I feel vindicated and less alone. I’ve been pushing my agenda – sometimes furtively, sometimes stridently: Comics have unique powers of expression – aesthetic and polemical. They can be directed in many ways that can’t be matched by blogs, articles, documentaries or single-panel posters. ‘Nuff said about that. Iris Flores reports in Hyperallergic:
The worlds of surveillance, journalism, and comics come together in Verax: The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance: A Graphic Novel, a recent piece of comics journalism by cartoonist Khalil Bendib and journalist Pratap Chatterjee.
The review examines the advantages that comics have over straight print journalism and documentaries and the accessibilityof Verax in particular.
Verax shows how compelling the comics medium can be as a platform for journalism. Documentary films, like Poitras’s Citizenfour, transport the viewer into the scene in a way that cannot be achieved in text-based newspaper articles or even long-form reports — a picture is worth a thousand words, after all. However, documentaries are at a disadvantage when reporting on events that the camera did not or could not capture. Verax doesn’t have this problem because comics are able to present images from any time and place. Even when real events are not on record, they still happened and can be represented.
A two-page spread illustrating the monstrous reach of the intelligence-military-industrial complex in chapter 17 of Verax (all images courtesy Metropolitan Books): Hyperallergic
Don’t forget the Event Horizon comic contest.
Event Horizon 