Abstract
In an environment that has made visual representations of news, politics, and history an especially contentious field for political struggle, the emergent genre of comics journalism attains special significance. Media theorists including Neil Postman and Susan Sontag have suggested that the epistemological biases of popular visual culture are inferior to those of typographical culture, while others have argued that the unique epistemology of comic books and graphic novels demands that we reassess the medium as a serious mode of communication. In reexamining Postman’s claims about visual culture with an eye towards the emerging genre of comics journalism, this paper proposes an epistemological theory of comics journalism that emphasizes the extent to which Joe Sacco’s representative texts link affective content with hard journalism, trouble strict distinctions between entertainment and serious public discourse, and critique mainstream typographic, photographic, and television journalism.
Keywords: comics journalism, Joe Sacco, comparative media, visual culture, news
Ted Rall’s works, covering the Afghanistan conflict for The Village Voice in 2001 and returning in 2010 to provide follow-up coverage for The Los Angeles Times, have provided mainstream journalists with a high-profile model of the usefulness and marketability of comics journalism. Comics journalism is an emergent approach to analyzing, presenting, and commenting on the news of the day through the hybridization of traditional journalistic background research and on-the-ground reporting with a cartoon drawing style more familiar from comic strips and graphic novels. Since Rall’s To Afghanistan and Back (2002) was originally syndicated over a period of time, fit into a narrative arc that most resembled a personal travelogue, and emphasized Rall’s critical view of the Afghanistan conflict as it unfolded, it often most resembled another emergent journalistic medium: the blog. Rall hybridizes on-the-ground comics journalism with political cartoon commentary that draws on the traditions of G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World. But Rall’s work is not unique for using a more journalistic approach to sequential art than Trudeau or Tomorrow; instead, Rall is just one contributor to a growing fringe genre. Somewhat similarly to Rall’s travel-blog format, Guy DeLisle’s popular travelogues from North Korea (2003), China (2006), and Burma (2008) combine the subjectivity of travel journalism with political commentary, although DeLisle’s works are written in a more book-friendly format than Rall’s shorter strips. Taking this subjective approach to the medium even further, Mike Russel’s CulturePulp (2000-2011) combines the sensibilities of human interest journalism, culture reviews, and citizen journalism to graphically cover popular regional entertainment and portray slices of youth culture in the Pacific Northwest. Some works of comics journalism, such as Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), Nick Bertozzi’s Iraq War Stories (2009), and Dan Archer’s The Honduras Coup: A Graphic History (2009-2010), provide a more factually-oriented approach to the news. Even so, these and other works in the genre maintain a strong sense of commentary and cultivate defined oppositional stances towards the mainstream media frames and agendas. Other examples of comics journalism like Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (2006) stay close to mainstream narratives and perspectives, using an approach more like an opinionated centrist historian than a muckracking television journalist. These examples from the last decade follow Joe Sacco’s trailblazing works of comics journalism, Palestine (1993-1995) and Safe Area Gorazde (2000), which helped establish the importance of the genre more than a decade ago (Williams, 2005). Combining an extremely detailed graphic approach that artfully mixes the subjective drawing style of cartooning or caricature with highly realistic illustrations of the impacts of conflict, Sacco both demonstrates the strength of comics journalism as a supplement to mainstream journalism and critiques the pretension to objectivity that occludes reflexivity towards the agenda-setting and framing functions of television and print reportage (Figure 1). Despite the strengths of the medium, however, comics are generally not considered “serious” or “adult” literature. One consequence of this is that even a favorable article like Kristian Williams’ “The Case for comics journalism: Artist-reporters leap tall conventions in a single bound” (2005) makes reference to superhero comics, undercutting the very serious themes like warfare and ethnic conflict that are mainstays of the genre. Despite this, critics including Rocco Versaci (2007) and Amy Nyberg (2006) stridently argue that the medium be taken seriously. If we intend to ask how a marginal genre like comics journalism can contribute to our understanding of public discourse, then this debt of the medium to juvenile-focused genres forces us to reconsider how our culture articulates the boundary between entertainment and news.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will first examine the importance that visual culture has attained in relation to typographic journalism in recent popular culture before turning towards some of the theoretical approaches to photographic and videographic journalism that suggest that visual media contribute to an undesirable conflation of entertainment and civic discourse or that visual media are inadequate to the purposes reserved for journalism in our culture. Then, I will return to Joe Sacco’s work specifically. Showing how comics journalism troubles and complicates the claims of these critics of visual culture while providing an epistemological model for journalistic reporting that demands reflexive attitudes towards content and medium, this paper will argue that the comics medium enables the journalist-artist to convey environmental and emotional aspects of conflict that are occluded by accepted modes of typographical, photographic, of television journalism.
I. Visual Media and Contemporary Journalism
The last decade has provided ample evidence that visual culture has become an especially contentious field for conflict over the public agenda, relationships between world cultures, and the shaping of national and religious identity. Controversies centering on photojournalism, popular television, Internet video, and editorial cartoons have demonstrated how events in visual culture can easily straddle categories of public communication generally considered distinct, including commentary, factual journalism, and entertainment, while emotionally engaging audiences with contemporary political and social challenges. Perhaps equally importantly, both ideologues and public interest groups have been able to use the emotional power of visual media to shape important debates about the roles of the military and religion in contemporary popular culture. For instance, the public advocacy website Wikileaks posted last Spring video of a 2007 attack on Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two journalists, leading to public outrage (Cohen and Stelter, 2010). In an article in The New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller (2010) reported that the video shows Reuters employees Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh among the victims of the aerial assault by Apache helicopters flown by US pilots. Bumiller also reported that the United States Central Command released a redacted report arguing that context not visible in the video suggests that no disciplinary or legal action is necessary. The evidence USCC offered included the presence of weapons nearby and the fact that Reuters employees “made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives”; nonetheless, USCC acknowledged that it was the reporters’ “furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants” (Bumiller, 2010). Blogger and journalist Glenn Greenwald (2010) has pointed out how ambiguity in Bumiller’s article led some other media personalities, including Bill Roggio of The Weekly Standard, to claim falsely that Wikileaks had failed to release the full 38-minute tape – according to Greenwald, this claim was specifically invoked to suggest that the missing context might exonerate the helicopter pilots. This focus on the context of visual representations of conflict – both the context outside of the frame of a given video, photograph, or drawing and other context that might be excluded more unconsciously from the visual presentation – proves to be a critical component in discourse about the importance of visual media to journalism.
The power to frame – which is to say, the power to establish which elements of the context are seen as salient – is crucial to the function of civic communications as a means of transferring information and coordinating interested parties to take action on the issues of the day. As Susan Sontag (2004) has argued, “For a long time – at least six decades – photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events.” To the extent that our memory of recent and historical events influences our civic behaviors, then, photographs have become central to the construction of opinion and the encouragement of action in the public sphere. World governments show an acute consciousness of this power: during the ongoing scandal about photographs of US military personnel torturing, violating, and abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference in which he offered his “deepest apology” to those mistreated, but continued to argue that the abuse “was inconsistent with the values of our nation, it was inconsistent with the teachings of the military to the men and women of the armed forces, and it was certainly fundamentally un-American” (Shanker and Schmitt, 2004). This initiated an official policy of blaming the individual soldiers rather than the larger policy and institutional context that arguably led to the abuse. In other words, Rumsfeld claimed that it is precisely the context beyond these images which makes them appear to be a particular and troubling exception, rather than evidence of misguided policy or institutionalized abuse.
In an editorial column, journalist Paul Gourevitch (2009) has argued that President Obama’s decision not to release the remaining Abu Ghraib photographs is appropriate in the greater context of US foreign entanglements and, moreover, that the photos will demonstrate nothing that is not already public knowledge. Gourevitch’s opinion carries special weight because he rose to prominence partially due to his unblinking print journalistic coverage of Rwandan genocide, suggesting that it is not simple repulsion at the images that motivates his position, but rather genuine concern about the socio-political fallout from further release (see Gourevitch, 1998). Moreover, as a correspondent for several internationally recognized newspapers, including the New York Times, Gourevitch and his co-author E. Morris collected information for Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), a critical look at the prison under American occupation. By suggesting that the images provide evidence only of wrongdoing that is already public knowledge, Gourevitch’s editorial (2009) suggests a clear demarcation between “knowledge” and “affective content” and privileges the former by emphasizing the danger of the latter. In other words, it is precisely the “affective content” of the photographs – their ability to elicit emotional responses that would negatively impact US military engagements – that justifies keeping these images secret. Implicit in this view is the assertion that this “affective content” does not qualify as “knowledge.” As we will see, this distinction between “affective content” and “knowledge” provides a common foundation for critiques of visual communications in civic life. Ultimately, I will mobilize this distinction to suggest that one characteristic strength of comics journalism is precisely its ability to convey “affective content” alongside “knowledge.” Indeed, comics critic Gillian Whitlock (2006) has pointed out that emotional impact is the crucial aspect of the Abu Ghraib photographs and that the question that should be asked is not whether these images tell us something new about conflict, but what should be done with the emotions they evoke. So, the greater context of the Abu Ghraib photos becomes the turning point in several ways: Rumsfeld’s divorce of the controversy from underlying policy, Gourevitch’s acknowledgement of the relationship of the images to continuing policy objectives and the risks that they pose to global perceptions of the US, and the power observed by Whitlock and other commentators that these photos have in a politically charged environment to evoke powerful emotions that could lead to social upheaval.
Perhaps there is no surprise that video of military engagements leading to civilian deaths and photographs of prisoner abuse should lead to protracted debate about the role of visual media in civic discourse. But the impact of visual culture is not confined to relatively more objective media like video and photography, as is demonstrated by the scandal around cartoons published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Not only were newspapers that republished the twelve caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad criticized by British foreign minister Jack Straw for being “insensitive” and “unnecessary,” but The Economist argued that the context of a “frankly insulting” “challenge” to Islamic people made moot the point made by defenders of the cartoons that injunctions against images of Muhammad in that religion are “to ensure that they do not become objects of worship in themselves” (“Islam and Free Speech,” 2006, p. 27). In other words, the justification of censure is the claim that non-Muslim-owned periodicals are free to violate Islamic religious law, but not when those violations are intended to offend and may be reasonably expected to generate dangerously heightened emotional situations. The controversy that ensued had dramatic effects on the greater discourse about relationships between many communities in the West and the Muslim world. For example, Yale University Press published a scholarly work on the Jyllands-Posten controversy by author Jytte Klausen without reproductions of the images that were the focus of the book; more importantly, they also excised images of “a drawing [from] a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí” (Cohen, 2009). As examples of representations of Mohammad, these images certainly violate the injunction against representations of the prophet in Islam, but their censorship from this scholarly work shows that even historical imagery intended to provide context for an argument about the long history of contentious representations of Muhammad in Western art and culture were, for Yale University Press, too loaded with affective baggage for publication. So, although The Economist argues that the insulting intent of the original cartoons provides the context that makes their publication in European and North American newspapers worthy of skepticism, the Yale University Press appears to have determined that the context of globally emotional and violent controversy should preclude display of these images even in the relatively dispassionate context of academia. Both take a stand against the publication of the images, but Yale University Press’s decision expands The Economist’s rationale, suggesting that the affective content of such images may overpower any attempt to rationally assess their impact and place in a greater cultural discourse.
The greater Jyllands-Posten controversy illustrates the power of images to elicit highly emotional responses when they are re-contextualized. Gillian Whitlock (2006) has argued that although “graphic art moves as a commodity in a global market across various econo-, ethno-, and ideoscapes … difference is not transcended or resolved in these transits, and visual images are processed within vastly different communities of interpretation”; most obviously, this applies to the transit of these images from the Jyllands-Posten newspaper to other publications in Europe and finally into the angry streets of several predominately Muslim countries (p. 970). Given this, Yale University Press shows an understandable awareness that commodification and re-contextualization of images can lead to unpredictable interpretations and emotionally-charged reactions. In a similar demonstration of this fear that images will be co-opted or recontextualized, officials shut down a Russian newspaper in Volgograd because the paper published on 9 February 2006 a cartoon displaying images of Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, and Buddha with an underlying message that religious leaders never encouraged the violence done in their name (Myers, 2006).
Drawing on the cultural taboo against images of Muhammad and the Jyllands-Posten controversy, the animated television series South Park has chosen to depict Muhammad on three occasions: predating the controversy in 2001, alongside the founders of other religions in a context not entirely dissimilar to that of the Volgograd cartoon; in 2006, immediately after the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy, during which episode Muhammad’s head was censored; and in April 2010, Muhammad was portrayed first from a closed U-haul Truck and then dressed in a bear costume (Itzkoff, 2010). The April 2010 episode brought predictions of violence from a radical Muslim group, which ultimately led Comedy Central to alter the episode, eliminate the online stream, and avoid the usual late-night rebroadcast (Itzkoff, 2010).
What these controversies demonstrate is that visual culture contributes significant emotional depth to ongoing cultural conflict while simultaneously bringing up questions about the importance of context and the differing reactions to images displayed by interpretive communities with varied interests. Given these considerations, Joe Sacco’s hybridization of sequential visual art and hard-nosed journalism, and his focus on marginalized (and usually Muslim) communities, Sacco’s works on the Bosnian and Palestinian conflicts prove to be especially powerful models for understanding how the unique epistemology of comics journalism can contribute to a vibrant and engaged public discourse. Sacco’s formal training as a journalist and his lifelong commitment to comic arts contribute to a good balance between the issues and perspectives endemic to both media, but before I undertake a short case study of Sacco’s work, some theoretical discussion is necessary.
II. Theory and Discussion: Visual Culture and Civic Discourse
For the purposes of moving towards a media-specific understanding of the epistemology of comics journalism, it is useful first to examine theoretical models that interrogate the relationships between visual culture, image-driven media, and public engagements with current events and political issues. In particular, to support my claim that comics journalism critiques some epistemological limits of more well-established modes of journalism, it will be useful to examine theorists who have suggested that the limits of photojournalism and television journalism prevent them from playing meaningful roles in civic discourse and public action. Following this discussion, I will show how these critiques of visual culture are addressed in Joe Sacco’s work.
As I have shown, the Jyllands-Posten affair and related incidents tend to blur the boundaries between journalism, commentary, activism, and entertainment in visual culture. Such controversies may appear to provide significant evidence in support of theorist Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that the “Age of Show Business” brings with it modes of thinking about, presenting, and engaging public discourse that are inferior to those he associates with the “Age of Typography.” But as the Abu Ghraib photos and the Wikileaks “Collateral Damage” video demonstrate, the affective impact of popular imagery can play a significant role in linking widely understood facts about warfare to appropriate emotional states, thus contributing significantly to existing debates of great consequence.
Postman’s approach adopts Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the “medium is the message,” asserting that “whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like” (p. 10). Postman argues that “some ways of truth-telling are better than others” and that “the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life” (p. 24). Particularly, Postman argues that typographic media re-enforce habits of thought and discourse that are necessary to the public good: for example, “a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response” (p. 63). By applying these theoretical schemes to Joe Sacco’s comics journalism, I will show that, although Postman may have some strong claims outside of the scope of this paper about the instancy of television-like discourses, the claims about the shortcomings of the image as a mode of public discourse are naïve towards the diverse possibilities of the image as a mode of reportage, education, entertainment, autocritique, and debate. Although Postman is not the most contemporary or widely-cited theorist of media culture, his critiques provide a particularly lucid example of more general anxiety towards the conflation of entertainment and news and the shortcomings of visually-rich media for civic engagement.
One easy way to call Postman’s claims into question is to draw attention to the co-existence of typographical modes of knowledge and modes of knowledge that pair instant communication with rich visual content. However, Postman claims that “coexistence implies parity,” and, since television (and now online multimedia formats that have similar characteristics) is a predominant mode of discourse, “print is now merely a residual epistemology” (p. 28). Given the rising importance of textuality on the Internet (a medium Postman also lamented), it is not clear that his claims about the impossibility of coexistence have been borne out. Perhaps much more importantly, his formulation occludes the importance of hybrid forms that employ both a visual rhetoric drawn in part from television and a print rhetoric with a much longer tradition. He says of newspapers and magazines that might fit this description that they merely “are made to look like television screens” (p. 28). This shortcoming of his theory provides an opening for considering the effects of fringe media like comic books that draw both on the new epistemology he laments and on the “residual” epistemology he lionizes to generate ways of knowing that are unique and have social utility.
Before examining what Postman’s formulations offer to our understanding of comics journalism, it is first necessary to look at general epistemological concerns which have been raised in the field of Journalism and which overlap with Postman’s argument. Organizing this heterogeneous set of concerns, the theory of public communication proposed by Harold Lasswell (1948) will serve as an outline, dividing the relevant categories into (1) Who (2) says what (3) in which channel (4) to whom (5) with what effect (p. 37). The decision to use Lasswell’s framework does not endorse the notion that these are the only relevant categories for understanding the epistemological concerns relating to journalism, but simply suggests that many of the main theoretical concerns can be understood to fit into at least one of these categories.
The first question, then, is who communicates. Postman argues that one of the problems with television journalism is that the medium encourages users to evaluate messages not on their own merit, but on the appearance of the actor-reporters who communicate them. As we will see when we look at Sacco’s work, comics journalists have powerful tools at their disposal to address this association of credibility with appearance. But a more sophisticated description should focus not just on the mouthpieces and talking heads, but also on studios, networks, and publishers who distribute the news. Herman and Chomsky (2002) have convincingly argued for attention to issues of ownership by suggesting that the size and profit orientation of mass media outlets for journalism tends to distort both the agenda and how particular stories are framed (p. 3). But, as the Internet provides a venue for smaller media sources to disseminate journalism and commentary without the prohibitive upfront capital outlay of older broadcast media, issues related to the mass media oligopoly may reduce in significance.
For the purposes of this analysis, it is worth noting that although several corporate-owned magazines have commissioned works of comics journalism, the short review of works of comics journalism in this introduction reveals that direct-to-reader Internet distribution models and small publishers play a significant role in sustaining the medium. The small publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly are responsible for publishing most of Sacco’s work. While Fantagraphics sometimes distributes titles through larger publishers like W.W. Norton (including Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde (2000)), the ownership is independent of large corporate interests. Drawn and Quarterly follows a similar model, independently distributing titles like Joe Sacco’s The Fixer and Other Stories (2009). Sacco’s work Footnotes in Gaza (2009), a journalistic history of continued impacts of the 1956 massacre in Rafah and Kahn Younis, Palestine, is distributed by the Metropolitan Books imprint of the large corporate publisher Henry Holt and Company. However, if Henry Holt applied pressure on Sacco, it is not evident in the text, which challenges mainstream views about the Middle East. Even so, Scott McCloud (2000) reports that comics artist Dave Sim has said “No publisher will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them” (p. 61); Sim’s point is simply that any contract with a comics publisher involves some compromise of creative freedoms. In any case, a full theory of the epistemology of comics journalism must account for how economic forces shape what counts as fact in the medium and how this compares or contrasts to how economic forces shape facts in other journalistic media.
The second question posed by Lasswell’s formulation involves what is said. Herman and Chomsky (2002) offer five filters that determine what can be said in the mainstream mass media: ownership, the role of advertising, the sources used, the enforcement of the mainstream agenda by flak, and dichotomizing political constructs like anticommunism. As I’ve suggested, ownership may play more of a role in mainstream journalism than in fringe media. And, though advertising certainly may play a role in which perspectives television, newspapers, and magazines offer by limiting their target audiences to consumer classes, the appearance of comics journalism in stand-alone comic books and graphic novels tends to reduce the impact of advertising on this medium. Joe Sacco’s works show a high level of sophistication towards background research and sourcing of information: Sacco skillfully interweaves background obtained from official documents and sources with on-the-ground interviews with those who have been most affected by conflict. If anything, Sacco’s work is itself flak for the mainstream media machine, suggesting that the Western-centric modes of portraying the Bosnian and Palestinian conflicts are inadequate approaches. Originally writing during the cold war, Herman and Chomsky focus on anti-communism as a dichotomizing political construct that filtered the news, established an agenda, and framed particular issues; in today’s climate, anti-terrorism has established within North American mainstream media a similarly troubling dichotomy between the West and most of the Muslim world. So, finally, Sacco’s tendency to cross into the marginalized and othered community to find sources for his research ultimately tends to undermine the dichotomization between the secular, Christian, and Jewish West (of which Sacco is himself a representative) and the Muslim Other. But Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model fails to account for the vast differences between the different accepted modes of journalism. For instance, though their model may provide a useful way to understand current events and commentary journalism, it describes little about human interest journalism and still less of marginal modes of journalistic inquiry that foreground the individual reporter, such as Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism. For the purposes of applying their theoretical framework to comics journalism, this shortcoming is particularly salient: as we have seen, some works of comics journalism – like the serial CulturePulp – focus on human interest stories. More importantly, Sacco’s work deploys some techniques which may have emerged in Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism or in earlier works of narrative journalism to underscore the fundamentally subjective relationship between reporter and story that is occluded by the pretense to objectivity in some so-called “hard” news (Nyberg, 2010).
Returning to Lasswell’s description of news media, Journalism is distributed through several channels in the US, including print media like newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as television, film, and various hybrid media delivered online. Each of these channels might be profitably divided into smaller subcategories. For instance, much print journalism uses the convention of plain language as a constraint on the channel. Comics critic Amy K. Nyberg (2008) observes that these “Journalists adhere to a strict set of rules determined by professional norms, institutional constraints and even legal considerations that are different from those that govern the writing of fiction and most other nonfiction” (p. 3). Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Kristian Williams (2005) argues that the plain language of print journalism is fundamentally a rhetorical move; he argues that comics journalism simply foregrounds its sophistic aspect: “When it comes to the front page, newspapers favor plain language, in part to protect the readers from the seductions of rhetoric, of art … But such reasoning also cuts the other way. The hard-nosed, facts-are-facts tone of ‘journalistic language’ is also seductive. Plain-speaking is itself a kind of rhetoric, which wins trust precisely by seeming to leave rhetoric aside” (p. 53). But as I have suggested, in addition to plain-language, front-page “hard” journalism, there is a tradition of narrative journalism, suggesting that journalists have long recognized that some knowledge is best presented through rhetorical means that share a good deal with novelistic fiction. Identifying relevant predecessors to comics journalism, Amy Nyberg (2010) locates within the tradition of narrative journalism a resurgence “in the 1960s when experimentation with journalistic storytelling and challenges to the conventions of professional practice arose from two forms – the television news documentary and the New Journalism movement” (p. 2). Similarly, comics critic Rocco Versaci (2007) argues that the anti-corporate and highly subjective approaches of comics journalism should be understood as heritage from New Journalism, which he says “called attention to the mediation that takes place in any journalistic enterprise; that is, far from being unfiltered, works of New Journalism forced readers to consider the idea that truth is never completely objective and that the facts alone do not necessarily reveal a given event in the most meaningful way” (p. 110).
But if comics journalism tends to draw on the tradition of New Journalism, realistic approaches to the comic journalistic medium certainly draw extensively on tradition from yet another medium: photography. As Postman’s theory has suggested, photojournalism as a subset of visual civic communications comes with its own attendant presumptions about what constitutes truth and what is worth telling, and so it is worth further consideration as a channel for journalism. The realistic illustrations of conflict provided in Sacco’s work recall the function of photography in traditional journalistic media: they serve an aesthetic purpose, but also serve as informational supplements to the text, sometimes becoming the centerpiece of the “story.” Walter Benjamin has drawn attention to the extent to which photography emphasizes aspects of the world of images which “reside in the smallest details” (1931, p. 7) while divorcing the cultural artifacts represented in photos from the “aura” they enjoyed in the pre-modern era (1936). Comics journalism depends on the modern divorce from the “aura” insofar as it is a mass reproduced medium, although the auction of original drawings from classic fiction comic books suggests that the power of the “aura” persists even in the comics world. Sacco’s detailed drawings certainly suggest the focus on minutiae that Benjamin critiques, but Ted Rall’s more cartoon-like illustration style suggests that this is a characteristic specific to individual artists; moreover, though very detailed drawings may sometimes appear photo-like, drawing is a process of selection that demands even a “realistic” illustrator of detailed drawings to consciously emphasize some elements over others.
Susan Sontag (1977) has suggested that role of the photograph as a trace or “material vestige of its subject” has elevated photography out of the frame of interpretation through which earlier visual arts have been understood (p. 350). Comics journalism, however, more closely approximates writing in this respect in that each frame demands interpretation and selection, both on the part of the creator and on the part of the media consumer. From the standpoint of better understanding how comics journalism fits into a more general epistemology of journalism, the view shared by Benjamin and Sontag that the caption plays a crucial role subsuming the photographic image into a textually conceptualized discourse proves especially illuminating. But cultural critic Judith Butler (2005) argues against Sontag’s suggestion that the interpretive power of a photograph lies in the caption, saying with reference to the Abu Ghraib photographs that an “interpretation [is] compelled and enacted by the visual frame, coercive and consensually established” (p. 827). Comics critic Amy Nyberg (2006) agrees: “Like the news story, the news photograph is a construct. The camera is never objective – from the choice of subject to the way an image is framed to its reproduction, images are a representation of reality, rather than a ‘window’ on the world”; even so, Nyberg concedes that oftentimes news audiences are less aware of the subjective nature of the camera (p. 102). So, while contemporary audiences have increasingly developed skeptical attitudes towards photography, videography, and film as “objective” media, anxiety persists that Postman’s (1985) somewhat dated claim that “Pictures have little difficulty [in TV news broadcasts] overwhelming words, and short-circuiting introspection” may be partially true (p. 103). In the case of Sacco’s comics journalism, however, I will demonstrate how images encourage introspection and encourage a mode of understanding that is not entirely dependent on language. Simply speaking, illustrations are perceived as less real than photographs, film, or video – they constantly remind the viewer that they are constructed. Simultaneously, I will argue that the strong affective content that Postman fears will limit introspection is actually one of the merits of a visual medium for civic communications.
Amy Nyberg (2010) suggests that, as a channel of journalistic communication, the comic form differs significantly from television and photographic media. She argues that news consumers tend not to perceive the constructed nature of photojournalism and sees in comics journalism a foregrounding of the contingent and constructed nature of journalistic images; moreover, she argues that news consumers may not “recognize the creativity of language” in plain-language journalism, accepting reportage as objective, neutral, and comprehensive (p. 1). Nyberg ultimately sees the greatest strength of comics journalism in the text-image relationship (p. 1). Kristian Williams (2005) makes a similar point by contrasting the “inherent subjectivity” of comics journalism to the “newsrooms’ dispassionate prose,” although Nyberg takes him to task in “Theorizing Comics Journalism” (2006) for failing to observe that some genres of journalistic discourse – for instance, commentary – demonstrate that there is a continuum of journalistic practices from those that downplay the intrusion of subjectivity in the newsmaking process to those that foreground the individual organizing consciousness (Williams, 2005, p. 52; Nyberg, 2006, p. 104-105).
For the purposes of our analysis of the epistemology of comics journalism, returning to Herman and Chomsky’s five filters to understand Lasswell’s to whom dimension of communication proves fruitful. Herman and Chomsky argue that the need for advertising circumscribes the content a medium can provide, since a news outlet must cultivate an audience who can spend money on the consumer products that are most frequently advertised. This factor is equally important when we consider the intended audience of comic journalism. The format of stand-alone comic books (e.g. individual issues of Sacco’s Palestine series), stand-alone magazine-length comics (e.g. Sacco’s Soba), comics anthologies (e.g. Zero Zero #15, which originally carried Sacco’s Christmas with Karadzic), and graphic novel-length comics (e.g. Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and Footnotes in Gaza) militate against the impact of potential advertising on Sacco’s imagination of his own audience; on the other hand, Ted Rall’s (2001; 2010) contributions of wartime journalism from Afghanistan were commissioned by an advertising-supported magazine and newspaper, and portions of Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, so Herman and Chomsky’s thesis might be more fully explored with respect to such work.
Perhaps the most interesting answer to the question of to whom are the comics journalists writing contrasts the marginal and even somewhat shameful nature of being a comics reader to the mainstream position of a news consumer. Comics critic Rocco Versaci (2007) has pointed out that the marginal status of comics in relation to literature and journalism enables comics to criticize mainstream media and “provoke us to think about the constructed nature of truth in all forms of journalism” (p. 135). Versaci contrasts this freedom to be radical and convention-defying from the margins of “serious” culture to the recuperation of the previously radical political agenda of New Journalism by globalized capitalism, observing that the conventions of New Journalism which once shocked and offended the sensibilities of those speaking for “corporate interests” can now be found in profusion on the shelves of big box book stores as “literary nonfiction” (p. 110).
The most salient question about journalism and the final of Lasswell’s categories is what effect is achieved. Since Postman’s perspective on the effects of contemporary journalistic communication on public discourse has already been discussed, here we will discuss a dimension of journalism that he mostly avoids: the role of affect. Postman (1985) concedes that “beneficial possibilities” of the emotional impact of television journalism “are not to be taken lightly,” noting claims that the “emotional power” of television “is so great that it could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent forms of racism” (p. 29). However, in discussing the public’s poor background knowledge for understanding the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Postman suggests that what passes for knowledge about the topic should be properly labeled “emotions” (p. 107). He dismisses these emotions by saying that this label “would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us” (p. 107-108).
As we have seen, Susan Sontag shares with Postman this concern, but is additionally worried that the shocking aspect of photojournalism has become cliché and expected. For our purposes, consideration of the shocking or emotional aspects of photojournalism is a valuable means of understanding how images more generally function in a news reporting context. In contrast to Sontag’s view, Judith Butler (2005) suggests that the affective content of photography is part of what makes it a powerful mode of journalism:
For photographs to communicate effectively, they must act on viewers in ways that bear directly on the judgments that viewers formulate about the world. Sontag concedes that photographs are transitive. They do not merely portray or represent – they relay affect. In fact, it times of war, this transitive affectivity of the photograph may overwhelm and numb its readers; she is less sure whether a photograph can incite and motivate its viewers to change a point of view or to assume a new course of action. (p. 823)
Butler acknowledges Sontag’s contention that the affectivity of photography can overwhelm readers and summarizes Sontag’s ambivalence in On Photography towards the idea that photography can motivate changes in perspective or new courses of action, as in Postman’s examples of anti-Vietnam War sentiment and attitudes against virulent racism. But Butler considers also Sontag’s more recent work:
[in Regarding the Pain of Others], she is more ambivalent about the status of the photograph, which, she concedes, can and must represent human suffering, teach us how to feel across global distances, establish through the visual frame a proximity to suffering that keeps us alert to the human cost of war, famine, and destruction in places that may be far from us geographically and culturally. For photographs to invoke a moral response, they must not only maintain the capacity to shock but also appeal to our sense of moral obligation. She continues to fear that photography has lost its capacity to shock, that shock itself has become a kind of cliché, and that photography tends to aestheticize suffering to satisfy a consumer demand – this last function of contemporary photography makes it inimical to ethical responsiveness and political interpretation alike. (p. 824)
If Sontag is correct that shock has become a cliché and that photographs no longer appeal to our deeper ethical sense, then we would not expect such outrage about the Abu Ghraib photographs (much less the protracted debate and political equivocation about releasing the remaining photographs) or the continuing controversy about the Wikileaks video of US forces killing journalists. Instead, it seems that the power of photography to evoke both shock and moral outrage remains significant. In fact, given the examples of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon scandal and the recent controversy about South Park‘s representations of the Prophet Muhammad, it seems that photography and videography are part of a subset of a larger category of graphic, non-textual representations that have taken center stage in our political and moral discourse precisely because of their affective power.
In the Western philosophical tradition, a profound distrust of the emotions as a component of human thought can be traced back to Plato. However, philosophers Richard Rorty (1991, p. 80) and Martha Nussbaum (1992, pp. 4, 40) have pointed to novelistic fiction as a privileged site for philosophical contemplation precisely because it foregrounds particularity the importance of affective states. Summarized by Nussbaum, this neo-Aristotelian perspective argues that “practical reasoning unaccompanied by emotion is not sufficient for practical wisdom … that emotions are not only not more unreliable than intellectual calculations, but frequently are more reliable, and less deceptively seductive” (p. 40). This interesting thesis may suggest that the affective power of visuals, far from being the liability that Postman suggests, is actually one of their great merits. Perhaps equally, it suggests that the narrative journalistic approach favored by Joe Sacco and other comics journalists may be preferable to the unemotional mode of expository prose that is common to plain language journalism, if (as Nussbaum frames it) “our task, as agents, is to live as good characters in a good story do, caring about what happens, resourcefully confronting each new thing” (p. 4).
III. Joe Sacco and the Age of Show Business
Joe Sacco’s works of comics journalism offer particularly rich case studies for examining Postman’s claims about the epistemology of visual culture while providing ample opportunity to examine how comics journalism fits into the more general modes of journalistic epistemology, including those that Postman criticizes. In this section, I will use five of Postman’s critiques of visual culture as jumping-off points for considering how comics journalism can complicate, contest, and comment on more established modes of journalism. The tutor texts for this section will be Sacco’s Palestine (1993-1995), Christmas with Karadzic (1997), Soba (1998), Safe Area Gorazde (2000), The Fixer (2003), and Footnotes in Gaza (2009). Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza are major achievements that more or less bookend Sacco’s career as a comics journalist thus far, although he had shorter works published before Palestine. Both books cover an aspect of the Palestine-Israeli conflict, focusing on the experiences of Palestinian residents. Christmas with Karadzic, Soba, Safe Area Gorazde, and The Fixer deal with the Bosnian conflicts of the 1990s and the subsequent social and political fallout from this violence.
1) Attention Span: Postman (1985) suggests that one weakness of the epistemology of the “Age of Show Business” compared to the epistemology of the “Age of Typography” is that it demands and encourages a diminished attention span from media consumers and participants (p. 103). Clearly, Postman has a case if he compares a 19th century news article to a 45-second clip on network television news, and then argues that these modes of communication vary vastly in the demands they put on their consumers. Similarly, a televised speech of an hour at most differs considerably from the multi-hour marathons that Postman attributes to the Lyceum movement and the 19th century lecture and debate circuit (pp. 44-51). It would be easy to compare a long piece of comics journalism like Safe Area Gorazde to a nonfiction book of similar length and make the case that comics journalism is dumbed down to engage the attention spans of the MTV and Internet generations. However, since media comparisons inherently involve apples-and-oranges evaluation, we might fruitfully raise questions about the relationship of “attention span” to the duration spent consuming media, the scope of the impact of that media, and quality of attention demanded – a fairer comparison might be made between a week’s worth of network news programs and a longer work of comics journalism. In any case, it is clearly difficult to compare the attention spans demanded by different media.
An important aspect of understanding the role of attention span in comics journalism is the odd dimension along which attention varies. First, a piece of comics journalism does not require a specific amount of time, as a television program; rather, like a book, each reader will proceed at her own pace. Moreover, the graphic nature of comics journalism likely introduces a greater variation in pacing than the already significant variations in reading speed which govern typographical journalism. Likewise, just as books sometimes yield greater understanding on a second reading, the detailed graphics of comics journalism suggest that repeated reading could allow attention to elements that do not at first make themselves obvious; moreover, their aesthetic and entertaining aspects encourage casual re-reading. A variety of factors may contribute to the amount of attention demanded by an individual frame or page, including the relative level of artistic detail, which varies from cartoonish (Figure 2) to almost realistic (Figure 3), the number of words per page, which varies from almost none (Figure 4; see also The Fixer, p. 14) to an unrelenting newspaper-like wall of text (the “Remind Me” episode in Palestine, p. 41-50), and the size of frames, which varies from two page spreads (Figure 5) to twenty frames per page (Figure 6).
And, though transitions from one topic to another via line or chapter breaks in books may be akin to the gutter between frames in comics, generally the discontinuities are only significant in the works of high modernists and their literary offspring; certainly, in works of journalism, the links between topics are generally quite explicit. Similarly, the phenomenon of the cut in documentary video journalism and television journalism offers up an interpretive gap to be filled by the viewer, but for the most part the conventions of all but the most avant garde films make these gaps fairly easily intelligible and unambiguous. For this reason, the stylistic demands of the comic book format suggest that a greater amount of time and attention might be necessary to uncover each possible frame-to-frame link (which is not to say that full understanding is necessary to achieve intelligibility).
Contrasting Sacco’s simple comic strip-like recounting the murder of a young Palestinian man by Israeli soldiers from the perspective of his mother in twelve equally-sized, temporally-sequenced frames per page on pages 236-237 of Palestine (Figure 7) with a more complexly presented story of the cutting of 70 olive trees on pages 60-62 (Figures 8-10) demonstrates how frame-to-frame understanding of differently composed passages can make significantly different demands on the reader to produce closure. In the olive tree passage, the narrative itself is enclosed in irregular trapezoidal frames, while frames that show the family telling their story run off the edges of the page. Moreover, the narrative is separated into two four-frame mini-episodes: one about the actual cutting of the trees and one about the abuse that the narrator’s son experienced when he was accused of throwing rocks during the episode. Constructing this narrative takes significant involvement and attention and surely does not proceed as quickly as a more straightforward passage.
Similarly, large frames with chaotic layouts may represent a sequence of events or several nearly simultaneous events, and it is incumbent on the reader to attend to the composition to determine what is going on. For instance, on Palestine page 270 (Figure 11), Sacco reports about an IDF action that serves as retribution for a Palestinian attack. The words themselves are somewhat chaotically placed on the page, but, more importantly, in the final frame there is a muddle of images of soldiers slapping, attacking, and interrogating a Palestinian vendor. The frame, then, is not a moment in time, but a sequence of events that the reader must reconstruct. Making a frame like this intelligible places significant demands on a reader’s attention.
Finally, the actual form of each of Joe Sacco’s works varies, so there is probably little that can be said about attention span relating to these works that would be universal to all of his work, much less about comics journalism generally, especially if we include in the genre one-page layouts in urban weeklies and cosmopolitan magazines. For instance, both Safe Area Gorazde and Footnotes in Gaza are long-format graphic novel-length works (227 pages and 419 pages, respectively), but each is separated into episodes of approximately 5 pages each. These episodes are portions of coherent story arcs, however, so while they might be good stopping points, there is often a sense of suspense carried from one episode to the next which draws on the serial conventions of comic book-length graphic treatments. The Fixer is a single story arc of 108 pages that is not broken up into episodes, although the main character’s memories are interspersed throughout as multi-panel bits of varying length emphasized by black backgrounds. The magazine-length story Soba (43 pages) could conceivably be read in one sitting, but the atmospheric detail suggests that one might spend a couple days absorbing everything that is going on: Soba depends more on appreciation of the relationship between the war-torn landscape and Soba’s damaged psyche than on comprehension of a sequence of events, so while a quick reading might yield a minimal understanding of Sacco’s project, more leisurely consideration proves quite fruitful. The story Christmas with Karadzic is approximately the conventional length for a comic book (20 pages) and Palestine was originally serialized as a comic book, with individual issues of approximately 25 pages. In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud (2000) suggests that the average comic book takes about 20 minutes to read (p. 186); whether that figure bears out empirically might be worth some study, but, in any case, it appears that each regular-length issue represents a single sitting’s worth of reading.
Postman seems to be primarily concerned about attention span as characterized by length of time. We can see that, although most of Sacco’s works of war reportage are broken up into fairly short episodes, the duration of attention they demand varies according to a number of individual, compositional, and rhetorical factors, including the length of the actual works and the willingness of the reader to actively interrogate the distortions, gaps, and gutters. As to the quality of attention demanded by different media forms, we may observe that people can have conversations while watching television, but must stop reading a work of comic journalism for such an interaction. Beyond that, quality of attention is probably a question for experimental psychology and not something that can be deduced formally from the medium.
2) Propositional Content: Postman (1985) also critiques visual culture for placing less emphasis on propositional statements of truth that can be confirmed, debated, or refuted and are salient to civic discourse than he would desire (pp. 49-51). In arguing that dependence on expository, propositional, and paraphrasable statements is a desirable characteristic of typography missing from television and photojournalism, Postman might justly be criticized for asking of television a homology to reading that it fundamentally does not share: it is not clear in this case that difference necessarily equals deficiency. Even so, to the extent that the business of journalism is the dissemination of facts, his criticism remains a damning one of these established visual newsmedia. Consequently, if his criticisms carry over into visual culture at large, they should be examined closely. Here I will argue that, on one hand, Postman’s critique of the informational paucity of these visual media does not apply to Sacco’s work, but, on the other hand, that the dissemination of facts is only one function of civic communications.
At the expository and paraphrasable level, it is important not to disregard the factual research that goes into the captions and word bubbles in Joe Sacco’s comics journalism. The bibliography to Safe Area Gorazde (2000) attests to his attention to mainstream journalistic sources, academic and popular works, and the publications of public interest organizations to assemble the background for his work (p. 228). The introduction to Footnotes to Gaza (2009) indicates that he relies also on United Nations and government documents to provide important context for the bulk of his research, which involves enough research that he “employed two Israeli researchers to go through the Israel Defense Forces archives” (p. x); in the bibliography to the same, he mentions several scholarly books from both Palestinian and Israeli points of view as well as a number of official document repositories (pp. 416-417).
But most importantly, much of each of these works of comics journalism consists in the sensible organization and selection of extensive on-the-ground interviews. In the Appendix to Footnotes to Gaza, Sacco includes long documents and interviews with IDF soldiers that provide some background (pp. 390-415), but throughout the text Sacco explicitly portrays his interviews with Palestinians in Rafah and Khan Younis, much as he did with Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip in Palestine (1993-5) and with the Muslim residents of Gorazde in Safe Area Gorazde. Soba (1998) and The Fixer (2003) both focus on sustained interviews and research about ordinary people caught in the Bosnian conflict much as significant parts of Safe Area Gorazde (2000) are primarily organized around repeated interviews and experiences with Sacco’s contact Edin. Sacco has said of the interview process that he extensively uses tape recorders, but finds the transcription of these tapes to be a major challenge that he tries to undertake while still in the field and often fails, amassing many hours of untranscribed recordings beyond what he needs for a given projects (Nevins & Sacco, 2002, p. 24). From this, we can see that Sacco’s process is rigorous, and, perhaps more importantly, that it nearly manifests an antithesis to Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model insofar as Sacco uses official sources as background, but focuses his energy and time on researching the perspectives of nonofficial sources and individuals who have experienced the events he seeks to document firsthand. From this research, Sacco produces a significant amount of propositional content, which he portrays through captions and word bubbles, although, as Amy K. Nyberg (2008) has observed, he frequently leaves specific background facts uncited (p. 32). Since this aspect of comics journalism is quite like typographical journalism, Postman’s perspective remains undisturbed.
However, these interviews also provide the basis for Joe Sacco’s detailed drawings. In these drawings, a significant amount of information is conveyed, some of which might be able to be translated into propositions, if one pleased. Sacco spoke at length about the process by which he moves from interviews to drawings in cases when he cannot locate or produce photographic aids at the University of Florida Comics Conference in 2002: he asks for explicit visual descriptions or sometimes asks his subjects to sketch their memories of events. So, Sacco attempts to translate not just the verbal experience of his interviewees into his texts, but relies even on their visual judgment, which may not necessarily be paraphrasable or propositional in nature, but nonetheless informs an honest representation of the scene. Additionally, some of the best background information (like maps) surely helps inform a reasoned and reasonable understanding of the events, but does not consist in strictly propositional content (Figure 12; see also Gorazde, p. 57).
Moreover, Sacco’s illustrations of what actual landscapes, buildings, or facilities look like (Figure 13, Figure 14, and Figure 15; see also Palestine, pp. 81, 146-147), how actual solutions to problems were achieved (Figure 16; see also Gorazde, p. 48), what a trench full of corpses looks like (Figure 17; see also Gorazde, p. 92), the conditions of emergency medicine in an impoverished and war-torn environment (Figure 18; see also Gorazde, p. 122), and even the menacing appearance of weaponry (Figure 19) are surely factual information that helps one better understand an event in a way that completely escapes Postman’s propositional logic. The factual detail offered by these drawings is not strictly entertaining or trivial, but rather contributes to the profound emotional power of Sacco’s documents. Sacco (2002) has said of such details as mud or graffiti that
A prose journalist is probably going to mention these things [mud, graffiti], but he or she is not going to mention them at every paragraph, whereas with a cartoon, just by the fact I have background I can play with, I can have these things, the mud, the graffiti. All of these things just follow the reader around wherever he or she goes in each panel so that it just creates an atmosphere. (“Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference”)
Following Martha Nussbaum (1992), a full exercise of practical reason in relation to the ethical and public policy implications of Sacco’s reportage would be inadequate without a sense of the bleakness of the situations, a portrayal of the particular facts on the ground, and an attentiveness to the human involvement in these conflicts. Furthermore, Whitlock (2006) has proposed that the way that gutters actively involve the reader in resolving the gaps in the text engages the reader with the issues at hand (p. 968), saying that “The notion that comics free us ‘to think and imagine and see differently’ drives these engagements with the pain and suffering of others, but the essence is the medium not the message” and suggesting that this engagement might even help shape “recognition across cultures” (p. 978).
So, while it would be unfair to criticize Sacco for a dearth of propositional and semantic content, especially in contrast to photojournalism or television journalism – and probably equally so in relation to typographic journalism – Sacco’s art and medium enable him to transmit a form of content toward which both Postman and Sontag show suspicion, but which ultimately contributes significantly to the moral and political understanding that he attempts to convey.
3) Orderliness: Postman (1985) proposes that one of the merits of typography is that it shapes a logical and reasonable mind capable of the complex operations necessary to vibrant public discourse (p. 73). He argues that because expository prose demands a sequential, linear, and a high degree of orderliness to be effective, consumers accustomed to expository prose were themselves more accustomed to organized and rational approaches to the content than contemporary consumers accustomed to rapid juxtapositions, quick cuts, and non-linear modes of organizing information characteristic of television and many contemporary popular press periodicals. Here I will suggest, against this naïve privileging of sequential, linear, and orderly logic, that Sacco uses a more complex multilinear organizational logic to generate multiply ordered signs, stylistic codes, and rhetorical devices. On their surface, Sacco’s works of comics journalism display sequentiality from panel to panel, from page to page, and from episode to episode. Equally, on most pages, the text should be read in a fairly easily deducible left to right, top to bottom order that is familiar from typographical books. Moreover, the narrative arcs of Sacco’s stories are generally sequential, so for the most part the linear sequences of text and frames correspond to progressing time; in fact, in the later works Safe Area Gorazde, The Fixer, Soba, and Footnotes on Gaza, Sacco clearly indicates when he digresses into a linear order of time that has already passed – that is, history, recollection, or memory – by framing the panels with a black border. In Palestine, history, recollection, and memory are usually confined by clearly defined frames, while the present order of linear time often spills to the edge of the page. Beyond these simple homologies between timelines and sequential reading, one of the merits of the comics medium is that it enables a number of other rhetorical orders to be layered on top of the basically linear structure.
For instance, Sacco’s style offers a sort of nonlinear running commentary on the content. Rocco Versaci (2007) has observed that “in Palestine, Sacco employs different – sometimes radically so – styles for each of the book’s different sections,” pointing out the newspaper-like sequence around pages 41-50 (Figure 19) and the increasingly claustrophobic composition of the pages during Ghassan’s torture leading up to page 110 (Figure 20; Versaci, 2007, pp. 119-120). Sacco himself comments on this latter choice in a presentation about his work:
… what I started doing was, as the story moves along, you can advance the frame, I started putting more panels on a page, basically to make his situation more claustrophobic, to sort of reduce him and reduce him and reduce the world he’s in, reduce the box. So, this was one way that I just want to demonstrate that although I am showing something that is essentially journalistic, I’m telling someone’s story that is factual, that I got from an interview and also trying to add something to it, which is something you can do, I think, with the medium of comics. … I’m not an objective journalist, so I feel free to use the art form to do this. (“Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference”)
Sacco consciously tries to supplement the factual aspects of the stories he tells using extra-textual and stylistic codes. This is especially true in frames and compositions that deny the orderliness of sequential time to display a more subjective version of events that requires the reader to provide a sequential interpretation, or, in many cases, suggests that events were confusing and existentially appeared out of sequence.
In an overview of the genre in Columbia Journalism Review, Kristian Williams (2005) observes that “Unlike much of photojournalism, the images are not intended to stand alone, each seeming to capture the whole story in a single moment. And unlike video and film, with comics the entire series is available to view simultaneously” (p. 53). What this suggests is that, in addition to the linear orders of text and sequential panels and the not strictly linear order of time, there is an aesthetic order that organizes individual pages or spreads according to its own compositional logic: simply put, each individual page stands out as a work of art. That this is the case can be suggested by the fact that original drawings of single pages of comic books have been successfully put on auction and shown in art galleries.
If anything, Postman’s assertion of the superiority of sequential and linear order neglects even the possibilities of print, which allows rhetorical and stylistic codes that are decidedly nonlinear to create verbal texture and effects that are not strictly expository. In light of the several layers of orderliness in Sacco’s work, one might fairly characterize Postman’s logic as short-sighted.
4) Abstraction: Postman (1985) argues in favor of the abstracted relationship towards communication encouraged by presentation in the linear, orderly expository language he valorizes; he suggests that this abstraction encourages attention to sophistic and rhetorical devices used by writers (p. 51). Moreover, he suggests that we should position the concrete particularity of photography and videography against this abstraction (p. 72). These criticisms might also be fairly leveled against representational drawings, so problematizing Postman’s position is crucial to the argument that, far from being a symptom of a deficient or impoverished visual discourse, comics journalism displays an advanced visual rhetoric that encourages abstraction from the drawings themselves, the interpretations they represent, the journalist as organizing consciousness, the character/sources, the scene of action, and the medium itself.
By modulating between styles, Sacco draws attention to the constructed and carefully chosen nature of his drawings. Moreover, this attention in turn suggests an autocritique of journalism’s pretenses to objectivity, for, as Rocco Versaci (2007) and Amy Nyberg (2010) have argued, the obvious hand of the artist-journalist in the drawings directs attention towards the extent to which all journalism is art. But Sacco is not content for the drawn nature of his images to speak for themselves; instead, he positions himself as a character inside the narratives, as we will see in the following section.
Throughout Palestine, but especially at the beginning of the narrative, some characters – both Palestinian and Israeli – are portrayed in a somewhat caricature-esque fashion that might offend some people’s sensitivities. As D. P. Royal (2007) has argued, the simplification of imagery in the comic form puts the artist at risk of using “reductive iconography” that “strips others of any unique identity and dehumanizes” the subject (p. 8). Arguably, some of Sacco’s early drawings in Palestine use elements like the “big noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and the generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual discourse with the other” (Royal, 2007, p 8.); however, as Palestine progresses, his representations of Palestinian residents become more nuanced and human. Taken as a whole, then, Sacco’s movement from his earliest work, Palestine, which may be occasionally faulted for stereotypical “reductive iconography,” to his most recent work, Footnotes on Gaza, which employs simple but individualized drawings of his subjects, may be seen as one that foregrounds his growth as an individual who appreciates the “unique identity” of the Other. In this way, readers of his texts may uncover the extent to which their own stereotypes are undermined by the complexities of Sacco’s characterization. Equally, Sacco manipulates the relationship between his detail-oriented style and a more cartoon-like approach for rhetorical effect at the level of individual scenes as well as at the level of whole books:
And I wanted to somehow mock myself with this and so again, I just let things get cartoony, just to sort of poke fun at myself, to release some of the tension even for the reader because what are talking about is very serious and disgusting stuff. (“Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference”)
Sacco does not want the reader (or himself) to get too lost or engrossed in the details of a heart-wrenching torture scene, so he puts an extra measure of visual abstraction between the subject and the presentation. Ultimately, the effect of this is to draw attention to the interpretive and rhetorical nature of his stylistic modulations not just in this obvious scene, but throughout Palestine. So, through these stylistic and rhetorical codes, Sacco is able to establish a level of abstraction from the means of presentation that is different than that demanded by print, but which exceeds Postman’s passive image of the media consumer in the Age of Show Business who is unable to abstract herself from the particular clips of video and still images used to convey the news.
Sacco also contributes to the sense of abstraction from the ongoing narrative while simultaneously conveying information about the scene that would otherwise be occluded through the portrayal of complex moments, events, or occasions in a single frame. In Understanding Comics (1993), Scott McCloud differentiates between the visual rhetoric of the photograph, which sees each image as a moment in time, and the comic panel that represents events with specified durations, including conversations and sounds, that inherently exist in time (p. 95). In agreement with McCloud, Williams (2005) says that “Comics can … incorporate a complex sequence of events, an entire history, into a single composition.” Sacco talks of utilizing this trope to convey a complex scene that did not lend itself to sequential panels, describing the scene as “a swirl of events” that requires that he manipulate compositional elements to convey the confusion of the events and to undermine the sense of consecutive sequence that tends to dominate in the comic form and certainly underwrites the accepted practices of typographic narration, some photojournalism, and television journalism (“Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference”). The order of things does not always matter from an existential point of view; indeed, an epistemology of discrete infinitesimal moments probably relates more to photography and television than to the world of subjective experience portrayed in comics. Sacco achieves three things with this trope: he conveys the existential experience of confusion, he subtly critiques the bias of photojournalism that aligns objectivity with sequential realism, and he denaturalizes the reader’s perception of linearity and time, emphasizing in the process the abstraction of his constructed narrative.
So, while Postman may be correct in observing that language inherently operates at a less concrete and more abstract level than images, Sacco’s works make a good case that the interrelation of text and image enables sustained meta-commentary to underlie the most superficial relationships between representations and their subjects. Particularly by modulating his style, by representing himself as a character in his journalism, and by distorting the epistemological assumptions about time that come as baggage from other visual media, Sacco is able to maintain a critique of his own medium as well as of journalism more generally.
5) The Credibility of the Teller: Postman (1985) makes a case that visual culture overemphasizes the image of the communicator in relation to the message’s own merits (pp. 61, 101). In comics journalism, this issue is manifest in two ways: first, through the credibility of the medium and the stylistic conventions of the art itself, which, ultimately, is quite low, since comics are commonly considered to be marginalia to high culture, low entertainment, or the provenance of children; and second, through the credibility of the artist as a character in the works, both as the organizing consciousness and as a literal drawing within the text. Each of these issues is closely linked to concerns about abstraction – and, in fact, may simply be a subset of that concern.
The question of credibility speaks to the basic ethical question that Aryn Bartley (2008) poses about journalism: “How can the journalist produce a just representation, one that can be translated from the speaker to the reader? What is the relation between a just representation and the practice of substitution? Where does the journalist’s story enter, or should it?” (pp. 59-60). Sacco does not elide himself with impersonal language or omniscient viewpoint, but embeds a peculiarly cartoonish image of himself into almost every page and features a few frames in each book that relate to his personal state (Figure 21; see also Gorazde, p. 8). Commenting on this, Sacco suggests that it is simply a result of his earlier efforts at autobiographical comics, which continue to be a popular genre of comics nonfiction (“Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference”).
However, this does not preclude analysis of the effect this device has on the reader’s level of abstraction from the ongoing narrative, or, more specifically, on the perception of the journalist’s credibility. Bartley’s (2008) main concern is with the concept of substitution from the challenging post-existential philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas; she suggests that Sacco refuses to substitute his privileges as a foreign journalist for a closer relationship to the actual conditions of his subjects, but that he authentically portrays this relationship to his subjects by acknowledging this refusal (p. 62). In addition to the observation that Sacco is forthright about how his “instinct for self-preservation and gratification sometimes outweigh his ability to be an ethical witness,” Bartley observes that his self-representation as a more “cartoony” image than his subjects “who often has his mouth hanging slightly ajar, sometimes with spit flying from his face” tends to generate skepticism towards him both as a character within the narrative and as the organizing consciousness behind it (p. 65). By portraying himself as a figure with privilege while also demonstrating both his personal failings and his professional inability to bear witness to some crucially emotional scenes, Bartley argues that Sacco emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between himself and the subject. This argument is parallel to Versaci’s (2007) observations that Sacco’s choice to draw himself as a more cartoonish figure “causes him to stand out as someone who doesn’t quite ‘fit’ into this landscape or with its native inhabitants” and “serve[s] to remind readers that he is filtering the events through his own unique perspective” (p. 119). Ultimately, Bartley suggests that this distance has parallels for the text’s consumer, who, rather than substituting herself for the oppressed characters, simply reads a book about them.
Drawing on Scott McCloud’s graphic novel treatment of comic book theory, Understanding Comics (1993), Bartley (2008) argues that since “less realistic characters produce readerly identification, Sacco entices us to identify with him” (p. 66). She continues: “I would like to suggest that, in this instance, readerly identification with Joe the character encourages us to identify ourselves with not just physical, but also moral ambivalence” (p. 66). Certainly, typographical texts have the tools available to create this kind of abstraction from the situations of being a journalist and being a consumer of journalism, as illustrated in Bartley’s analysis of a Vietnam-era work of journalism and also in the uneasy voyeuristic feeling Paul Gourevitch skillfully manipulates in We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1999). But the use of the visual representation of the artist-journalist in Sacco’s work is particularly effective to these ends and shows a sophisticated reflexivity towards issues of journalistic credibility.
So, if Joe Sacco’s wartime comics journalism appeals to Postman’s “talking hairdo” logic of television’s visual culture, it does so in a very sophisticated way: Sacco’s image becomes credible not by looking attractive, since he is portrayed with an unsympathetic countenance, nor by associating his image with virtue, since he openly portrays his character thinking combative thoughts towards the locals who are his subjects, acting out his privilege as a foreign reporter, and sometimes acting in a way that comes close to transgressing boundaries about sexual objectification of others (although, to be fair, comparing Sacco’s work to other works by heterosexual white males in alternative comics, his work is quite tame in this regard). Instead, if Sacco’s image attains credibility, it is precisely because he is open about his shortcomings as a person, as a witness, and as a reporter.
IV. Conclusion
In a domestic environment in which former Attorney General John Ashcroft proposed in all seriousness that the topless image of Lady Justice be clothed in drapery (“Curtains for Semi-Nude Justice Statue,” 2002) and when Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli proposes that the half-topless image of Virtue standing on the chest of Tyranny on the Virginia State Seal be clothed with armor (Helderman, 2010), there can be little question that the visual culture has achieved a powerful status in our culture’s self-awareness. Given this status, it is worthwhile to examine critiques of visual culture such as those proposed by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) with an eye towards understanding the limitations of our culture, problematizing those assumptions which are not borne out by developments in our culture, and positively participating in our dominant modes of discourse. Particularly, the advents of media forms that hybridize text-intensive modes of knowledge with visual rhetoric provide uniquely useful occasions for understanding the epistemological strengths and weaknesses of each mode. Moreover, they may offer opportunities for evolving modes of knowledge that supercede the limitations of either medium individually.
In contemporary culture, the visual has become a site for contesting the relationships between secular, Christian, and Jewish Western identities and those of Muslims, who often come from less privileged situations. That this is the case has been shown by the Spring 2010 Wikileaks video of an aerial helicopter attack, the Abu Ghraib photographs, the Jyllands-Posten cartoon scandal and aftermath, and the scandal about South Park‘s representation of the Prophet Muhammad. In each of these situations, the contentious issues have revolved around the greater context that is excluded from the visual frame, a criticism of visual culture raised in different ways by Neil Postman, Susan Sontag, and Walter Benjamin. However, Joe Sacco’s treatments of Muslims in Bosnia and Palestine for privileged U.S. audiences opens the possibility that, despite the shortcomings of richly visual civic communications, the resources of our emerging visual culture are powerful enough to sensitively deal with the particular and highly emotional conditions which prevail in impoverished and war-torn areas. More importantly, the factual and emotional components of practical political and ethical reasoning can be adequately portrayed through Sacco’s chosen medium of comics journalism. So, despite their rather obvious participation in the conflation of entertainment and journalism that characterizes Postman’s Age of Show Business, in no obvious way are these fringe documentaries precluded from playing a part in a vibrant public discussion about our roles in these conflicts and how we will avoid our failings in future situations.
References
Archer, D. (2009-2010). The Honduran coup: A graphic history. Retrieved from http://www.archcomix.com/honduran-coup-comic/
Bartley, A. (2008). The hateful self: Substitution and the ethics of representing war. Modern Fiction Studies, 54(1), 50-71.
Bazin, A. (2005). The myth of total cinema (H. Gray, Trans.). In What is cinema? London: University of California Press. (Original English translation published 1967).
Benjamin, W. (1972). A short history of photography. Screen, 13(1), 5-26. (Original work published 1931).
—. (2009). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (H. Zohn, Trans.). In L. Braudy & M. Cohen (Eds.), Film theory and criticism (7th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (Original work published 1936).
Bertozzi, N. & students. (2009). Iraq war stories. Retrieved from http://act-i-vate.com/83-1.comic
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Univeristy Press.
Bumiller, E. (2010, April 6). Video shows U.S. killing of Reuters employees. New York Times, p. A13.
Butler, J. (2005). Photography, war, outrage. PMLA, 120(3), 822-27.
Cohen, N., & Stelter, B. (2010, April 7). Iraq video brings notice to a website. New York Times, p. A8.
Cohen, P. (2009, 12 April). Yale Press bans images of Muhammad in new book. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Curtains for semi-nude justice statue. BBC News (2002, January 29). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news
Delisle, G. (2003). Pyongyang: A journey in North Korea. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.
—. (2006). Shenzhen: A travelogue from China. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.
—. (2008). Burma chronicles. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.
Lasswell, H. D. (1948). The structure and function of communications in society.In L. Bryson (Ed.), The communication of ideas (pp. 37-51). New York: Harper and Row.
Gourevitch, P. (2009, May 24). The Abu Ghraib we cannot see. New York Times, p. WK10.
—. (1998). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gourevitch, P., & Morris, E. (2009). The ballad of Abu Ghraib. New York: Penguin.
Greenwald, G. (2010, 6 April). New York Times, Weekly Standard join in a falsehood. Retrieved from http://www.salon.com
Helderman, R. (2010, May 3). Cuccinelli gives Virginia state seal a makeover. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2002). Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1988).
Islam and free speech. The Economist (2006, 11 February). Retrieved from http://www.economist.com
Itzkoff, D. (2010, 22 April). South Park episode altered after Muslim group’s warning. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Jacobson, S., & Colon, E. (2006). The 9/11 Report: A graphic adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang.
McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics. New York: Harper Collins.
—. (2000). Reinventing comics. New York: Harper Perennial.
Myers, S. L. (2006, February 18). New cartoon showing Muhammad prompts the closing of a Russian paper. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Neufeld, J. (2009). A.D.: New Orleans after the deluge. New York: Pantheon. (Original work published as a webcomic, 2007-2008).
Nevins, M. D., & Sacco, J. (2002). “Drawing from life”: An interview with Joe Sacco. International Journal of Comic Art, 4(2), 1-52.
Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nyberg, A. K. (2006) Theorizing comics journalism. International Journal of Comic Art, 8(2), 98-112.
—. (2008, March 18-21). Joe Sacco’s journalistic “I.” Comic art and comics area, PCA national convention, San Francisco, CA. Unpublished.
—. (2010, April 2). Culture pulp: The art of journalism. Comic art and comics area, PCA national convention, Renaissance Hotel/America’s Center, St Louis, MO. Unpublished.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin.
Rall, T. (2002). To Afghanistan and back. New York: ComicsLit. (Original work published in Village Voice, 2001).
—. (2010). Ted Rall: Cartoon blogging daily from Afghanistan. LA Times. Retrieved from http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2010/08/ted-rall-cartoon-blogging-daily-from-afghanistan.html
Royal, D. P. (2007). Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-ethnic engagements with graphic narrative. MELUS, 32(3), 7-22.
Rorty, R. (1991). Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens. In Essays on Heidegger and others, philosophical papers volume 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Russel, M. (2000-2011). CulturePulp. Retrieved from http://www.webcomicsnation.com/culturepulp/culturepulp/series.php?view=archive&chapter=18275
Sacco, J. (1996). Palestine. Seattle, Washington: Fantagraphics Books. (Original work published as individual comic books, 1993-1995).
—. (2000). Safe Area Gorazde: The war in Eastern Bosnia. Seattle, Washington: Fantagraphics Books.
—. (2009). The fixer and other stories. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly. (Christmas with Karadzic originally published 1997; Soba originally published 1998; The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo originally published 2003).
—. (2009). Presentation from the 2002 UF Comics Conference. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 1(1). Retrieved from http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/sacco/
—. (2009). Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company.
Shanker, T., & Schmitt, E. (2004, 8 May). Rumsfeld accepts blame and offers apology in abuse. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Sontag, S. (1982). The Image-World. A Susan Sontag reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 347-367. (Original work published in On Photography, 1977).
—. (2004, May 23). Regarding the torture of others. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Versaci, R. (2007). This book contains graphic language: Comics as literature. New York: Continuum.
Whitlock, G. (2006). Autographics: The seeing “I” of the comics. Modern Fiction Studies, 52(4), 965-979.
Williams, K. (2005). The case for comics journalism: Artist-reporters leap tall conventions in a single bound. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org