Video is my primary medium for storytelling production, but when it comes to storytelling consumption, one of my favorite forms of multimedia journalism is the often unsung graphic nonfiction format. I think the comic form has a lot to teach me as a filmmaker and visual storyteller: composition within a frame, juxtaposition of frames as a storytelling device, a sparse economy of dialog, and an imperative to show rather than tell. What are storyboards, after all, but comics?

One of the most famous examples of this genre is Maus by Art Spiegelman, in which he interviews his father about surviving the Holocaust as a Polish Jew. There’s also Persepolis (about the Iranian revolution), A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, Palestine (by UO SOJC alum Joe Sacco), Logicomix (about Bertrand Russell) and many more. Here’s a nice list from the Atlantic of great journalistic comic books.

One of my favorites on that list is The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, a well-known reporter and host of On the Media (my favorite podcast). Take a look here at how Gladstone and artist Josh Neufeld visually tackle a rather philosophical discussion of journalistic neutrality. Right away you’ll see they are using the documentary storytelling techniques of re-enactment and then reflexivity, when Gladstone places herself in the historical scenes. The frames alternate between long and medium and closeup shots to keep the story moving with visual interest. On the second page, there is an interesting sequence where the shot and reverse-shot of Yeats is intercut with a visual representation of what is in his head. Could that set of cuts work in a film, I wonder?

The example below is from another one of my favorites, Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle. I love the way he launches into a history lesson from an intriguing hook line: “I got ripped off today.” The present-tense scene of the author walking through the city streets as he thinks about the bill keeps the story moving forward, literally. The opening detail shot of the bill is juxtaposed with a frame of him looking down at the bill, and it graphically matches what we imagine he is seeing. Comics are very good at showing you just enough to get your imagination working to fill in the rest, a subtle skill that I hope to learn to incorporate into my filmmaking.

The final frame of this page, for instance, conveys a historical fact, comments on that fact, and offers a present tense storytelling illustration of the implications of that fact. All in one tiny frame and less than 50 words.

I haven’t read this one yet (I have a request in at the library!), but another piece of graphic nonfiction that we can surely all learn from as multimedia journalists is this new one, Out on the Wire, about “The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio” with a forward by the man himself, Ira Glass.

Are there any nonfiction graphic “novels” that you can recommend for journalistic filmmaking inspiration?