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Adam Rosenblatt on Comics Journalism in CJR
posted March 16, 2005
 

Adam Rosenblatt
via the Internet

Many thanks for The Comics Reporter, which I read daily with great interest.

As someone entering a PhD program next year with the intention of doing work on comics journalism, I read Kristian Williams' piece in CJR with great interest. I agree with you that it did a great job for a short piece, but one nagging worry stayed with me throughout: Because the article never really defines what makes a comic "journalism," it lumps works with very different goals and methodologies together in a mix that I find uncomfortable.

The myth of journalistic objectivity may indeed be long overdue for questioning (though it seems to me that the questioning process has been going on for at least as long as I've been old enough to read the newspaper), but there is nevertheless an important difference between, for example, Jane Mayer's recent piece on "Outsourcing Terror" in the New Yorker and, say, the endless punditry that has lately passed for journalism on TV news. Similarly, though Joe Sacco does a brilliant job of questioning himself and his own methods in his work, his core purpose -- as evidenced by his heavy use of interviews and historical background -- is to tell the stories of others.

In the Shadow of No Towers, on the other hand, is a mix of editorial cartooning and memoir with concerns that are firmly local: Spiegelman's subject is himself, his family, New York and America in his personal imagination of them. I'm not criticizing Spiegelman for working in a different genre from Sacco, but rather pointing out that while Sacco is "covering" a story -- raising all the questions about objectivity, accuracy and emphasis that the CJR article rightly poses -- Speigelman works in a mode that owes much less to prose journalism and more, as you point out yourself, to newspaper cartoons. When Mr. Williams claims that Spiegelman "plays with the dissonance between subjectivity and objectivity," I'm not sure he's looking in the right place: Last time I opened up In the Shadow of No Towers, it seemed (purposefully, I might add) subjective to its core.