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Steve Koller: Studio Writing #7

Joe Sacco


I think one of the most interesting things about Joe Sacco is how he's using the comic medium in the journalism line of work, and the two are rarely mixed. Reporting through comics? Genius!

He talked about some good reasons why comics as a medium can convey more than mere prose, plain words on paper, abstract symbols representing an event. One is that he can reinforce some things about the event subtly, but effectively, his example being that one scene was incredibly muddy. Mr. Sacco said that in prose you could only say "it was really muddy" once or twice, you can't visually reinforce the fact like you can through multiple frames of a comic. Another advantage to the medium was how he could control the feel and speed of the comic. For example, in the tense scenes of a man being tortured and questioned, Joe put many small frames onto one page with simple forms. This gave it a feeling of claustrophobia that also read quickly. An opposite example was the two-page spread in which there were no words, and only one frame per page. This showed the emptiness and silence of the scene.

It's so awesome that through his incredible work, this new usage of journalistic comics is legitimized.

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