image in mind, it must rst be artistically translated on paper and thus rethought, reshaped and—under certain circumstances—also re-experienced. By staring at the objects and by meticulously observing what they are drawing (see Fig. 3.14, 3.15), comics journalists turn from witnesses to translators, to narrators and to mediators, and sometimes even to activists (see Ch. 4.1.3). The last step, the fourth phase of my distinction, covers everything surrounding the publication process. For example, as soon as the drawing is nished, comics journalists are likely to post their piece of work online, most frequently via Facebook. Then, they share it among their friends and colleagues, or they refer to the new piece of work on their personal blogs. 44 Alternatively, they hyperlink an image on Instagram or Facebook. If one has accepted Facebook’s settings to show every place where one is located, it is possible for fans and friends of the comics journalist to immediately trace her back to the location. Somehow reminding of eld research by ethnographers, social media act as a kind of evidence by showing the readership the result of a speci c period of time, or at a speci c point of time. In this regard, it authenticates the geographical location of the author, her eld work, and the investigation. Finally, it is worth mentioning that many comics journalists enter into direct communication with the audience, often one-to-one. Sometimes, they even ask the community for something. For example, Sarah Glidden hopes to receive advice on how to best digitally sort her material, research, and notes (see Fig. 4.34). Her call implies a certain kind of helplessness and limited knowledge, which in turn makes her appear authentic up to a certain point. 44 I will explain the role of social media in due course in Ch. 4.3. 297 Sarah Glidden Hello writers and researchers I am here to ask for help: tell me about your system for keeping research organized while you work on a large project. This isn't my first rodeo but I am TERRIBLE at putting things where I can find them later. I use Evernote. I use Scrivener. Maybe the problem is that I try to many systems and can't commit to one. I have multiple notebooks going that have no structure. I use my notes app. I use TextEdit. I use Google Docs. My files have names like "outline.txt" and "newoutline.txt" Maybe all I need is some advice on how to stick to one system! 20. November 2019 Figure 4.34: Screenshot, Sarah Glidden Asks the Crowd for Advice (Glidden, “Keeping research organized”) In terms of equipment, this means that even if the phases of the production process of comics journalism are similar everywhere, the conditions under which journalists carry out their work are exposed to di erent factors and conditions in di erent places in the world: Di erent Working Conditions for Comics Journalists Worldwide Journalistic working methods do not only depend on nancial, personnel, and material resources, but also on the respective state system. Especially political and cultural reporting is strongly in uenced by issues of power. 45 In democracies, the press is regarded as the ‘fourth pillar’ that contributes to freedom of the press and opinion. In dictatorships, in contrast, independent reporting may be severely hampered. In 2018, countries such as China, Turkey, or Eastern European countries such as Russia, Ukraine, and Romania either severely restricted reporting for journalists or prevented publishing opinions that di er from the regime. This topic of meta issues is also described and criticized by comics journalism itself and thematized in Rolling Blackouts . When entering Damascus at night, the rst thing the journalists notice is that portraits of Bashar al-Assad are everywhere. Although the politician is “supposed to be less authoritarian than his father” ( RB 217), “Syria is not a good country for journalists. It was ranked 173 rd out of 178 countries in this year’s [2010] Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, narrowly beating Iran and North Korea. In 2016, Syria was ranked 177 th out of 186 countries and classi ed as a “very serious situation,” scoring 81.35/ 100. “The Press Freedom Index re ects the degree of freedom 45 For an overview, I recommend the Media Freedom Navigator by Deutsche Welle Akademie . 298 that journalists, news organizations and netizens enjoy, with particular regard to journalistic safety. The countries are ranked according to an overall country score ranging from 0 to 100, with 0 being the best possible score and 100 being the worst. Based on the score, Reporters Without Borders attributes di erent categories—“Good Situation,” “Satisfactory Situation,” “Noticeable Problems,” “Di cult Situation,” and “Very Serious Situation” (cf. Samy). In comparison to Germany, which is on rank 16 with a score of 14.8/ 100, the leader of the Press Freedom Index 2016 is Finland. [. . . ] The Syrian government controls all media within the country and arrests journalists who step out of line [. . . ] It’s di cult for foreign press as well” ( RB 217). For journalists in these countries, (digital) structures, especially with informants and colleagues, are particularly important. Communication takes place via the Internet, above all, via social media channels. Even if a transparent approach and disclosure of sources, and references is highly indispensable and even more important regarding veri ability, it is highly dangerous in nondemocratic regions of the world. To brie y recall, comics journalism is about transparency but not about a personal transparency and omniscience about the author and her private preferences. It would be too simplistic to claim that just because a (comics) journalist writes for a left-wing media house, she also sympathizes with left-wing politics in private life. However, comics journalism is also dedicated to transparency and tries to make it better than traditional journalism through a high degree of selfand meta-references. 4.2.3 Formal Aspects of Practicing Comics Journalism Comics Journalists Are O en Freelancers It has already been mentioned that the majority of comics journalists are self-employed. 46 There are occupational elds in which self-employment is more common than elsewhere, such as in writing, the arts, and journalism. Hence, it comes as no surprise that this is not di erent in comics journalism. Even if self-employment allows more independence concerning decisionmaking, and even if it can lead to the abolition of editorial hierarchies, which are mainly known from the work processes of traditional journalism and ctional comics, freelancing also comes with disadvantages and nancial uncertainties. Although Susie Cagle’s quote is quite lengthy, it nicely summarizes the situation of freelancers. The verbal narratorial passages are taken from her piece of comics journalism Eight Years in Solitude . 46 Due to a lack of empirical surveys and data among comics journalists, I have based my work on their statements in interviews, or they are taken from personal conversations. Although I think it is right, however, this thesis must be discussed carefully until it has been o cially and empirically veri ed, which would go beyond the scope of this study. 299 I graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia’s journalism school. [. . . ] I blogged for pennies. I blogged for free. I lled out dozens of job applications a day. I was one of thousands. [. . . ] Two months after that, I was sleeping on my parents’ couch. [. . . ] These were, objectively, strange times for media; they still are. Tens of thousands of sta writing jobs disappeared in journalism over the last couple decades, replaced by freelance gigs that pay a fraction of what they used to. But the pool of available talent only seems to grow wider and deeper. [. . . ] It seemed in my best interest to diversify my skill-set and di erentiate myself from the pack. And so I learned to draw. In between applying for quota blogging and copyediting gigs across Northern California, I lled sketchbooks with hand and drapery studies. Every other out-of-work journalist is learning Javascript, I gured, but I’ll be the only one who can draw. [. . . ] But while it lled my bank account and raised my pro le, my drawing seemed to ultimately devalue my journalism. Readers presumed that if my work was illustrated, it was not fact-checked; that quotes were fabricated, statistics rounded o to whatever. I footnote everything now. It matters about as much as my masters degree. [. . . ] The economic world is structured for people with jobs. Yet the self-employed population is growing by leaps and bounds—more and more people each year are paying higher taxes and buying their own insurance. We have no institutional protections, no security, no unemployment bene ts when our contracts run out. I know I’m far from alone—freelance journalists quietly, privately lament our low, late pay, our inherent insecurity, and the dual pressure to appear productive and successful while also available for hire. [. . . ] But each new published piece is a chance that a hiring editor might see my work, reach out, o er something. [. . . ] Media companies often make hiring choices by skimming the cream o other, competing media companies; it’s easiest to get a job if you’ve already got one. Everyone knows you’re most attractive when you’re already in a relationship. Freelancing becomes an easy place to get stuck on the low side of this employment gap. You seem great, but there must be something wrong with you. [. . . ] (Cagle, “Eight Years of Solitude” n. pag.) 300 Cagle describes what it feels like to have a solid and proper education and still not get a job. Without jobs, one is dependent on the nancial support of others. The situation has been made worse by the austerity measures in the journalism sector. Often, the only option is to become self-employed. Moreover, freelancers su er from a dual pressure—to stay productive, while also being available for other orders (maybe even without payment). As Cagle has experienced, “it’s easiest to get a job if you’ve already got one” (Cagle, “Eight Years of Solitude” n. pag.). Hence, freelancing is not trivial but involves several risks and challenges; and comics journalism concerns it just as much as other elds of culture and the ne arts. The term “freelancer,” however, is actually misleading because, in many ways, freelancers are not as free as the word suggests. In general, although the concept of freelance work is not a legal term, it is widespread among certain groups. For example, freelancers can be found in the elds of visual and performing arts, such as in craftsmanship, architecture, design, lmmaking, photography, cabaret, etc. What all these professions have in common is that a freelancer works with her own materials, and tools and, in particular, at her own economic risk. However, in this quote, the British writer Richard Morgan highlights the dependence of the author on the editor, and calls the freelancer “the editor’s plaything” (se Fig. 4.35), mirroring that freelancing is a two-sided sword. Figure 4.35: Page Excerpt, Quote by Richard Morgan (Cagle, “Eight Years of Solitude” n. pag.) 301 In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung , the illustrator and cartoonist Yi Luo, whose pen name is Yin nity, speaks of the making-of of her three-page comic for the SZ , pointing to the di erences and challenges she had to face while doing this piece of art (cf. Luo n. pag.). For example, she was obliged to show a storyboard-like structure of the comic-to-be to the editors beforehand. They had a say in what and how Yi Luo should draw. She describes it in a similar way as Morgan, who says that a “freelancer-editor-relationship is nothing more than friends with bene ts” (see Fig. 4.35). Furthermore, Luo confesses that this way of working was a di erent experience compared to what she is normally used to, which is due to the fact that she performs a much stronger authorship when she publishes her comics reportages entirely by herself. In Rolling Blackouts , Sarah Glidden also describes the link between imprisonment and nancial pressure as exerted by their friends’ editor. The editor wants to have the “Hollywood narrative” ( RB 102), which to the detriment of Alex, is “so fucked up” ( RB 102). Their editor told them that their article has been rejected because it is “too dark” ( RB 158). Sarah Stuteville is also annoyed by this opinion: “[t]here’s no way to write about people living in a prison and have it not be dark! They wouldn’t want to overwhelm their audience with too depressing a story” ( RB 158). She always asks herself whether it is better that this story is out in the world than if it was not. If the answer is yes, then she does it. “The best we can hope for is that the story gets passed along. The way the readers use that story to understand the world is up to them” ( RB 298)—a statement which contributes to Morgan’s claim that “the editor will never choose you over the publication“ (see Fig. 4.35). The in uence of editors and thus institutions as well as the hierarchical pressure on the relationship between comics journalist and client will be discussed below. Influence of ( Journalistic) Institutions and Organisations While the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is mainly established between author and reader, its credibility is also in uenced by institutions—both journalistic and political ones—that act as intermediaries, such as publishers, editors, or other types of clients. Hence, one can assume that the name and prestige of a newspaper, publisher, or other institution has an in uence on how trustworthy a piece of comics journalism appears. Moreover, the reputation of a publisher and publishing house, its quality of texts and veri cation, its political orientation, netiquette, handling of sources, and instances for the checking of facts are often decisive for the prestige and trustworthiness of a newspaper. Media are institutions and organizations (cf. Bonfadelli). Media organizations need the current contents produced by journalism, whereas journalism needs the possibility of distribution provided by the media (procurement, 302 production, bundling, distribution and nancing) (cf. Kiefer 165). Only production (journalistic content) and distribution (via the media) generate a (public) communication process, which is why there is a close, mutual dependency between journalism and the media. Journalism is to be understood in relation to society, namely as the central information system of the public. Because of the interaction between the production and a reception side, a public sphere is created. In this regard, comics journalists are always already public gures; and some of them are permanently employed by the publisher or media house. Depending on the reputation of the institution, some media and publishing houses are believed more, and some less. For example, the reader will have more con dence in media with quality management and documentation centers that value high-quality reporting, or that have a worldwide network of journalists, information providers, and news o ces compared to an institution that is only locally represented, has a small circulation, or no means and human sources for verifying facts. Consequently, the reader assumes that a comics journalist working together with DIE ZEIT , or The New York Times , or The Guardian had to meet certain requirements and quality criteria in order to publish her work in these newspapers. Yet, one has to accept that di erent groups of readers have di erent opinions, use di erent sources of information, and thus choose di erent media houses as a source of information. Hence, the discussion on the belief in an institution also relates to some extent to the discussion on quality in journalism. One can check quality based on certain categories. Susie Cagle mentions something quite interesting, which in certain ways is similar to the idea of the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ namely that the reader has expectations and trusts speci c media organizations and institutions more than others. Among other things, to name but a few, The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung , and The Guardian are widely regarded as national ‘newspapers of record,’ newspapers one can trust. They maintain an international reputation for quality, and bolster legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of the public. Accordingly, one can also observe that high-quality journalism is connected to journalism’s institutional independence from state control, business interests, market forces, and any other vested interest. Working for the New York Times , for example, is a hallmark of dispassionate, critical, and reliable journalism. It suggests a high standard of research and writing quality and preciseness, assistance with travel expenses, fact-checking instances and more. Nevertheless, despite some agship examples of how journalism can precede, Klaus-Dieter Altmeppen takes a di erent position. In his view, research on journalism in German-speaking countries lacks behind with empirical data and thus many issues remain unclear and unanswered (cf. Altmeppen). Scholars do 303 not know how journalists work, or what resources they have at their disposal, or how they deal with sources. Who controls the journalists and by which means? From this point of view, the ‘Relotius case,’ which was introduced at the beginning of this chapter, con rms the failure of years marked by a lack of research on journalism itself. In this regard, the Relotius a air was advantageous because it has not only shaken up one magazine but the entire branch of journalism and many other media houses Relotius wrote for. In the aftermath of the ‘Relotius case’ in Germany, many newsrooms have re ected on themselves and invested in positions for fact-checking, changed their hierarchical structures, and supervising steps. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung , for example, is working on a database where the newspaper’s reporters have to upload any of their recordings, documents, and photos to improve the checking of facts and to make it easier to verify the content. One can argue that if a newspaper can stick to the ethos of credible, well-researched, and balanced content, this is likely to spill over to its perception by readers, and its prestige, too. Consequently, a variety of measures have been implemented in newsrooms since then. For example, frequent controls are set up, documentation and ‘fact-checking’ departments are founded, and large resorts are split up into smaller ones in order to support communication among colleagues. In doing so, one intends to detect and prevent one-sided abuse. In this respect, I think that it is appropriate to speak not only of a journalism and media change (see Ch. 2.1) but also of an institutional change as such, which ties in with my claim of accepting comics journalism as a serious form of reporting; and yet, only a few newspapers publish non ction comics journalism. Moreover, one can observe that media houses which incorporate non ction comics and editorial cartoons seem to be more progressive than others; but one could also ask whether they are just brave enough to ght against a possible mob if a crowd dislikes (political) cartoons, comics, or caricatures. Even in the twenty- rst century, the mere fact of including political cartooning and non ction comics in the news medium reveals a lot about the institutional practice of the publisher and editor. However, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the fact that over the last years, an increasing number of cartoonists working for (reputational) newspapers lost their job. For example, the Americans Nick Anderson and Rob Rogers lost their positions because their publishers found their work to be too critical of Donald Trump. Several others were sent to jail. For example, in 2018, Musa Kart was sentenced to three years in jail in Turkey. Others have been forced into exile because of their political cartooning (Hani Abbas). The most extreme form of disagreeing with a cartoon is what happened to the journalists and cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015—murder. Similarly, the Syrian 304 cartoonist Akram Raslan died under torture because he had drawn images that expressed criticism of the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. In addition, working conditions as set by institutions can also be an obstacle, because for comics journalism as independent journalism, this must also mean that nancial supporters, so-called backers, should not interfere in the piece of comics journalism in terms of content. In 2019, for example, the community was outraged by the dismissal of Patrick Chappatte, who had been working for the New York Times ( NYT ) for more than two decades. Along with The Economist , The New York Times was one of the last venues for international political cartooning that also had a meaningful impact worldwide. Yet, as of June 2019, Chappatte lost his job because of a caricature that expressed criticism of Israel, which he had not even drawn himself but rather his Portuguese colleague António Moreira Antunes (see Fig. 4.36, “Caricature”). Figure 4.36: Screenshot, Caricature in The New York Times ’ International Edition on 25 April 2019 The caricature, for the publication of which the newspaper was harshly criticized, shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. Netanyahu is depicted as a guide dog wearing a Star of David on his collar, which leads a blind Trump, who wears a skullcap. In a post on its Twitter page, the newspaper’s opinion section wrote that the cartoon “included anti-Semitic tropes” and that the “image was o ensive, and it was an error of judgment to publish it” (Sta n. pag.); yet, it did not explicitly apologize for publishing the cartoon. 47 What is striking about this incident is that it has sparked outrage, even if political cartooning has been tied to democracy since the beginning of the nineteenth century. One could argue that Chappatte’s case goes beyond the limits 47 The cartoon was distributed by the syndicate CartoonArts International, selected by an editor in Hong Kong, and eventually published in the global edition of The New York Times . 305 of what has existed so far because it raises questions about journalism, art, and freedom of opinion in general. Ceasing the publication of political cartooning in the international edition of the NYT to avoid possible waves of anger is what Chappatte calls “preventive self-censorship” by the editors (Chappatte TED 9: 22 min). But instead of commenting on this, the NYT completely stopped all publications of political cartooning. Chappatte and many of his colleagues assume that the NYT took the easiest path: “[i]n order to not have problems with political cartoons in the future, let’s not have any at all” (TED 9: 07-9: 13 min). In his view, this is the wrong way because intact democracies need irony, satire, and humor. Chappatte argues that a free society can or must endure visual and verbal exaggeration in a drawn news medium, especially if it is as prestigious as The New York Times (TED 9: 10-9: 20 min). Now, regarding this caricature, two positions seem to face each other: on the one hand, the advocates of freedom of opinion and thus also of political caricature, and on the other hand, the opponents who see their rights and freedom of religion violated because the image of the Jew is stereotypical. They argue that such an image is always dangerous, and in times when anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide, it is all the more unacceptable. The impression arises that caricatures critical of Israel are often not criticized for the criticism of Israel per se, but for the depiction of the Jew, in this particular case, like a dog with a big nose, ears, mouth, and star of David. Mostly, these exaggerated facial features play with stereotypes and are perceived as anti-Semitic. The opponents then argue that a newspaper that publishes such a caricature is an expression of a growing antisemitic mood in society, disguised as a criticism of Israel. 48 According to the German cartoonist Klaus Stuttmann, the topic of depicting Israel and its politics is hardly negotiable anymore. In his opinion, no matter what one draws, one is likely to be confronted with a wave of outrage and with accusations of hidden anti- Semitism, which is why many cartoonists do not deal with the topic of Israel anymore (cf. Huber n. pag.). Chapatte’s current example illustrates that the relation between journalism and the media as institutions is much more complex and diverse than can be presented here. But it also shows, among other things, that institutions are associated with social power, too. They regulate and coordinate expectations and behavior of individuals (cf. Kiefer 211). By publishing their own comics independently, or by increasingly publishing their works digitally on independent, politically orientated platforms, comics journalists are enhancing the 48 A similar incident happened to the German cartoonist Dieter Hanitzsch, who was dismissed by Süddeutsche Zeitung because he had drawn the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanjahu with too big ears. The editor in chief apologized. However, the German Press Council said that freedom of expression covered the Netanyahu cartoon in the SZ . 306 institutional landscape, while at the same time accepting the journalistic code of conduct, integrity, and accuracy. However, one of the major advantages of comics journalists who have a regular employment and an institutional a liation is that institutions can reduce ( nancial) uncertainties and provide resources that may not be accessible to a freelancing and individually working comics journalist to that extent, such as access to visas, accreditation, archives, documentation, proofreading, application for travel expenses, the use of an already existing network of persons and sources, etc. What belongs to the entire picture, however, is that on the one hand, institutions guarantee freedom of action to the (comics) journalists they hire as much as possible. On the other hand, institutions and organizations as principals will always stay in a superior position to the (comics) journalist and decide upon comics journalists and their works. Even if self-employed comics journalists seem to have a higher degree of self-determination and authority over their decisions, a speci c dependence will always remain—the dependence on the editor/ s of the publishing house or the donors of the project. In an interview with Tom Spurgeon from The Comics Reporter about the collection Journalism , Sacco is also asked about the editing process. In Spurgeon’s view, Sacco “comes from that alt-comics tradition where there’s little to no editing at all, partly due to the lean and mean and close to the ground nature of a lot of those publishers” (Spurgeon n. pag.). His impression is that Sacco is not subject to intensive editing in the process of doing his comics, with which Sacco partly agrees. For example, when he did The Hague: The War Crime Trials (in his collection Journalism ) for Art Spiegelman, Spiegelman was very actively involved in editing and making suggestions for the script. They basically went through nine di erent drafts (cf. Spurgeon n. pag.). In the aftermath, even though Sacco was not used to being edited, he was happy about it: “I thought, ‘This is Art Spiegelman. Maybe I can learn something here.’ [. . . ] I sort of gave myself over to the process. And I did learn something. It was very useful” (n. pag.). The other time he was edited was with Footnotes in Gaza , which “was a much more complicated process” (Spurgeon n. pag.; cf. Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza ). Sacco concludes: I actually had an editor. This is for a book publisher, Metropolitan, as opposed to a comic book publisher. The thing with a regular book publisher [laughs] if I might call it that, they’re not used to people just having their own way without... feedback. Without inserting themselves on some level. I sort of wanted an editor in this case, because it was very loaded material [about massacres in Gaza]. [. . . ] I usually write an entire script. So there was a lot of back and forth about the script, and I was okay with it, maddening as it was. [. . . ] 307 I personally like not being edited just because it’s easier that way, and because cartooning is one of the only places that you can get a sort of singular vision. A painter isn’t edited in his painting, or her painting. They put down what they want to put down, and that’s the end of the story. I think that’s how a lot of cartoonists are used to negotiating these sorts of things. Maybe that will change. As more book publishers get involved, it might change. DC and Marvel and all those places have editors. (Spurgeon n. pag.) In terms of artistic freedom, Sacco nds it strange to be edited. In terms of content correctness, it is sometimes even desirable to work with editors. The relationship between editors and authors is often characterized by a hierarchical relationship. In these days, the word “hierarchy” often refers to the structure of institutions, organizations, values, and (social) relationships: 49 Hierarchies rank—organizing experience into asymmetrical, discriminatory, often deeply unjust arrangements. The most consistent and painful a ordance of hierarchical structures is inequality. Hierarchies are in this respect the most troubling of all forms [. . . ]. (Levine 82) If a hierarchy is seen as a form, its dissolution implies a challenge that can possibly end in formlessness. If one refers this statement to the world of work, it also means that without hierarchical structures, there is no (or less) inequality and injustice, for example, between colleagues. Yet, one has to distinguish between independent comics journalism in book print format and editorial comics journalism for newspapers here. Concerning print journalism, one encounters a strict hierarchy in the responsibilities of human resources which depend on the size of the newspaper. The larger the hierarchy is, the larger o cial channels and bureaucracy are (cf. “Journalism Jobs Hierarchy” n. pag.). 50 Levine observes that a “much more complex hierarchical form has become a common organizing experience globally: the bureaucratic ladder” (Levine 97-98). Those at the top of the bureaucratic ladder give commands; those lower down take orders while seeking to rise, and “outsiders are mysti ed, frustrated, and disempowered” (99). The “bureaucratic ladder” of large-circulation papers often looks like this: • publisher/ president: ultimately responsible for everything 49 The term was rst used in the sixth century AD to describe levels of angelic choruses, but it “soon came to be applied to the governance of the Church, to describe its strictly ordered levels of authority and subordination” (Levine 82). 50 Small weekly magazines often have a handful of sta in the news department, whereas large daily newspapers may have hundreds of employees. 308 • editor in chief: oversees employees, responsible for all news content • managing editor: assigns and edits stories, responsible for daily operations, situated between the sta and the editor-in-chief • department editor: there can be several or only a few, for instance, for entertainment, sports, lifestyle, business, and politics • assistant section editor: optional, depending on the size of the paper • journalists: cover stories by researching and going into the eld • photography editor: manages photography • copy chief: handles production and the copy desk • design/ graphics editor/ web producers: handle graphic arts requests and manage the layout of the paper, may develop interactive multimedia content When journalists have nished their stories, they usually show the text to the department editor, who makes sure that the text ts the goals of the assignment. Next, they have to go to the copy desk for editing and headline writing, and eventually back to the department editor for nal approval. Being just about to publish the polished text, journalists may work together with the (graphics) designer, who places the story onto the newspaper’s/ magazine’s page. The publisher can often be the owner or the head of the managing board of the publishing house. The publisher decides in which elds to invest, such as in the production, technical equipment, digitalization, distribution, marketing, or public relations. Hence, she decisively in uences the orientation and external appearance of the publishing house. In this respect, these institutions also in uence the relationship between the author, her work, and the reader. Although editors (or publishers) often have the last word, comics journalism reduces complexity concerning the involvement of other persons in the writing, research, and editing process due to the strong notion of single authorship (see Ch. 2.3.1). In contrast, Fig. 4.32 visualizes the common way of how the creation of ctional comics is accomplished, because creating ctional comics is a team e ort. In comparison, a comics journalist is not only a journalist and drawer but also a reporter, researcher, penciler, inker, letterer, colorist, proofreader, and very often also the editor at the same time (see ‘comics journalistic pact’). Moreover, what is also part of the truth is that a comics reportage published by The New York Times , for example, may go through the same editorial process and is therefore not signi cantly di erent from the editing process of a standard written text. Moreover, an independent journalist who publishes a book seems to have atter hierarchies in her communication with publishers than those who work for institutions. Sacco points to the challenges of such an editing process because many authors want to “begin and end at the script stage” (Spurgeon n. pag.). Cartoonists use their power to negotiate because they are the only ones who have the talent to draw and make changes, and who thus 309 often prevail over editors. Other than in large comics dynasties, such as Marvel or DC, either the comics journalist is responsible on her own for everything, or she shares work through collaborations. However, one can remark that creating comics journalism involves a atter or no hierarchy at all due to the form of self-employment. The comics journalist Gemma Correll nicely summarizes the price one has to pay as a comics journalist for practicing this job (see Fig. 4.37). In her opinion, Figure 4.37: Screenshot, “Horror Movies for Freelancers” (Correll n. pag.) freelancers—with which she refers to comics journalists—seem to be insane to do this job. Under certain circumstances, the wage arrives too late or not at all, and the set deadline is likely to destroy the author’s work-life balance. In the nine-panel-piece, Correll represents the freelancer as the alien, presumably because of the pressure to create a product in a speci c time. Everything seems rather dangerous because of the three intense colors—black, white, and red. The red color can be linked to the allegory of Dracula; the editor appears as a bloodsucking Dracula sending thousands of e-mails that need to be considered, based on the assumption that the editor is more in uential and has the power. 310 Four panels later, the impression of a ght between publisher and freelancer is obvious, which is evoked by the direct juxtaposition of the gures in the visual track and through the little word “vs” on the verbal level. To sum up, compared to traditional journalism, one can observe a similar situation and a high degree of self-employment in comics journalism, too, making the hierarchical structure super uous, especially with single authorship. Working as freelancer, however, also has its disadvantages. On the one hand, the comics journalist is her own boss and decides about the visual, narrative, and verbal structure of the story. On the other hand, if she depends on nancial supporters, or has to work for clients (such as organizations, publishing houses, governmental departments, etc.), she is indeed dependent on the wishes of the customers. 51 Still, comics journalists in the case of single authorship pretend to have the last word of how things are done. Crowdfunding and Other Forms of Funding Freelancers must steadily seek funding. One way to get one’s projects nanced is via crowdfunding, which is an alternative practice of funding a project or venture by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet. Through crowdfunding calls, readers, fans, and other interested people donate money and thus contribute to the realization of a project. Kickstarter, for example, the most frequently used platform for funding all sorts of creative art, uses an all-or-nothing funding approach, which means that projects only receive funding if they reach their nancial goal. This is the way how the digital comics journalism platform The Nib launched its printed The Nib Magazine in 2018. Another example, Climate Change: October (October 2019), was released on The Nib as Climate Inctober (November 2019) by Sarah Glidden. It was not nanced by backers, but Glidden asked the recipients for a nancial donation after the download. The recipients can decide for themselves how much money to pay (cf. Glidden, “Climate Inktober” n. pag.). Moreover, in 2013, Dan Archer asked people to donate money on Kickstarter for an investigative journalism project to report on human tra cking in Nepal in real time in the form of a webcomic. In total, 165 supporters contributed $13,303 to realize this project (cf. Archer, “Graphic Journalism on Human Tra cking in Nepal”). This shows that the nancing of comics journalism can also come from citizens instead of professional institutions. It is also reasonable to assume that this is one model of how nonvisual journalism could be nanced in the future as well. The establishment of one’s own company as in Archer’s case is certainly the exception because the majority of projects still needs external funding. If so, planned projects are announced via social media, described and distributed 51 For a further discussion of this problem, see the interview with Sarah Glidden about the disadvantages of comics journalism (Wertz n. pag.). 311 via crowdfunding platforms, for example, Kickstarter—and if successfully backed—they are eventually realized. 52 For comics journalists, it seems to be about nding a community which is interested and willing to pay money for a speci c topic that is worth being reported about. A possible reason why many artists rely on Kickstarter may be that the company’s stated mission is straightforwardly announced, namely to help bringing creative projects to life. The connection between the use of crowdfunding platforms and the distribution of comics journalism on social media can be exempli ed by many authors, among them Matt Bors, an American cartoonist and the editor of the online publication platform The Nib . On 3 July 2018, he posted on Facebook: On July 17 we’re Kickstarting The Nib Magazine , a 100-page print quarterly. The rst four issues—Death, Family, Empire, and Scams—have been in the works since January and the stories and talent we have on board for this, you’re going to like. All we need is your support and we will hit send to the printer if we’re funded. We launch in two weeks. (Bors, “Announcing The Nib ”) Some days later, on 17 July 2018, Andy Warner, who is a contributing editor to The Nib , posted on his Facebook pro le: The Nib is launching a print quarterly and you can now support it on Kickstarter. It’s going to be beautiful, with all original memoir, journalism and non ction comics. The theme of the rst issue is Death, and I’ve got a 12-page story in it about the limits of the human lifespan, and the tech billionaires funding research on how to live forever. (Warner, “ The Nib Kickstarter campaign”) Obviously, the online platform The Nib started a Kickstarter campaign to have the rst issue of The Nib magazine nanced, which is “a quarterly print publication featuring the best non- ction comics, journalism and satire. It will be very nice. It’s going to be the only magazine of its kind” (Bors, “The Nib Magazine” n. pag.). Within a very short time, the initiators were already able to digitally collect $45,000 by people all over the world, which was just based on online advertising campaigns and shares on the social media website of the artists. This success makes the initiators of this project claim that “[p]rint is not dead” (Newsletter Project Update No. 3 The Nib Magazine by The Nib ) and that there are people who are willing to pay for quality journalism and who are interested in non ction graphic storytelling. The rst magazine was published in September 2018. 52 The American public-bene t corporation Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform, which focuses on creativity and merchandising. The use of crowdfunding platforms does not correlate with being a freelancer. Even non-governmental organizations or employed artists apply for funding (see Ch. 4.2.3). 312 In the last 24 hours of their campaign, The Nib creators had already hit their nal stretch goal of $150,000. Finally, 3,149 backers donated $168,672 in total. The Nib magazine is so far the only magazine of its kind (cf. Bors, “The Nib Magazine”). 53 However, it should also be mentioned that Symbolia , the digital comics journalism magazine founded by Erin Polgreen and Joyce Rice, was discontinued after only two years (2013-15). In a statement to their subscribers, they point out one reason for closure, namely that when the magazine launched, it would have been hard to predict that places like Harper’s and The New Yorker would be running comics-format journalism alongside traditional journalism and ction. Yet, this has become a reality. Their statement also said that they have helped to both legitimize an industry and change the way people think about what journalism can be. The women never dreamed that they would work with organizations like American Public Media , Tumblr , and others to create visual narratives (cf. Asselin). Although Kickstarter is the most frequently used platform to support creative projects, it is important to mention that only those projects that meet the minimum funding requirements will be supported. Moreover, the initiator of the project is also dependent on the favor of the readers, which is not always conducive to journalistic objectivity (regardless of how “objectivity” is de ned here). In other words, the readers get what they want to hear and read. Moreover, Kickstarter works with a so-called “The Sta Pick” badge, which is so powerful that it can determine the success or failure of a crowdfunding campaign. Unfortunately, the process of assigning the badge and the underlying algorithm is not transparent. The criticism against Kickstarter is based on the perceived arbitrariness of the button’s use. Besides crowdfunding, there are other ways of fundraising. The following list is a collection of possibilities of nancial donorship in comics journalism. • Works that are commissioned by non-government organizations , such as Doctors Without Borders. This resulted in works such as The Photographer and Freetown . Or, Oxfam Perú supported The War over Water , which is the result of the project by de Investigación and part of the series of surveys #PrivilegiosFiscales. • In Germany, one can observe a tendency that political institutions such as The Federal Agency for Civic Education increasingly support 53 Other examples include Acuerdo , the rst publication for tablets that o ers quality journalism with twenty- rst-century narratives, for which 360 people donated £45,302 (cf. del Árbol). It includes Joe Sacco’s rst webcomic Srebrenica (Sacco, “Srebrenica, a web comic by Joe Sacco”). A further example is Katherine Hearst’s project of realizing the electronic journal, Modern Times - A Graphic Commentary , which is an “innovative, cutting-edge new publication, featuring social commentary through graphic journalism, photography and writing.” Here, 1,011£ were contributed by 40 people (cf. Hearst). 313 non ction projects that inform foreign citizens about life in Germany, like Alphabet des Ankommens (‘Alphabet of Arrival’) by Hommer and Pithan. 54 • Besides editors of print publications, editors of magazines, broadcast stations (ARTE), and newspapers may hire comics journalists as in the case of the creation of the local part of Schwerter Ruhr-Nachrichten . • Public funds and scholarships can also provide nancial support; examples include the Fonds Pascal Decroos voor Bijzondere Journalistiek , or Lira Startsubsidie voor Jonge Journalisten in the case of One Day in Kara Tepe by Mei-Li Nieuwland, and “Refugee” by Jules Calis. Moreover, Olivier Kugler received a grant from the Arts Council England for Escaping Wars and Waves , and Dan Archer was a fellow at Reynolds Journalism Institute. • Students who—without receiving any nancial compensation—create comics journalistic projects as part of their studies and nal theses, such as in Geschichten aus dem Grandhotel . • Establishing one’s own company can support nancial independence, which was one of the reasons for Dan Archer’s foundation of Empathetic Media , which supported the creation of Ferguson Firsthand and The Nisoor Square Shootings . • Financial reserves of the authors or their families often also support the realization of projects for a limited time as, for example, Susie Cagle’s Eight Years of Solitude demonstrates. As one can see, there are various ways in which comics journalists can nance themselves or get paid for their projects. Depending on the dependency, there is a hierarchy of varying degrees between comics journalists and clients. Comics journalism belongs more to independent journalism than to corporate journalism. The tension between nanciers and the in uence of their decisions on the content of the project will presumably always remain. 54 “Alphabet of Arrival” is a project by the German Comics Association and is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education. All comics reportages were produced during a workshop that took place in Hamburg in March 2017, combining journalism with comics to address the topics of emigration and immigration in Germany. 314 4.3 The Use of Social Media in Comics Journalism World events are more and more often told along to people, small scenes are woven into a story that lives from the author’s theses and interpretation. In addition, some journalists today market themselves like artists. On their Twitter and Facebook pro les, their political views are usually revealed openly. The nimbus of neutrality is lost there as well. 55 (Hülsen 70) While the signi cance of social media on a textual level could already be shown in the previous chapter, the focus is now on the extratextual world. One can notice that many comics journalists are very active on their social media channels. Social media use in comics journalism mostly refers to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 56 I argue that social media are another major strategy of authentication to verify the content of a piece of work, as well as the author’s persona. 57 This is why I pursue the following questions: ‘How, to what ends, and to what extent does the comics journalist use social media for her purposes? ’ Therefore, I followed, among other, Dan Archer, Josh Neufeld, Sarah Glidden, Kate Evans, Aimee de Jongh, and Ted Rall and took a closer look at how they handle their social media accounts. Because of the fact that one can easily follow these comics journalists on their pro les, the social media channels also allow the audience to follow their works closely, to be at the ravages of time, or to get in direct contact with them, which is an advantage of studies on contemporary authorship. Social media ful ll di erent functions in comics journalism and are a useful tool for sales and promotion (announcing, advertising, distributing), publishing, veri cation of facts, and persons, and their research, for information updates (for example, on the work process), networking, branding, fostering (political) action, and they are a platform for communication with the readership. It is not far-fetched to say that social media is both a curse and a blessing for cartoonists and for comics journalists alike. We are living right in the middle of the era of images, the prevalence of which W.J.T. Mitchell proclaimed as the 55 The original reads, “Das Weltgeschehen wird immer öfter an Personen entlangerzählt, kleine Szenen zu einer Geschichte verwoben, die von Thesen und Deutung des Autors lebt. Hinzu kommt, dass sich manche Journalisten heute wie Künstler vermarkten. Auf ihren Twitter- und Facebook-Pro len treten ihre politischen Ansichten meist o en zutage. Der Nimbus der Neutralität geht auch dort verloren.” 56 Facebook currently has 2.4 billion users; Twitter has 340 million active users, and Instagram has around 1 billion users (cf. Clement). 57 Social media are “interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks” (Obar and Wildman n. pag.). 315 “pictorial turn” (Mitchell) almost 25 years ago. Images are shared and liked; they get viral. In the UK, for example, Facebook is the top social media brand. 29 percent of people use it for news consumption (cf. Newman). Readers can express their agreement with ‘thumb-up likes’ on Facebook. Organizations and journalists can be followed either on their personal or on their institution’s public Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. Therefore, the use of social media is not a novelty or a practice that comics journalism claims for itself because it is used by traditional news media alike. Rather, it is particularly evident for the purposes of announcement, advertisement, distribution, networking, and branding. In this regard, it is a blessing because a large audience can be reached in a short time; however, it is also a curse because negative criticism spreads just as quickly on the Internet. Although social media have a range of positive outcomes, improvements, and advantages, they also face harsh criticism, as the research from many di erent disciplines has shown. For example, the Internet complicates legal issues concerning the ownership of media content, privacy rights, the disparity of information available, the loss of face-to-face social interaction, the impact on concentration, and “ lter bubbles” (cf. Pariser). There has also been criticism directed against the reliability of information presented and general trustworthiness, data harvesting, cyberbullying, and psychological and physiological impacts on the mind and body. The list does not make any claim to completeness; yet, I would like to emphasize the aspect of self-presentation in this regard, which I have already addressed by referring to Go man’s idea of “staging.” Comics journalists know how to use the Internet for their purposes. By this, I do not mean that they engage in intentional self-staging. On the contrary, one gets the impression that they are concerned less with their own person than with the topic they are dealing with and for which they want to generate media attention. I argue that the focus is on their works and not on them as persons (see Ch. 3.2.2). As they publish their work on their personal social media channels, they vouch for it with their name. This is why a separation of the work and the private sphere is almost impossible in comics journalism; yet, this is also not uncommon in self-employment. The person herself or her drawing style is often the hallmark, or the brand, of the comics journalist. Conversely, one could now argue that this blurring of boundaries makes comics journalists particularly authentic because friends and clients alike are just followers who are aware of the risks of the Internet but also accept the rules that come with it. To name at least one advantage compared to comics journalism in print, one can point out that the recipient has access to more information about the author because of the Internet’s unique media a uence and environment. 316 “Transparency” and “veri ability” are key concepts here. As on printed dust jacket blurbs, Drawing the Times introduces its authors with short biographical texts. Additionally, they link to the authors’ websites and all their (social) media channels. Yamuna Matheswaran, for example, published “Sexual Harassment in India: An Illustrated Essay” on Drawing the Times and added her website, her blog “Travel. Writing. Photography. Art,” and her Instagram account to allow readers learn more about her work. 58 This leads me to the next section, which deals with how social media as forms of distribution are used for work, for example, for the veri cation of the content and the author’s person (see Fig. 4.38). Figure 4.38: Page Excerpt, New Channels of Distribution ( Proud of You Burundian Journalist n. pag.) 4.3.1 Announcement, Advertisement, and Distribution Social media support the authors’ e orts to keep their works up to date. The following examples illustrate how comics journalists try to disclose their working process to the recipient as quickly and directly as possible. While de Jongh and Glidden signal in their posts (see Fig. 4.39, 4.40) that they not only post pictures but also talk about their work ow in lectures, Neufeld, and Archer, for example, showcase parts of a raw page of panels and empty speech bubbles of their pieces (see Fig. 4.41). Additionally, Archer sometimes not only posts a page of his current work but also tries to create credibility by posting that even after a day full of drawing; it is still drawing that calms him down. Generally, although publishing information about comics journalism certainly helps to increase the degree of authenticity, documenting the work process and making it comprehensible and accessible in social media is not a must, but comics journalists just do it. 58 One should not forget, however, that the artists decide how much they reveal of themselves. 317 Figure 4.39: Screenshot, Sketch vs. Final Drawing by Aimee de Jongh (de Jongh, “Sketch versus Final Drawing”) Posting samples of drawings online ful lls di erent functions. Besides verifying that and how one is working, this makes people curious and motivates them to continually follow the comics journalists’ account in order to keep themselves updated. This might also increase the number of fans and followers. Moreover, the ‘sharing’ option of social media allows to increase the number of people interested in one’s work. Thus, the act of sel essly recommending and promoting other colleagues’ work contributes to a network of colleagues, supporters, fans, and like-minded people. De Jongh, for example, is nominated as “Best Artist” for the 2019 Broken Frontier Award. On Facebook, she encourages her followers to vote, if not for her, then for one of her colleagues who, in her opinion, also deserve to receive the award (de Jongh, “Call to Vote”). One can note that this type of post veri es the author’s commitment and support for her colleagues. This gesture makes de Jongh likeable and presents her in a positive light. Furthermore, in line with the thought from Ch. 2.6.2, comics journalism as a slow medium veri es what the slow media manifesto also states, namely that “[s]low [m]edia are distributed via recommendations not advertising” (Blumtritt et al. n. pag.). The question of whether “the success of Slow Media is not based on an overwhelming advertising pressure on all channels but on recommendation from friends, colleagues or family” (n. pag.) is a research 318 Figure 4.40: Screenshot, Sarah Glidden Announces and Promotes Her Workshop on Comics Journalism (Glidden, “Comics Slideshow”) desideratum that needs to be analyzed further and goes beyond this study. Anyway, the previous examples have shown that sharing links and re-tweets on social media ful ll di erent functions. Among other things, they help the author in her e orts to have the latest piece of comics journalism nanced, announced, and spread across the community (see Fig. 4.42, 4.43). In the case of migration comics, another way to verify and authenticate the comics journalists is to look for footage shot by the asylum seekers themselves— particularly in comics journalism about migration and the European refugee crisis. Almost all of them have Facebook and Instagram accounts where they post photos and lms of their life in refugee camps to show their family and friends how and what they are doing. According to de Jongh, who has been in a refugee camp on Lesbos herself, there does not seem to be a lot of censorship there. In my private mail conversation with her, she writes: The authorities can’t keep track of those posts. The media (newspaper/ tv) can be controlled more easily, as it turns out. Journalists need to be way more careful. We didn’t know this when we came. 319 We were surprised that when we confronted the refugees in the camps with the fact that photos were forbidden, they said: “Really? But I can just make a video and post it online. Why is it forbidden? For who? ” They didn’t even know it was an issue. So, if you know any refugees pro les online, look on their Instagram/ Facebook for photos. (cf. Schlichting, “Questions to Aimée de Jongh”) If one does not have private and direct contact to refugees, there is another way to verify the comics journalist’s facts, namely with the help of the websites of Figure 4.41: Screenshot, Josh Neufeld Publishes His Drafts (Neufeld, “Preparing #2020Census ”) 320 Figure 4.42: Screenshot, Kate Evans Begs Her Followers to Spread Her Name (Evans, “Begging for Sharing”) the organizations supporting the camps, such as the United Nations, Doctors Without Borders, WHO, etc. 4.3.2 The Importance of Networks, Brands, and Styles Comics journalism is not only about journalism but also about art. Hence, the genre also raises questions about aesthetics, personal preferences, and tastes. Therefore, one should talk about the author’s style or brand as well. That is why this subsection pursues the importance of branding and networking as two ‘follow-up e ects’ of self-employment among comics journalists in case of missing organizational and institutional structures. Accordingly, it is also about the lack of a network that is usually given when a comics journalist is institutionally a liated, because there is no database uniting all comics journalists or those who consider themselves as such. With self-employment, the idea of creating networks, of socializing, of spreading one’s name and one’s work within and beyond a speci c community, and eventually turn one’s work or name into a kind of brand is an observation that seems to be of more relevance for comics journalists than for other journalists. As already mentioned in Chapter 4.2.3, comics journalists have the burden of being freelancers in three ways—as journalists, as artists, and as storytellers. Self-employed people are more likely not to have a guaranteed monthly income. Thus, they must always present themselves on the market and o er their work to publishers, editors, and recipients alike. Caroline Levine writes that mainly “networks are useful because they allow us to refuse metaphysical 321 Figure 4.43: Screenshot, Dan Archer Retweets a Post by Empathetic Media on Immersion (Archer, “Proud to Contibute to Immerse ”) assumptions about causality in favor of observing linkages between objects, bodies, and discourses” (Levine 113). In comics journalism, networks have to be understood as a process-oriented manner of behavior—namely ‘networking’— which describes the development of “(professional) relationships that may boost an individual’s future business and employment prospects” (Kagan n. pag.). The aim of ‘networking’ is to link up with other “bodies,” or groups, and to connect with people for social or business purposes. Also, networks can help promote the comics journalist’s e orts to receive support and exchange knowledge. Even if “networks usefully confound containing forms” (Levine 112), one 322 can distinguish between di erent types of networking—“business networking,” “online networking,” and “computer networking”—the rst two types of which seem to play a particular role and intermingle in comics journalism (Kagan n. pag.). Moreover, one can also assume that there is a large unknown number of people who practice comics journalism as a ‘hobby,’ though. These are comics journalists who are not professionally anchored or institutionally connected, or who produce their rst piece of comics journalism. This applies in particular to creators who contribute their work to the best-known digital platforms of non ction, such as The Nib and Drawing the Times , because of at hierarchies, a strong authorial decision-making, and no (or little) publication costs. Eva Hilhorst and Mara Joustra initiated the comics journalism platform Drawing the Times , which was founded with the nancial aid of the “Dutch Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek” and the “Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie” in 2015. It o ers a space “where committed graphic journalists and cartoonists worldwide publish work that informs, entertains, engages and challenges readers on global issues and local stories” (Hilhorst n. pag.) The platform is also a “collective of graphic journalists and illustrators who work on commission” (n. pag.). They seek collaborations “with third parties like newspapers and magazines, governmental and non-governmental organizations, schools and universities, festivals and museums” (n. pag.). The platforms’ success can be traced back to steadily changing authors who contribute to it. This is no coincidence because the platforms try to enable publications without complications or (hierarchical) barriers. However, it might very well be the case that these artists have not yet been internationally recognized or awarded any prize. Compared to studies of documentaries and memoirs, one also has to acknowledge that comics journalism is a comparably ‘young’ eld of practice and research. It is a niche, and many comics journalists are still unknown, even if non ction comics have become popular with a mainstream audience over the last couple of years. The list of works produced, though, is not as long as the list of what booksellers refer to as “graphic novels.” One reason is that many comics journalists are ‘young’ regarding their creative work process. Their oeuvre is just about to start growing. With debut pieces, the recipient risks to know only very little about the comics journalist and her oeuvre. 59 To give the reader at least some information about the author, ‘novel-length’ pieces of comics journalism o er a special section, which is often entitled “About the Author,” or “Note on the Author.” It informs the recipient about the most 59 The institutional connection of a comics journalist often correlates with her access to travel funding opportunities and (human) sources. It says little about the quality of her work, though. 323 important facts regarding the comics journalist’s oeuvre and received awards. 60 Once a comics journalist has worked for a renowned (international) newspaper or publishing house, she might have established a certain reputation. 61 The following example by Nicolas Mahler represents many other similar fates: Ich hab den Vorteil, dass ich es mir mittlerweile leisten kann, beim einzelnen Buch relativ entspannt zu sein. [. . . ] Ich habe mittlerweile das Privileg, dass ich mir ziemlich sicher sein kann, für jedes Projekt einen Verlag zu nden. Damit kommt eben auch das Privileg, dass ich künstlerisch frei sein und mich ausprobieren kann. Das war natürlich nicht von Anfang an so. Jahrzehntelang hat in dem Bereich nix für mich funktioniert. Ich habe mir eben nach und nach über Eigenverlag die Trademark so aufgebaut, dass sich irgendwann auch die Verlage für meine Arbeit interessiert haben. Heute ist es selbstverständlich, dass mir niemand mehr reinredet. Wenn wer reinredet, erscheint das Buch eben woanders. (Guttner n. pag.) Mahler, too, acknowledges that once one has had a breakthrough, other editors and o cials might become more aware of one’s artistic power and talent, and ideally contract out further projects. At the same time, Mahler’s case also encourages others, because there seems to be movement in the relationship of the same value between publishers and authors. Unlike Gemma Correll’s experience—the “ ght between editor and author,” see Fig.4.37—, Mahler, who is known for his adaptations in comics, for example, Alte Meister , has the last word and can overrule the editor’s decisions now. However, “[g]etting the opportunity is often just a matter of being in the right place at the right time” (Pett n. pag.). Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea , Guy Delisle’s graphic journal about North Korea, was created when the animation company he worked for moved its South Korean operations to the capital of North Korea. This was a good choice for Delisle, because “Canadian magazines and newspapers are reluctant to commission expensive assignments, and few cartoonists have the loose change to pay their way” (Pett n. pag.). Furthermore, Joe Sacco’s piece of comics journalism “The Underground War in Gaza,” which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on 6 July 2003, “opened doors 60 This is the case in Rolling Blackouts , A.D. After the Deluge and Threads . 61 Knowing little to nothing about the person who has created a piece of comics journalism is a disadvantage and a blessing at the same time. On the one hand, if the author has made a name for herself, the reader might tend to approach the text more quickly and is more likely to focus more on the content, because one is already familiar with her institutional and professional career, as well as her drawing style. On the other hand, if a person cannot yet prove international success as a rookie, the recipient is likely to invest more time in reading in order to get accustomed to the person and her work. 324 for [him] at the Israeli Foreign Press O ce” (Sacco, Journalism 26). This opportunity allowed him to convey Israeli concerns about weapons smuggling. “When people work for The New York Times and are posted somewhere, they might know ten or twelve people whom they go to over and over, and those people call them when there’s something going on,” observes the real-world journalist Alex Stonehill, who appears as a character in Rolling Blackouts . “But as a freelancer developing your own beats or the kind of journalism that we [The Seattle Globalist] do, you’re never o the job,” adds Sarah Stuteville, who works as a journalist for The Seattle Globalist ( RB 223). American cartoonist Josh Neufeld, for example, con rms what it means to have made a name for oneself. 62 Unpredictable as life, the opportunity to publish with a famous magazine or newspaper is often a unique chance to become famous. In Neufeld’s case, his book about Hurricane Katrina brought him celebrity. Neufeld went to New Orleans after Katrina and volunteered as a Red Cross worker. At the same time, he blogged about the storm’s destructive power, which led to a series of comics for the Smith Magazine , and later to his best-selling graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge . Ever since, he has been a highly appreciated and widely acknowledged comics journalist, a status which earned him a membership in the US Speaker and Specialist Program allowing Neufeld to travel to Burma for a new project on the embassy system. The State Department invited him “speci cally because of the Katrina book, which is blatantly so critical of the government,” Neufeld tells Comic Ri s . 63 “The program brings in cultural gures who disseminate [this message]—the State Department is proud of that freedom of expression [. . . ]. They bring me over as a statement of how our civil society welcomes voices of dissent in all forms” (Cavna n. pag.). Neufeld is appreciated for his reliability and his way of working. However, how can one establish a kind of brand, or label, in comics journalism, and what does it mean in the context of comics journalism? A brand is usually de ned as an image made of a unique design, sign, color, or symbol that identi es a product or person and di erentiates it from its 62 Neufeld aroused media interest and won several memberships, for example, the Knight-Wallace Fellowship in Journalism, and he was nominated for prestigious awards, for example, the Ignatz Award nomination for his Outstanding Comic Keyhole , and he was nominated for the Eisner Award for the “Best Graphic Album-Reprint” for his A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge . He collaborated with many writers from within and outside the comics world, including poets, memoirists, and theater groups. Neufeld also collaborated with the renowned US journalist Brooke Gladstone, co-host of WNYC radio’s On the Media . Their book is entitled The In uencing Machine , in which Gladstone is responsible for the journalistic side and Neufeld for the artwork. Gladstone, who appears as a “cartoon version of herself,” describes the book as “a treatise on the relationship between us and the news media, [. . . ] a manifesto on the role of the press in American history as told through a cartoon version of [me] that would preside over each page” (Neyfakh n. pag.). 63 Comic Ri s is a blog by columnist Michael Cavna for The Washington Post . 325 competitors. Over time, this image may become associated with a level of credibility, quality, and satisfaction (cf. “Brand”). In my mind, in the context of comics journalism, a brand (or trademark) describes the ‘comics journalistic identity’ of an author and can be created through three di erent, unique strategies that intersect with each other: • drawing style • personal appearance • social media usage Whereas “style” in literary studies, in its broadest sense, consists of all possible choices concerning the text—whether phonetic, grammatical, lexical, contextual, direct and indirect speech, or any other (cf. Mikkonen 110)—a relatively broad de nition of “graphic style” is given by Robert C. Harvey, who de nes it as the “visual result of an individual artist’s use of the entire arsenal of graphics devices available, including the tools of the craft” (Harvey 152). For visual studies and comics journalism, in particular, style is generally associated with anything typical or eye-catching that belongs to the comics journalist’s trademark. The drawn image as the basis of each comic is a manufactured creation which inevitably produces a signature of its creator (cf. Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator”). Drawing is produced by a speci c reading of a speci c part of the world by a particular person, the comics journalist. Thus, style is part of the extratextual ‘real’ world and often has a distinctive design, which Mikkonen calls “the mark of the maker” (Mikkonen 111). 64 Due to its craftsmanship, it is per se an encoding and a stylization of reality, which, as such, cannot and should not be separated from the hand of the comics journalist. Any drawing is necessarily signed, never neutral, and thus marked by a signi cant degree of uniqueness (cf. Groensteen, “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator” 4). This conclusion allows a connection to the concept of “mediated authenticity” (Enli, see Ch. 2.3). One can say that news, like comics, are mediated. In other words, even facts can be entertaining, just as ction can be very non-amusing. Consequently, one can observe a broad spectrum of styles, ranging from almost naturalistically drawn pieces to roughly sketched ones; from artists using only pencils to computer drawing programs. 65 Each cartoonist uses 64 This slogan seems to be based on Marion’s development of a French comics theory, where graphic style is de ned as “écriture graphique singulière” (Groensteen, Bande dessinée et narration: Système de la bande dessinée 2 92; Marion 251). Mikkonen translates this as “individual graphic writing” (Mikkonen 111), or an instance of personal graphic expression (cf. Hescher Ch. 4.9.1). 65 Further research could analyze the impact of the drawing style on the reception process. In other words, do we more believe comics journalism that is realistically drawn and shows many details of the storyworld more than simpler cartoony (iconic) lines? Cartoonicity (iconicity) is 326 her speci c style to draw people, which contributes to creating a personal label. According to Mikkonen, the “cartoonist’s subjectivity can be detected in the use and combination of stylistic conventions such as the graphics line, lettering, or the spatial organization of the page” (Mikkonen 101; cf. Marion 249-253). For example, Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust says about the Russian artist Victoria Lomasko that one can feel her regional background in the drawings due to a di erent handling of the stroke (cf. Roser Corella 5: 43 min). In this context, Mikkonen rightly states that graphic style has “various potential functions: it marks the maker, a period, a genre, a particular work, or a contextual artistic reference; [. . . ] it connotes the cartoonist’s intonation, approach, and perception of the world and creates speci c e ects such as realism, dream, memory, humor, or suspense” (Mikkonen 113). There are various features which include formal possibilities; regarding the materiality of the platform and the means of drawing, one can choose, for example, with or without technical/ digital equipment; regarding structural and compositional techniques one encounters, for example, the layout style, the arrangement of words and images on the page, and the selection of what should be told or not (cf. Mikkonen 110-112). To add another example, the German cartoonist Birgit Weyhe knows that she cannot draw realistically. She has digitalized her own handwriting, and sometimes she varies the technique with potato prints, watercolors, and symbols (cf. Engler). In contrast to her, Glidden’s drawings are straightforward and natural. Although using watercolors is her trademark, it nicely ties in with the topics and countries she deals with. In Rolling Blackouts , it is no coincidence but appears to serve a more important purpose. It acts as an appropriate means of expression when it comes to creating an authentic picture of the Middle East, which is due to the colors’ soft and gentle tone, often only ranging within di erent degrees of ocher, brown, and gray (see Fig. 4.44). Glidden’s muted colors imitate a bleak and deserted landscape, very often lacking ‘loud’ colors. 66 said to lie in the reduction of the whole to single, disproportionally stylized details (Packard, Was ist ein Cartoon? 41). Some artists tend to draw people as ‘archetypes; ’ as the Russian creator Victoria Lomasko admits in her book Other Russias , “[t]he portraits here are not so much images of speci c people as they are archetypes: the faded, lonely woman, the slutty boozer, the rigid old Soviet woman, and so on” (Lomasko 35). So does Joe Sacco when he admits that the gures in See Palestine: The Special Edition are stereotypes. Still, one could argue that he succeeds in drawing a more shaded picture of the characteristics of Israeli soldiers than ‘established’ media can. 66 However, there are situations when a loud color like red is used, but this occurs less frequently. It is used for re ( RB 161), for clothes in US immigration detention centers ( RB 185), for ags like the Turkish one ( RB 295), for banners at demonstrations against G.W. Bush and the war “Not in our name” ( RB 197), for gra ti on walls “The people want the fall of the regime” on a Syrian stone wall (295), for carpets (for example, 258) like in the “Dudeland-room”, or for a red rooster in a cock ght ( RB 136-138). Cock ghting is an ancient leisure activity and still popular in South East Asia, Pakistan, India, Iraq, and other parts of the world. 327 Figure 4.44: Page Excerpt, Drawing Style and Color ( Rolling Blackouts 56) If one associates intense colors with happiness, joy, and life, then, in some places, the color gives consistency to the book and suggests that happiness and joy are not characteristic features of (former) war zones, dessert-like regions, and wasteland areas. In contrast to Glidden, who prefers watercolors, Evans exclusively draws with pens and pencils. While her pink hair, for example, is always drawn with the same two colored pencils (cf. Davies), Evans had to experiment more with the skin tones—all the Africans, Arab / Afghan / Iranians, and Europeans are drawn with three di erent base tones “to give a visual echo to the social divisions that they are subject to” (Davies). In other places, the color adds intensity to the action. The sunset ( Threads 133, see Fig. 4.45), for example, accomplishes something even more dramatic, lling more and more of the page with emotions and dramatic suspense. To some extent, Evans’ use of color reminds the beholder of intensive Disney graphics. 67 In contrast to photographs, the power of the simple line as a key feature of handwriting and of a speci c drawing style allows the author to remove all unnecessary things and details to convey a message. The technique of drawing and the usage of colors tends to be perhaps the most decisive factor for establishing the author’s label. Comics journalism is not only (narrative) journalism; it is also art and craft at once. 68 Another example is David Axe’s brand “War Is Boring,” which originated from a webcomic and was later adapted into a graphic novel. Axe 67 In this context, the American artist and designer Mary Blair comes to my mind. She was a prominent producer of art and animation for The Walt Disney Company . 68 Much scholarly work has been devoted to Joe Sacco and the analysis of his “bigfoot style” (cf. Obradović) in contrast to Glidden’s style of ligne claire . 328 Figure 4.45: Page, Drawing Style and Color ( Threads 133) 329 continued to use the name War is Boring for his personal blog, which became an expansion of the brand. As the popularity of the webpage grew, Axe began publishing articles by other writers with an interest in war and US national security. Furthermore, Archer has been successful in turning his name, personal appearance, and drawing style into a brand by using almost all social media channels. Dan Archer builds up his own personal ‘brand’ that stands for precise investigation and trustworthy information, often in connection with multiple media and virtual or augmented reality. Like many other comics journalists, he, too, has built up a network of followers and supporters on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Archer is a comics journalist, media scholar, and businessman who explores, develops, and researches on virtual and augmented reality, as well as on comics journalism. He is the founder of Empathetic Media , a transmedia agency that uses comics journalism to tell news stories in an immersive new way.Archer has a master’s degree in languages and a Master of Fine Arts in cartooning. He had several journalism fellowships at Stanford University, at Reynolds Journalism Institute, and the Columbia Journalism school, but he did not hold a degree in journalism: “[w]hen I started out as a graphic journalist, there were (and still aren’t) no courses of this kind at jschools, so I started freelancing out of MFA almost immediately” (private chat conversation on Facebook on 17 February 2016). Interviews with him, conference talks, or videos about him can be found on several Internet platforms, among them YouTube and Vimeo. In addition to this, the recipient can follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, the recipient can use Instagram to see him sketching live (for example Archer, “Livedrawing the Polls”). Or, one could nd his daily drawings for AP Sports about the Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang in South Korea on Instagram (cf. Archer, “The Daily Draw: 2018 Olympic Wintergames”). To compare, Gianluca Constantini also drew about the Winter Olympics for CNN (cf. Costantini). Because of comics journalists’ autonomy, independence, and self-employment, they have to rely on twenty- rst-century methods of communication. Besides using social media for veri cation (see Ch. 4.3), they play an indispensable role for intensive professional and social networking. The comics journalists use these methods to promote their nished products, to make fans curious, and to keep subscribers and followers up to date. They also use social media to verify their personal identity and to verify the content they display. With the help of social media, comics journalists connect with their colleagues around the globe, and share or ‘like’ their works. Social media platforms make it possible for (comics) journalists to directly enter into a one-to-one or oneto-many communication with users within a very short time. In short, social media blur the boundaries between comics journalists’ private lives and their 330 work. One could also argue that this border does not exist at all, especially in the case of activist journalists and drafters who interfere in political events. Their work is their life and their money. Furthermore, social media play a considerable role in this, and it is impossible to imagine comics journalism without them. No matter whether with regard to authenticity, objectivity, or veri ability, transparency is the mode of dealing with these issues, the principle to follow, the ‘golden rule’ comics journalists seem to stick to, because the authors have established this rule for themselves. Moreover, it will still be interesting to see whether comics journalism will continue to rely on social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for its purposes in the future because, given the discussion about privacy and legal rights on Facebook, critical voices are becoming louder among authors trying to ban Facebook’s and Twitter’s policy and move to other platforms. 331 Chapter 5 Conclusion and Outlook: Authorship Ma ers in Comics Journalism Figure 5.1: Page Excerpt, “So [N]ow [W]hat? ” ( Rolling Blackouts 289) The main objectives of this study were to investigate how authorship is presented in comics journalism, and what functions of the author which in uence authorship can be identi ed on the textual and extratextual level. In addition, I intended to give an overview of the numerous forms of contemporary comics journalism, as well as to publish the rst book-length study on comics journalism. By examining ten in-depth case studies in print and digital formats, and by considering many more primary works that qualify as comics journalism, 333 I have found out that traditional concepts of literary theory in general and narratology in particular turn out to be of limited value for conceptualizing the features of comics journalism—rather, this is why a new way of thinking was necessary to do justice to this relatively new phenomenon. By combining perspectives from journalistic, literary, and media studies, and by considering theories and concepts from sociology, as well as the study of culture, I have developed the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ which considers the author both in the storyworld and the extratextual world in order to understand how comics journalism works, and how this genre can be de ned. My central thesis is that author and recipient in comics journalism enter into a moral and invisible agreement with each other. The ‘comics journalistic pact’ is voluntarily entered into as soon as the recipient decides to read this genre. The pact relates to the following aspects: • the form: comics (narratorial caption script in prose and speech balloons as character dialogue); produced according to journalistic standards and methods • the choice of topics: not limited; “reality narrations” and (multimedia) references to the extratextual world; no “fake news” • the main functions of the author: the comics journalist acts as the author, visual and verbal narrator, drawer, witness, and sometimes also as an actively engaged person • the position of the author: the author is not the protagonist of the story but can be a character in it; yet, some autobiographical traces are accepted • the production: transparent and veri able strategies of authentication of content and authentication of the comics journalist, in particular via the Internet and its social media channels Besides these formal requirements, I have divided the pact into three parts: ‘voice’ (see Ch. 3.1), ‘face’ (see Ch. 3.2), and ‘hands’ (see Ch. 4.1). The terms refer to the essential body parts an author needs to create comics journalism. Comics journalists try to give a voice to other groups and marginalized people by using their own voice to report verbally and visually on a topic. They narrate from their perspective (from their eyes) about the world; that is, they focus on how they see, perceive, and experience it. Due to the visual representation of the face (and sometimes of the whole body) in the storyworld, comics journalists testify to what they have seen and vouch for it. I conceptualize this visual selfrepresentation by the authors as their respective ‘cartoon-me.’ Furthermore, I have chosen the symbol of hands to stress that comics journalists cannot maintain the usual journalistic distance to the subjects to be reported. This degree of involvement takes di erent forms, varying from author to author and work to work. 334 Consequently, on the one hand, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ requires a speci c mode and way of writing. The author should use di erent methods to follow rules of credibility and methods of authentication. I will explain them in due course. On the other hand, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ also requires a speci c mode of reading and attitude by the reader to accept these genre-speci c claims. Hence, the pact is to be read in such a way that what the comics journalist narrates, testi es to, and does is also true and has truly taken place. To analyze the wide variety of comics journalism in all its complexity, I have used a bottom-up approach and rst looked at the publications of comics journalism in order to classify them. Even though comics journalism has experienced an enormous upswing in the last ve years alone, works of this kind remain on the margins of the mainstream news culture. In particular, German-language publications remain rare in a corpus dominated by the English language. Thus, even if comics seem to have gained greater acceptance in society, and even if the tendency seems to promise a positive development of comics journalism for the future, comics journalism is mostly dominated by English-language works. The pieces of comics journalism which are primarily referred to in this study were published after 2010. These are, among others, Inside Death Row by Patrick Chappatte, Threads: From the Refugee Crisis by Kate Evans, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq by Sarah Glidden, Journalism by Joe Sacco, Escaping Wars and Waves by Olivier Kugler, Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos by Judith Vanistendael, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld, Lesbos: Europe’s Waitingroom by Aimée de Jongh, Ferguson Firsthand and The Nisoor Square Shootings by Dan Archer, The In uencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld, and ARTE’s project on refugees with Reinhard Kleist and Nicolas Wild. Moreover, for the analyses, I have also considered the extratextual world of the authors, and I have mainly examined their webpages and social media accounts, in particular, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram channels. Thus, I have found that the unique feature of comics journalism is the author and her dealing with authorship, especially with regard to investigation, production, and distribution. Furthermore, I have combined text-centered with intermedial (Rippl; Schwanecke; Wolf), journalistic (Downie and Schudson, Kovach and Rosenstiel; Lö elholz; Meier; Neuberger and Kapern; Weischenberg), cultureoriented (Assmann), and sociological approaches (Go man; Emcke). In order to establish the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ I have modi ed Lejeune’s conceptualization of the “autobiographical pact,” and applied Klein’s and Martínez essay on narrations of reality (“Wirklichkeitserzählungen”). As a hybrid phenomenon at the intersection of literature, art, and journalism, 335 comics journalism shows similarities to New Journalism (Bleicher and Pörksen; Wolfe). In addition, I have adopted Neuberger and Kapern’s model of journalistic forms of representation and adjusted it for my purposes to develop what I call the ‘features of comics journalism.’ The features of comics journalism arise from the individual characteristics of the journalistic genre. These are report, feature, reportage, and visual and verbal commentary (see Ch. 2.6.3). For the discussion of the concept of the “author,” I have mostly worked with Jannidis, Lauer, Martínez, and Winko; with comics theory (Abel, Klein; Grünewald; Hescher; Kukkonen; Schüwer); theories of narrativization and focalization (Genette; Nünning, Nünning; Thon), ocularization and monstration (Groensteen; Thon); and I have used theories of witnessing (Krämer, Schmidt, Schülein; Emcke). For a classi cation of comics journalism, I used Caroline Levine’s thoughts on “forms” and “hierarchies.” Further ideas and research on comics journalism were mainly inserted from Chute, Ludewig, Mickwitz, Schmid, as well as Weber and Rall. Furthermore, I have worked with comics journalistic texts themselves as secondary sources because they employ elements that are just as relevant, scienti c, and interesting for my study as traditional secondary literature is. Examples which are unique in this way are The In uencing Machine , Understanding Comics , Reinventing Comics , and parts of Rolling Blackouts , just like selected works by Dan Archer, Susie Cagle, Gemma Corell, and Josh Neufeld. In this way, I try to make my contribution to treating non ction comics seriously and expand them to an academic use. In the theoretical part, I have developed ve reasons for the rise of comics journalism, which are based on journalism and genre theory, and which have also been taken from the contemporary discourse on truth and fake news. These are the following: a changing journalistic eld and profession (see Ch. 2.1), the representation of “essential truth,” objectivity, and facts (see Ch. 2.2); the narrative mediation in the news and its “mediated authenticity” (Enli; see Ch. 2.3); the increasing popularity of drawing/ s (see Ch. 2.4); as well as the generic change causing hybrid genres, such as New Journalism (see Ch. 2.5). In the last part of the theory chapter, I have presented three ways to classify comics journalism. These are the following: way and medium of publication (see Ch. 2.6.1), duration of production (see Ch. 2.6.2), and a result of the combination of di erent journalistic genres (see Ch. 2.6.3). Here, a fundamental distinction between comics journalism and comics journalist became apparent. According to my de nition, a person who creates comics journalism can be called a comics journalist. An author who is a journalist in the real world and who appears in the comics panel as a journalist, however, is not per se a comics journalist, as long as she is only responsible for one activity, that is 336 researching or drawing. A comics journalist is not a journalist who reports about (non ction) comics. A comics journalist is a person who is based in the real world and who draws and investigates her journalistic stories according to journalistic methods and ethos in the medium of comics on her own. A comics journalist takes responsibility for all steps of the production, which is the reason for a strong notion of single authorship. Finally, as for the analytical framework, one of the greatest challenges was the combination of journalistic and literary theories with regard to authorship, and the author’s concept, as well as the justi cation of visual and verbal conceptualizations and representations of the author in the storyworld. This is why I have developed a model of narrative mediation in comics journalism (see Ch. 3.1.2, Fig. 3.2). For the analysis of the author’s narrative situation, I suggest two pairs of combination in comics journalism: there is a ‘verbal’ and a ‘visual’ way of narration by the author; and then, both categories can be di erentiated further into a ‘covert’ and an ‘overt’ narrative situation of the author. Based on this, I have introduced the concept of the ‘cartoon-me,’ which I de ne as the author’s visual self-representation on the level of the storyworld, and which also ful lls di erent functions. Coming back to the introductory gure at the beginning of this chapter in which Sarah Glidden asks “so now what? ,” one can say that comics journalism has de nitely changed the hitherto known literary and journalistic concepts of “author” and the way in which authorship is dealt with in these elds and during the creation of non ction comics. Authorship plays a very prominent and essential role due to the importance of the author. In other words, authorship is essential for approaching comics journalism. In the following, I will summarize my results and elaborate on the various interand extratextual ndings and forms of comics journalism, the manifold functions and roles of the author, and I will describe what authorship looks like in reality. Eventually, this study concludes with a brief summary of possible limitations of this work, and with an outlook on possible future developments, and suggestions for further studies on comics journalism that can be applied to di erent elds of studies (see Ch. 5.2). 5.1 ‘The Comics Journalistic Pact’ Refers to Voice, Face, and Hands Strong Authorship in Comics Journalism, Particularly in Comics Reportages Treated as a genre, comics journalism dissolves the boundaries between literature, journalism, and art. My hypothesis was that authorship is negotiated di erently in comics journalism than in traditional journalism 337 and literature. In particular, the author has been of great importance because, unlike literary studies, journalism studies do not distinguish between the narrator and the author, which is the crucial point from which to start the analysis of comics journalism. This is also why I have renegotiated the literary concept of the author, and, in turn, called for the de nition and acceptance of comics journalism as a serious form of reporting. I elaborated on how authorship is practiced in the extratextual world and how it di ers from the production of ctional comics and journalism. Furthermore, I emphasized the multiple roles of the author and her authorship by considering the textual and extratextual level, which resulted in what I label the ‘comics journalistic pact’ between the recipient and the author. Notions of authorship are naturally subject to historical change and in uence the understanding of a piece of comics journalism. If there are multiple authors, authorship refers to those authors who have made a signi cant contribution to the conception, design, investigation, technical implementation, and artistic arrangement of the work of comics journalism. In this respect, comics journalism is confronted with the following problem: the classic editorial structure of traditional journalism does not exist, or at least only rarely. Hence, I argue that it is all the more important that the author’s position is transparently communicated to provide the reader with information worth knowing (for example, on her professional background and way of working, on the sources used, changes that had to be made, etc.) in order to understand the texts because the comics journalist is responsible for her own work. This study has shown that many comics journalists perform strong authorship, which is partly due to their status of being freelancers. They have to market and sell themselves and their work. The ways of digital distribution, announcement, and advertisement are extraordinarily important for comics journalists. The Internet in general and social media in particular are the best possible means, helping to verify and prove the content from which the author and the reader bene t. First, because this is the way how comics journalists mainly attract attention. Second, this is how the authors of comics journalism can inform a broad audience and potential consumers very quickly about their latest news and pieces of work, which they can update and upload very quickly. Third, with the help of social media, comics journalists can enter into direct one-to-one communication with the reader but also continue the one-to-many communication with the audience. And fourth, the Internet provides fast fact-checking tools which can con rm the author in several regards. This study has pointed out that authorship is extraordinarily important in comics journalism. An author-related reception focuses on the author’s perspective on a speci c topic in order to convey a particular understanding of this issue. In this sense, the work can also be seen as an expression of 338 the author’s personality—including her feelings, opinions, knowledge and values—without the comics journalist being the protagonist of the story. It is not only possible to look at the textual level, but there is a compelling need for the analysis of autonomy on an extratexual level. Hence, authorship is to be seen as a status attributed to a piece of comics journalism, and is bound up with authorial visual self-presentation in a spectrum ranging from observing via witnessing to active involvement. In this regard, authorship in comics journalism has been identi ed as a “cultural performance” (cf. Berensmeyer et al., Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies ) in connection with social contexts, technological and cultural developments, as well as crossmedial con gurations. Authorship is to be understood in relation to the comics journalist’s personal qualities, knowledge, drawing and coloring styles, all of which contribute to the establishment of a comics journalist as her own brand, causes recognition in the community, and is eventually connected to her identity. Authorship gives rise to some consequences in a social context, such as debates about intellectual property and copyright, and about the author’s legal responsibility for the e ects of her work. Comics journalists are liable by name for telling their stories visually and verbally. In addition, the conception of authorship in comics journalism determines editorial practices that are di erent from traditional journalism and the creation of ctional comics. This concerns the elds of patronage, market and media dependency, authorpublisher relationships, and the communication to the audience on the Internet. Self-employment is the most frequent way of how authors are nanced, and it has advantages and disadvantages. While they have a higher degree of responsibility in every step of the production process than in traditional journalism, the nancial uncertainty and the pressure to have their products constantly marketed, are merely some of the risks that not every author is willing to take. Nevertheless, a self-reliant and strong authorship strengthens the comics journalist’s professional portfolio and general appearance. This can be helpful to support and underline her authenticity and credibility, to receive invitations for reviewing panels, to give talks at conferences, to teach workshops, or to become an expert who is invited to give advice to others. For single authorship comics journalism, these are the following results: The Voice of the Author Is the Voice of the Narrator First, the pact acknowledges that comics can transport non ctional information in a ctional medium while guaranteeing journalistic rules and investigation methods. More precisely, comics journalism produces a narration that is written and drawn in sequential art by a real person about a contemporary topic of interest. It is realized by journalistic means and methods provided that the focus is 339 not on autobiographical lives, but on the reporting and representation of actual events and stories of other people. Prose text in caption boxes and character dialogue in speech balloons create the verbal narratorial caption script. Thought balloons are used either not at all or only rarely. Even if a piece of comics journalism is written in the present tense, the reader must assume a temporal displacement and, thus, a retrospective narrative perspective of the main character. What is visually and verbally told in the present tense of the comics panel evokes the immersion of the reader; she has the impression that the incident is taking place right now. Nevertheless, the events represented must be understood as situations that have happened in the past (see Ch. 2.6.2). Moreover, this part of “voice” acknowledges that the comics journalist must be the person who researches, narrates, and draws. Only this makes her a comics journalist. Drawing already requires a perspective and the author’s point of view. In reality, it is not the narrator but the author of a novel who writes down the words. However, comics journalism fundamentally undermines this previous separation. Due to its complex character as a hybrid form, neither the impossibility of a strict separation between the author and narrator nor the unity of these two has been taken into scholarly account until now, because in contrast to literary studies, one considers the narrator in the storyworld as the real author from the extratextual world. Nevertheless, a mediation takes place between the author in the real world and her counterpart in the piece of work. It is important to note that there are di erent ‘selves’ of an author, such as the remembering self, narrating self, experiencing self, and the drawing self—all of them constitute the authoring self. Based on this, it is also possible to derive the authorial functions in single authorship comics journalism; and the “ideal” reader knows about the ‘borderline’ status, and accepts that comics journalism often works with a trichotomy of the author, the verbal narrator, and the visual narrator. Unlike ctional narratives, which may deliberately delude the reader, one has to trust the comics journalist and the media representative to report fully, accurately, and justly, which is not di erent from traditional journalism. By ascribing importance to the author in single authorship comics journalism, one can assume the identity of the author as the narrating character of her story due to her verbal and visual occurrence on the level of the storyworld. Hence, depending on the author’s narrative situation, comics journalism may either appear as (more) subjective or (more) documentary. If the author ful lls the functions of the journalist, the drawer, the eyewitness, and the narrator, one is dealing with a very strong type of single authorship. This narrative situation is usually presented overtly both verbally and visually. Furthermore, it is marked by direct speech in caption boxes or speech balloons. The author’s ‘cartoon-me’ turns towards the reader and often looks at her. 340 ‘Real’ Comics Journalist Storyworld 1 Extratextual Level (‘Reality’) ‘Cartoon-Me’ (of the Comics Journalist) Cartoon Image of the ‘Real Person’ ‘Real’ Person Storyworld 2 Textual Level Figure 5.2: Model of Narrative Communication in Comics Journalism For single authorship, I have developed a model (see Fig. 5.2) which includes at least two levels of mediation: The extratextual world, in which the real comics journalist and the real person who is a subject of interest to the comics journalist are located. ‘Storyworld 1’ is inside the extratextual world. The ‘cartoon-me,’ which is the visual self-representation of the real comics journalist in the form of a cartoon, embodies the journalist and cartoonist. She is also the narrator and eyewitness of the story to be told. If the comics journalist only gives voice to other characters to let them tell their stories, she no longer functions as a verbal narrator of the story but only as a visual one. Then, ‘storyworld 2,’ which is verbally told and experienced by another character, comes into existence. Moreover, the existence of ‘storyworld 2’ is connected to a temporal shift. While comics journalism mostly presents ‘storyworld 1,’ the narration told by a character has happened in the past and is referred to as ‘storyworld 2.’ The tendency is that ‘storyworld 2’ almost always occurs in the works of comics journalism. In contrast to those pieces of comics journalism which are characterized by a covert narrator, the distinction between a narrator and author seems 341 to be more appropriate. The narrative situation of comics journalism with a more documentary character is characterized by the fact that the narrator merely presents and records the facts. It can also be observed when the comics journalist does not act as an eyewitness herself. In this case, she cannot verbally tell the story but only describes other people’s experiences in storyworld 2 utilizing visual images. Here, the narrator functions more as a presenter of facts. Furthermore, it has been shown that the di erence between storyworld 1 and 2 is a shift in time from the present to the past tense. In combination with the visual representation of the character, this is one way of creating immersion. While the author is at the same time the eyewitness of the incidents in storyworld 1, storyworld 2 comes into existence as soon as a character starts to tell her story. The author has not been able to experience on her own what the character in storyworld 1 recounts. Furthermore, a more neutral tone appears if the author recedes into the background and has another character tell the story. Such examples show the fuzziness of the distinction between the documentary and journalistic mode and blur the generic boundaries between literature and journalism. Because my approach is strongly marked by journalistic methods and elements, I am working with “comics journalism” instead of “documentary comics.” Moreover, a ‘visually and verbally overt narrative situation’ is particularly successful in the journalistic genre of reportage, which plays a special role in comics journalism. In this case, the role of the author and the situation of the narrator can also be seen as reasons why comics journalism is often wrongly equated with comics reportage. Due to its rst-person narration and subjective stance, comics reportage should be seen as a form of comics journalism. The supposedly greater subjectivity can be better justi ed and understood in this genre by looking at the author’s strategies of authentication in the extratextual world (see Ch. 4). Figure 5.3 shows my classi cation, which categorizes the main primary works of this study according to their narrative situations. In comics journalism, one encounters three di erent possibilities of narrative situations. These are the following: ‘visually and verbally overt,’ ‘visually covert and verbally overt,’ ‘visually and verbally covert.’ The combinations allow for four di erent options but ‘visually overt and verbally covert’ is impossible and thus does not exist in comics journalism. An author who overtly represents herself by a ‘cartoon-me’ in the story is more likely to use rst-person narration than a neutral and covert voice. Whereas the boldly printed examples in the bottom right corner list the works which are to be understood as more documentary-like, the upper row can be ascribed to examples of rst-person narration. Moreover, one can note that the bottom left corner remains free because this combination 342 Visual Overt Covert Ver bal Overt reads: From the Refugee Crisis, Rolling Blackouts, Journalism, Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos, One Day in Kara Tepe, Lesbos: Europe’s Waiting Room, e Influencing Machine, … Freetown, Schwerter Ruhr-Nachrichten, some Introductory Panels, e.g., Inside Death Row Covert Ferguson Firsthand, The Nisoor Square Shooting, The War Over Water, Escaping Wars and Waves Figure 5.3: Classi cation of Narrative Situations with Examples is impossible. In other words, a verbally covert narration in tandem with a visually overt representation of the author is contradictory and does not exist in comics journalism. The Comics Journalist Is the Witness and Has Experienced Herself What She Tells the Reader The ‘face’ constitutes the second part of the ‘comics journalistic pact’ and analyzes the visual (self-)representation of the author in comics journalism. I have analyzed single authorship and point to the challenges I face with collaborative authorship (see Ch. 3.2.4). Because the face and especially the eyes of the comics journalist play an important role, the focus of this part was on seeing and being seen. On the one hand, seeing is a fundamental prerequisite for observing in order to create a mimetic drawing of reality. On the other hand, the eyes are the body parts that are important for witnessing events that can be retold later on. I have shown that the comics journalist as the author takes the functions of the narrator, drawer , and the journalist (see Ch. 3.1). In the following section, one further role of authorship is added—namely that of the eyewitness . Comics journalists not only witness but also con rm happenings with their own eyes, 343 pens, and papers. Against the backdrop of our cultural memory and the times of “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and “post-truthness,” understanding the comics journalist as a witness can turn out to be tremendously helpful and relevant for analyses. Similar to the “narratorial I” and the “narrated I” in autobiographical comics, one has to take into account the visual rst-person narrative in the narratorial caption boxes, in particular in the case of comics journalism created by one author. The comics journalist as the author has a ‘verbal I’ and a ‘visual I.’ I have suggested the term ‘cartoon-me,’ which should be thought of as a kind of a ‘visual clone’ of the comics journalist instead of ascribing deep psychological and cognitive self-re ection to it. However, neither “avatar” nor “alter ego” does justice to what we encounter in comics journalism. First, comics journalists do not play with secret identities. Being professional journalists and authors, they follow journalistic rules and methods; they stand in with their names for what they write (see Ch. 3.2.1). Second, “avatar” can also refer to a nonanthropomorphic object or form. This implies that one equates a human journalist from the extratextual world with, for example, the symbol of a mouse cursor, which can also be called an “avatar.” Third, because of their usage in literary and game studies, I want to avoid any underlying connotations of ction and thus consider the terms “avatar” and “alter ego” to be inappropriate. I do not overemphasize the pictorial representation of the comics journalist because she does not have the intention to create a perfect image of herself in the work. All in all, the appearance of the author’s image in the diegetic world is, however, a particular feature of comics journalism. A cartoony style of the ‘cartoon-me’ leaves opportunities of visual commentary, commemorative function, emotional distance, and thematic disinterest up to the readers. Even if not every ‘cartoon-me’ has to appear as an abstract self-presentation, the cartoony way of seeing coincides with the comics journalist’s mode of seeing, witnessing, and researching, which is one of the biggest a ordances of comics journalism because “[c]artooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing” (McCloud, Understanding Comics 31). The new meaning of the face in the panel contributes to a personalized type of journalism. Sticking to the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ authors swear that what they have seen, touched, experienced, or felt is true. Thus, using ‘cartoon-mes’ for authorial visual presentation ful lls various functions because attaching the author’s face to the text literally adds a new meaning to it: • for reasons of identi cation and memorability of the comics journalist throughout the narrative • as an attention carrier and director of the line of sight of the story • as a re ection gure for the recipient 344 • as a protection mask for the author in case of emotional or physical involvement • as a ‘what if ’-mask for worldmaking Moreover, the concept of the “witness” has proven to be very helpful. I have argued that comics journalists are not only journalists and storytellers but also important witnesses of our time. They record our society in all its forms and varieties with visual means. I even claim that they are not only witnesses (‘Zeugen’) but also testi ers (‘Bezeuger’) of the truth, using minimalistic means— their eyes, pens, and papers. Moreover, they are also producers (‘Erzeuger’) of sociopolitical discourses. Furthermore, the ethical and political dimension of the concept of “witnessing” legitimates the subjective and emotional side, which can also be found in comics journalism. Being contextualized and embedded in the contemporary media landscape and debates, the use of testimony can be a way to justify the inherent subjectivity of the reporter’s perspective on the storyworld. By taking the eyewitness account for granted and fact-based, the concept of testimony makes the fact- ction-debate approachable for comics studies, similar to the recipient’s trust in journalism. Moreover, the depiction of fact-based witnessing justi es the representation of ‘essentially true’ content in comics journalism. Additionally, I have proposed that the author’s verbal and visual self-representation has special signi cance in comics journalism, especially in comics reportages, because, in postmodern times, stressing the author’s perspective is more authentic and trustworthy than the author’s pseudo-hidden narratorial voice. For example, in the world of information, the concept of authorship stands for the “very idea of the individual point of view” (Lanier 47). Considering this statement, the pictorial presence of the comics journalistic subject, the ‘cartoon-me,’ both corroborates and unravels comics journalism’s generic claims. The Comics Journalist Is an Engaged Character in Her Own Story I have chosen the label ‘hands’ for the third part of the ‘comics journalistic pact.’ This constituent of the pact has a unique role because it oscillates between the author in the storyworld and her counterpart in the extratextual world. There is no other situation in which the blurring of generic boundaries, for example, the dividing line between the narrator and author as textual entities on the one hand and as real-world subjects on the other, is more visible than in this thematic chapter. Authorship in comics journalism can only fully be understood when considering the textual and extratextual levels. In this regard, ‘hands’ relate to the following aspects: 345 • The hands are not visible in the storyworld, but the recipient knows that the comic must have been created by someone’s hands. • The comics journalist’s hands are visible in the storyworld. They are represented with regard to the production, that is, while writing, researching, sketching and so on (see Ch. 3.1.4). • The hands and thus the comics journalist are/ is in action and function/ s as a kind of messenger between di erent positions. The comics journalist becomes part of the story, which was not originally intended or initiated by herself. • The comics journalist’s hands are in action and start to dissolve the boundaries between the real world and the storyworld because the comics journalist actively intervenes and participates in the story, for example, by drawing portraits of people and talking about their lives, and by giving art workshops to o er people a distraction from their everyday misery. In addition, this part of the pact also investigates the physical and emotional distance between the comics journalist and her subject of reporting. In order to show the di erent degrees of engagement of comics journalists, I have developed a scale (see Ch. 4.1.3). I illustrated the author’s di erent levels of engagement with Fig. 5.4: engaged like an activist physically and/ or emotionally engaged (‘messenger’) silently observing Kate Evans Ted Rall Joe Sacco Sarah Glidden Dan Archer Olivier Kugler Josh Neufeld Aimée de Jongh low high less/ more Figure 5.4: The Author’s Di erent Levels of Engagement An interesting case is when the comics journalist reveals herself in the story, which can change from a mere ‘experiencing’ and ‘observing’ author to an ‘intervening’ and ‘highly engaged’ author, who dismisses the physical and emotional distance, which is generally required in traditional journalism to a great extent. On the left side of the scale, one can situate the author as a silent observer and witness who documents her experiences and who stays outside the story she tells about. The more one moves to the right end of the scale, the higher the degree of the author’s involvement becomes. While somewhere in the middle of the scale, the author starts to lose her physical and emotional 346 impartiality, the right extreme corresponds to an emotionally and physically highly involved comics journalist, who actively participates in the real world of which she is making a piece of comics journalism. Regarding the degree of the author’s involvement, I suggest speaking of a ‘more’ or ‘less’ instead of strict dichotomies. This means that one might talk about an author who is ‘less’ activist-like but ‘more’ observing, in contrast to one who is ‘very active and helping.’ It has become evident that drawing a strict line between the levels of the storyworld and the extratextual world is hardly possible in comics journalism, which contributes to its status as a very interesting phenomenon and an outstanding genre. Collaborative Authorship Complicates and Challenges the Pact As explained before, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is designed for single authorship. The reader enters notionally into a pact with the comics journalist. As a matter of fact, ‘collaborative authorship’ is divided among di erent bodies. Consequently, the idea of the ‘comics journalistic pact’ does not apply here because in this case, the comics journalist is not a strong and single author because collaborative authorship complicates the issues of witnessing, experiencing, and narrating. Moreover, with the rise of the Internet, the number of works with collaborative authorship has increased considerably. One reason for this is that the competences and skills that a journalist must have at her disposal nowadays have to exceed those of a ‘traditional’ journalist, who only investigates and writes texts. This becomes evident with regard to technical skills. In particular, webcomics, which are already designed as comics for the Internet, require technical expertise, and the tasks are divided among di erent people. However, there is a way in which a complete breach of the pact and the danger of misleading the reader can be avoided. If one argues by referring to the respective forms in which comics journalism can occur, one does not give up all requirements, but might have to adjust some parts even more strictly, especially with regard to the transparency of the production. Then, one could postulate that ‘collaborative comics journalism’ does not work well whenever it occurs in the form of reportage. Ch. 2.6.3 on classifying comics journalism has shown that the reportage is one of the most personalized journalistic genres. In my view, comics journalism with collaborative authorship is incompatible with the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ because it does not harmonize and function well with regard to division of labor and issues of reliable and credible witnessing, experiencing, and narrating. 347 The Comics Journalist Uses Di erent Strategies to Verify and Authenticate Herself and the Content In order to minimize the possibilities of ctionalization, strategies that prove the trustworthiness of the author and underpin her delity to the facts are particularly important. Authentication strategies thus serve as reassurance and con rmation. These strategies are predominantly located outside of the work, which means that they are situated on the extratextual level. It would be di cult to understand comics journalism and to identify the role of the author without them. I built on Weber and Rall, who identi ed the “author’s presence,” her “physical resemblance,” “stylistic devices,” “documentary evidence,” and “the meta-story of the comic” as authentication strategies (Weber and H.-M. Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 1). Furthermore, I consider a frequent use of multiperspectivity as a method of authentication. This can include the possibility that the author has various people narrate the story. Another way is the insertion of di erent media that underpin and verify the comics journalist’s story and the stance from which she writes. This study has shown that the Internet plays an incredibly important role for the presentation and work of the author due to the intermingling of the storyworld and the extratextual world, which, in particular, holds true for reportages. The author’s use and handling of her social media accounts, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, can support the factual message. Furthermore, personal blogs and websites indicate that a separation of the levels of story and discourse is not meaningful but necessary in order to respect the pact. Regarding the implementation of fact-checking, one can note that the author uses footnotes in the panels, which then belong to the diegetic world and whose insertion causes some kind of rupture, signaling that one is not dealing with ction. Moreover, the integration of other sources that the comics journalist used for writing or has come across during her research, as well as the insertion of prologues, epilogues, and short commentaries in which she refers to the anonymization and protection of sources, or in which she shows making-of pictures of herself, are further ways that the comics journalists employs to verify her identity, her production process, and to corroborate her expertise in the eld. The A ordances of Comics Journalism This study has contributed to the research on genre theory by examining comics journalism as a new(s) genre and a serious source of information. Like all genres, comics journalism is subject to historical and cultural change because generic boundaries are uid and change over time. Comics journalism is a synthesis of art, literature, and journalism because it merges features and techniques of sequential art with journalistic concepts, 348 work processes, and methods. A comics journalist, a designation that is not a protected job title, researches and acts like any other journalist. Although the representation of news and events from reality is the thematic basis, authors of comics journalism have advantages when it comes to creating images. Thus, comics shift the weight of authentication from media prerequisites towards their authors, and thus to the textual properties referring to them. The subjective voice of the author is often visually emphasized, intentionally exposed, and transparently veri ed by a variety of means ranging from paratextual via textual to extratextual strategies. Ideally, connections can be represented better in this way and help to convey issues to a broad public. Comics journalism can be assigned to movements of literary and slow journalism, as well as to watchdog and advocacy journalism. It stands in the tradition of New Journalism. Therefore, comics journalism is a type of journalism with attitude and personality and is characterized by an intended subjectivity of the author. On a textual level, comics journalism is characterized by a striking overlap between the author, narrator, drawer, and character of the story. Moreover, comics imagery immediately exhibits the subjectivity of the artist and her interpretation, but what could be considered a hindrance to factual reporting has become a valuable resource and a central feature of comics journalism. The overt display of subjectivity and medial limitations as a means of honesty has been described as an authentication strategy of non ction comics. In addition, this study has shown that comics journalism is a mode of reading and writing. It requires not only accurate dealing with sources and working methods but also participation by its readers because the role of the reader is pivotal in this genre. Even if authorship in comics journalism is linked to great demands on authorial authenticity and trust, critical literacy is needed, because it must not be ignored that every visual representation consists of a “mediated authenticity” (cf. Enli) and requires critical analysis, especially because of the author’s deliberately emphasized opinion. However, this type of journalism should not be used to polarize opinions. It is not in the interest of comics journalists that only their information is perceived to reinforce their own convictions. Comics journalism is about the matter itself and not about the authors themselves, even if one cannot avoid and deny that comics journalistic authorship has a staging dimension, which is reinforced by the omnipresent staging character of social media (cf. Hallet, “Literatur, Kognition und Kompetenz: Die Literarizität kulturellen Handelns” 45-46), because there is no immediately accessible reality (cf. Leonhardt and Viebrock 4). The author ful lls many roles and is indispensable for the analysis of comics journalism. Derived from the pact, the comics journalist as a single author functions as a journalist, cartoonist, narrator, eyewitness, observer, 349 listener, volunteer, supporter, activist, teacher, trauma therapist, entertainer, messenger, handicraftswoman, artist, voice-giver, traveler, and sometimes as a character in her own story. Comics journalists are always ready to work because they are not dependent on any technical equipment but only on a few external means that are also easy to take along with oneself, such as the drawing pad/ sketchbook, and the pencil. This purism often allows them to get access to places that are denied to other media. This is the case when photography and camera records are, rst, not allowed; second, not welcome; or third, not possible. Comics journalism wants to satisfy the audience’s need for a better understanding of the making of the news through a personal lens and through a contextualization which is guided by the author. In this regard, comics journalists are crucial witnesses of our time, our culture, and our society. As such, they contribute to a di erent tradition of communicative practice. Comics journalism can engage, touch, and move readers because comics journalism as a genre of literary journalism is capable of surprising and shocking the audience—all the more so due to visual images. Moreover, comics journalism can have people co-experience what the comics journalist saw and covers in her stories. It is an o er to revitalize the news industry and journalism, which, eventually, may attract new audiences. Assuming that literary texts a ect and might change the cultural perception and understanding of reality, this can only happen through the individual recipient and her active reception of the text. In this regard, the need to sensitize people for the workload involved in producing newspapers or comics, or to grant them a glimpse behind the scenes is another a ordance that comics journalism o ers, which I have analyzed as ‘meta-comics journalism’ (see Ch. 3.1.4). As this study has shown, comics journalism is a genre that, due to its journalistic methods, also critically addresses and investigates contemporary issues. It is precisely not the case that these comics are to be treated as funny, trivial, or comic, but on the contrary, they take an active stand and are also political to varying degrees. At the beginning of this study, I mentioned that comics journalism polarizes. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with this is up to herself. What has to be noted, however, is that the authors who make non ction comics and political cartoons are increasingly noticed by our society for what they do. Matt Bors, the editor of The Nib , for example, is a 2020 Pulitzer Prize nalist and was nominated for his “[political] cartoons that sliced through the hypocrisy of the Trump presidency, as well as the blind spots of moderate Democrats in a distinct, contemporary style” (Prizes n. pag.). If he wins, this would be a clear signal against the Trump presidency, and a triumph of art, journalism, and the expressive power of drawn panels. 350 To sum up, this study is based on the hypothesis that comics journalism, despite its inherent claim to the ctionality of the medium “comics,” merits serious critical analysis as a supplier of information. The interdependence between description and narration, between telling and showing in combination with universally understandable (hand-)drawn images that are crafted to represent, change, or exaggerate reality, is a unique a ordance. Moreover, the disclosure of the research process, the intended subjectivity instead of false neutrality, the entire coherence throughout a project and beyond, and this individual approach instead of sticking to normative, prede ned constraints while at the same time trying to apply journalistic methodology are further features that make comics journalism unique. Even though comics journalism has experienced an enormous upswing in the last ve years alone, works of this kind remain on the margins of the mainstream news culture. In particular, German-language publications remain rare in a corpus dominated by the English language. Thus, although comics seem to have gained greater acceptance in society, and although the tendency seems to promise a positive development of comics journalism for the future, there is still much research to be done. 5.2 Limitations and Further Research Establishing a ‘comics journalistic pact’ for approaching comics journalism comes with a few limitations, however. When one is dealing with comics journalism, the question of fact and ction always resonates subliminally. If traditional journalism worked with “essential truth,” it would immediately be accused of spreading incomplete, wrong, or even fake news. Hence, another research question I examined consisted in nding out to what extent and how comics journalism ctionalizes despite its claim to factuality. The most important reason is to be found in the de nition of the genre as such. Due to its origins in literary journalism, speci cally New Journalism and reportage journalism, reading comics journalism means reading a more personal work in contrast to than traditional news journalism, which is practiced on a daily basis in newspapers. Comics journalism does not deny the apparently more ctional character of the medium but highlights the aestheticizing tendencies which are present in all visual representations. The ‘comics journalistic pact’ is characterized by the dual approach of personal experience and testimony as well as by a claim to truth. Nevertheless, some aspects might indeed be criticized for because they approach the subjective level more than the objective level. These are, for example, memory de ciencies and untruthfulness by the comics journalist. And, rst and foremost, the ‘comics journalistic pact’ is based on mutual belief between two 351 parties. The more the comics journalist reveals about her production, the more she uses strategies of authentication, and the more she is present on di erent social media accounts, the more likely she is to be trustworthy and to produce correct and veri able information. However, each party has to stick to the rules—the reader to the genre’s features and the author to the truth and the other aspects mentioned earlier. In the case of single authorship, the veri ability of what has happened on the ground during the investigation, during interviews, etc. proves to be more challenging. Human beings are fallible, and believing people necessitates a primal trust in the good in other people—trusting people is one of the most fragile goods, having a tremendous impact on many social interrelations. While in ctional comics “complex closure” can have a productive e ect on the suspense and dramatic line of the story (McCloud, Understanding Comics 63-64), and although the concept of closure is essential for comics because they would not work without it, comics journalism works better if there is as little closure as possible, and a dense gutter. Then, little room is given to speculation that is liable to journalistic accuracy and a factual basis. Often, the degree of closure is kept to a minimum for the reader. If everything to know is there, in the panels, the reader stays as close to the facts as possible and does not have to interpret a lot in the gutter. In turn, however, the panels often may look similar to each other; the arrangement of the panels follows a strict pattern which is not varied substantially throughout the story, and the panel sequence is often steady and similar. In contrast to ctional comics, the layout and design of comics journalism is not diversi ed a lot and appears as rather monotonous, which is not a problem, though, because the reader does not expect extraordinary speech balloons, adventurous and playful storylines, or onomatopoeia as in superhero comics. One has to keep in mind that we are dealing with factual content here. Anything exaggerated or any wrong depiction violates the journalistic ethos and thus the ‘comics journalistic pact.’ Consequently, when reading comics journalism, the recipient expects an authentically narrated story based on real-world events, while still being aware of the fact that truth cannot be represented mimetically in a drawn medium, which is also characterized by its handmade character. However, the “5 W’s” from journalism also apply to comics journalism; comics journalism even widens their scope. These are the following: event (what and why), place (where), time (when), and characters (who)—their visual representation and verbal representation. For comics journalism, one has to add the method of the author’s investigation and drawing process (how). Further aspects that often cannot be depicted mimetically concern the details, such as the panel backgrounds or the colors. 352 Furthermore, the di erent drawing styles and individual drawing skills of the author create an additional possibility of abstraction and, thus, a degree of ctionalization. Last but not least, the drawing itself is also linked to pragmatic factors, which means that the production time decisively in uences the author’s imagination while creating the piece of comics journalism. It may take several years before a novel-length book is published. Due to this temporal viewpoint, the con ict of relevance, timeliness, and production time could be listed as a shortcoming of comics journalism. This study on “authorship in comics journalism” has given a selective overview of the multitude of works that have emerged since the last decade. Although I have tackled a wide range of authors, issues, and topics, several questions remain unanswered. This study has demonstrated that the author and her way of writing, drawing, and investigating has a considerable impact on the existence of comics journalism as a genre. This process has not yet come to an end, but I expect comics journalism to gain further relevance in the years to come. Therefore, I will provide ten suggestions for further research in the elds of comics journalism and non ction comics: First, although this study does not have a national focus, a number of other countries with rich traditions of text-picture stories are not included. Therefore, the analysis of comics journalism can be extended to other countries, for example, Spain, France, Japan, Asia, and Russia, to name but a few. Moreover, the comics culture in the Arab world is also vibrant, though many Western readers are unfamiliar with it. Drawing the Times ’s Issue 5 in March 2017 is entitled “Stories from the Arab World: Life after the Arab Spring,” and it is a forerunner of this topic and comics culture. In this special issue, non ction stories from Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Libya are included. Moreover, the Franco-Belgian tradition of the bande dessinée , as well as the Asian manga culture with its manifold variety could unfortunately not be considered in this study. Comparisons could be made, for example, with regard to the type and manner of the drawing style, the choice of topics, as well as the author’s dealing with the extratextual world. A possible approach here would be to analyze the representation of authorship under the in uence of less democratic governments or regimes. Second, there is a lack of empirical studies on the practical implementation of authorship, for example, with regard to comics journalists’ salaries, working conditions, nding jobs, and dependencies on editors or publishers. Until now, I have gained all insights from the authors’ blogs, personal websites, and interviews with comic magazines. Third, it would also be great to conduct a reception-oriented study and nd out more about the reader and her preception of comics journalism. 353 Fourth, a further study could focus more strongly on the performative aspect of authorship. Although I mainly analyzed the impacts on single authorship, I have expressed my doubts on collaborative authorship in comics journalism. Following Harald Love’s conceptualization of a performative model of authorship (cf. H. Love) could also do justice to the increasing tendency of digitalization and webcomics journalism, which necessitate knowledge of information technology that broadens the requirements of a journalist’s professional skills. Fifth, a comics narratology should take into account ctional and non ctional comics because the entities of narrating, focalizing, monstrating, and ocularizing require di erent considerations. Sixth, I have already named two subgenres of comics journalism which could only be brie y addressed in this dissertation. They are ‘migration comics’ and ‘prison comics.’ I assume that there will be more subgenres which are mainly categorized by their contents. For example, comics journalists start to cover the coronavirus pandemic. With regard to the research eld of graphic medicine, this promises to be a further eld of study. Seventh, one could also examine the politics of a ect and emotion in comics journalism more closely because, as has been shown, emotions play a major role in reportages but undermine the idea of physical and emotional distancing from the subjects of investigation. The eighth research desideratum addresses the question of the relationship of the medium of comics to high and popular culture. One can ask whether the acceptance of comics changes due to the expansion of non ction comics. The medium of comics is strong enough as an art form; the comic does not have to emulate high culture. Perhaps, it is the other way around and one could also provocatively ask wh the so-called high culture suddenly accepts the comic. ‘Is this a sign of a lack of inventiveness on the part of high culture? Is it perhaps the case that high culture needs the comic and not the other way around? ’ Ninth, because readers can now actively engage with the narrative text, ctional characters, and the author, how far do we need to adapt or change the traditional one-way author-reader communication model to apply to interactive and participatory non ction (Weigel-Heller, Schlichting)? Moreover, does the concept of the traditional “reader” still capture the idea of interactive literature, or are other terms, such as “reader-agents” and “user” more appropriate, particularly with regard to the analysis of webcomics journalism? And last of all, teaching comics has been a new way of giving lessons at schools for a while. Particularly, in the foreign language classroom, teaching comics can be used as an e ective means to learn new languages. Due to its highly interdisciplinary and multimodal character, comics journalism allows for 354 an interdisciplinary teaching across disciplines. Art classes, foreign language teaching, political education, and social studies could work together; and if there is no time for teaching comics journalism as part of the regular syllabus, projects on comics journalism could be a nice and diverse o er in addition to the syllabus. In this regard, comics journalism can be a useful tool for teachers who want to prepare students to be empowered, informed, and civic-minded. It is not far-fetched to assert that, at the very least, the (political) happenings in our contemporary culture have enourmously raised our awareness of the challenging status of concepts, such as literature and journalism, as well as our understanding of fact and ction. Hence, we are forced to reach a deeper understanding of the nature of new generic hybrids combining various types of ctional aspects with elements of extratextual reality. This study has shown that a crossing of disciplinary boundaries opens up new elds of reception and production processes, which also o er new ways of gathering and conveying information. What is our relationship to fact and truth, and what role do ltered opinions play? Systems like journalism and literature are constantly in ux, and one steadily has to keep exploring the epistemology of journalism, as well as the a ordances of literary and journalistic methods to allow for the emergence of new(s) forms. 355 Works Cited Primary Sources Abel, Jessica. Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio . Broadway Books, 2015. Antunes, António Moreira. “Caricature.” The New York Times , 2019, www. timeso srael.com/ ny-times-apologizes-for-printing-netanyahu-cartoonwith-anti-semitic-tropes/ . Accessed 8 May 2020. 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Metzler, 2010, pp. 267-270. 391 uistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprach senschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik schaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Stat \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ anagement \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschicht Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ acherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidakt DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus F \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourism \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ WL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanist Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft ologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissensc \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ nguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenscha Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ orische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechn Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissen hematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwiss schaft Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ aft Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenscha Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ orische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechn Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissen hematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwiss schaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen aft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwe \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik emdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinav \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ WL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilolog Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ rt \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosoph ien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissensc BUCHTIPP Sabine Dengscherz, Michèle Cooke Transkulturelle Kommunikation Verstehen - Vertiefen - Weiterdenken 1. Auflage 2020, 270 Seiten €[D] 24,90 ISBN 978-3-8252-5319-6 eISBN 978-3-8385-5319-1 Was haben Ampelfiguren, ein Hase oder ein „Speibsackerl“ mit Transkultureller Kommunikation zu tun? Was spielt alles mit in einer Kommunikationssituation und was macht professionelle Transkulturelle Kommunikation aus? Warum braucht es ein differenziertes Kulturverständnis ohne Simplifizierung und Zuschreibungen? Mit diesen und vielen weiteren Fragen der Transkulturellen Kommunikation setzt sich diese interdisziplinäre Einführung auseinander. Das Buch richtet sich an Studierende, an Lehrende der Kultur- und Kommunikationswissenschaften sowie an alle an Kommunikation Interessierten. UVK Verlag. Ein Unternehmen der Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de www.uvk.de ISBN 978-3-7398-3123-7 ‘What is Comics Journalism,’ and ‘Why is the author not dead at all? ’ Because literature and journalism deal differently with “authorship” and “author,” this work renegotiates these concepts. It analyzes the author’s importance in comics journalism, especially concerning the verification and authentication of the production process. This study gives a broad and extensive overview of the various forms of contemporary comics journalism, and argues that authorship in comics journalism can only be adequately understood by considering the author both on the textual and extratextual level. By combining comics analyses with cultural, sociological, and literary studies approaches, this study introduces the ‘comics journalistic pact,’ which is an invisible agreement between author and reader, addressing issues of narration (‘voice’), testimony (‘face’), and journalistic engagement (‘hands’). It categorizes comics journalism as a borderline genre between literature, culture, art, and journalism due to its interdisciplinary nature. Laura Schlichting holds a Bachelor‘s Degree in English, Russian, and economics and a Master‘s Degree in English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. She was a member of the International Ph.D. Program and graduated from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Giessen.