The Professor is in…

But an unplanned series of encounters in 2017 with the comics journalism of Joe Sacco, the Oxford U. Press Graphic History Series, and various other non-fiction comics efforts, took me by surprise, and awakened something dormant.

There was a lot in these works that was already familiar: Attentiveness to empirical detail and centering the voices of others. The language of interpretation and argument. Commitment to investigative processes grounded in rigor and integrity. Declaring things about the world with self-confidence yet reflexivity. And they were doing these things without claiming naïve values like “objectivity,” emphasizing instead the credibility, dependability, and confirmability of their form of realism. It sounded a lot like things we talk about in cultural anthropology.

One of the first graphic histories I encountered, Abina and the Important Men

From Joe Sacco’s book 2012 book Journalism.

But it also felt wholly new to me, raising some less familiar and intriguing questions, like how does one strike a balance between the concise language of captions and the “thick description” of historical and ethnographic writing? Obviously images play a central communicative role here, but then, what various kind of relationships are possible between words and images? Between imagistic depiction and analysis? Between a process of inquiry and the making of representations? And what possibilities might comics provide for engaging in public-facing scholarship?

I also asked, could I do something like this myself? “Get yourself an illustrator,” a historian involved in these matters advised me. Seeing as I had no funding, experience, or background in comics, much less formal arts in general, I didn’t see any reasonable way forward. But I wondered, what if I could also illustrate my own work? I hadn’t drawn in any sustained and purposeful way in years. But these questions felt unexpectedly compelling, and the urge to combine drawing and words began to tug on me.

I knew I had plentiful material to work with: a mountain of unpublished nineteenth-century Vermont bicycle history research generated while writing my book Reconsidering the Bicycle, gathered from digital newspaper archives like Chronicling America and physical archives of numerous small towns and the Vermont Historical Society. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur has observed, archived materials present “clues and traces that call for reconstruction and contextualization.” I was already doing that work in a public talk throughout the state, but I wondered if comics might help me reconstruct, contextualize, and creatively express some of those clues and traces of bicycle history in novel ways.

From Comics as Knowledge Exchange…

A dominant framework for thinking about the relationship between academic research and comics is that the latter is a powerful tool of knowledge exchange, engagement, and dissemination. In an age dominated by visuality and images, comics offers a vibrant communication tool for scholars and educators striving to engage students with multiple literacies and to reach diverse new publics excluded by ponderous scholarly jargon and the paywalls of academic journal publishers. In digital formats, it can be disseminated more widely, and quickly, than traditional research reports and publications. And for those open to self-publishing, there is a tremendously low-barrier of entry for comics creation, especially as zines. It has to be said that there is plenty about the comics medium that is not self-evident, and it does take guidance and effort to understand its potential and limitations (thanks Scott McCloud), but I don’t necessarily disagree with this framework.

Nevertheless, what I find vaguely unsatisfying here is the assumption that comics are created after the process of knowledge creation is complete, and a division of labor in which the knowledge producer and artistic creator might collaborate, but for all intents and purposes are separate agents in the process. I began this work in a different place, a place of deep involvement in ongoing archival research; no leverage, capital, or comics know-how to find and work with an illustrator; and a desire to internalize experientially the relationship between word and image through the act of creation itself.

A bicycle shop. Now that’s a great place to deliver a lecture on the history of bicycling in Vermont.

There are, of course, tensions between scholarship and practice: the large gap between research and comics discourses; institutional barriers and prejudices; strong boundary maintenance practices within academia as well as the professional world of comics creators; the low prestige of comics in academic settings; lack of mentoring for those who want to cross the boundaries, etc. etc. (see here and here, for overview of these issues). There are breakouts here—Nick Sousanis’ published dissertation Unflattening, for example, or the University of Toronto Press EthnoGRAPHIC series. But the relationships that do result tend to be interstitial, betwixt and between, often informal and underrecognized as legitimate works of academic research and comics.

And then there’s the question of time…research can be slow enough as it is…why add more time, espeially when tenure and promotion await?? (From Alec Longstreth’s Location, Location, Location)

I have drawn substantial inspiration from works that are themselves positioned interstitially and in interdisciplinary spaces, among them comics journalism and graphics history, as well as the practice of “applied cartooning” developed by the Center for Cartoon Studies, exemplified in their Applied Cartooning Lab and manifesto “The World is Made of Cheese.” I can’t not also mention the deep influence on my efforts of Marek Bennett, whose graphic novels based on the diaries of New Hampshire Civil War soldier Freeman Colby are works of deceptively subtle artistic power and methodological transparency and self-reflexivity. Early into my forays into this world, I took one of his workshops on how to make comics from historical archives that gave me a set of practical skills and comics storytelling strategies with non-fiction materials on which I still draw.

…To Comics as Knowledge Making and Praxis.

Historical researchers use methodological techniques like distanciation, fact-checking, triangulation, contextualization of sources, analysis of language and style, and so on to make sense of archives and artifacts. But producing a historical account based on archival research is never simply about assembling and reporting what’s in those archives. There is active interpretation of the clues and traces collected and gathered, management of unverifiable findings, navigating situated perspectives—in other words, working through various layers of mediation—and wrangling it all into a narrative that claims to figure out what might have occurred, how different people might have made sense of it, and how those individual events related to larger processes.

Historical sense making is thus always a creative, inventive, and imaginative process. It involves (as anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in his famous essay “Thick Description”) the crafting of fictions—“fictions in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’—the original meaning of fictio—not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments.” What if, instead of hiding all this—as academic writing often does—we highlight that fictio, put it out front, let that making and fashioining shape and guide the research process? This, I came to realize, is a space that comics as knowledge making and praxis can productively occupy. I found that the deeper I was drawn into comics creation, the more my archival research activities were being guided by questions of visuality, the imaginary dynamics of comics-making, and identifying stories that lend themselves to comics communication. For me, this has been a source of methodological revelation and expasion, driving an under-exercised aspect of my brain and body through visual cognition and comprehension and providing a productive opportunity to move beyond academia’s strict logocentrism.

Compared to other forms of historical understanding, the comics medium tends to:

• drive toward the recreation of incidents

• emphasize action over dialogue

• be good at making the previously invisible visible (“bottom-up” histories)

• and be organized around the search for tellable tales with larger-than-life qualities

Depending on your perspective these things can bring history alive…or (as historian Paul Buhle warns) run away with it, as it pushes more on metaphorical insight than reconstructing context through narrative detail. I think it’s not an either-or here, and both are possible (as the magnificent graphic novel Berlin illustrates). Here are some other things comics as research can do:

Manipulate Frames and Progressions

As Scott McCloud illustrates in a panel from his book Understanding Comics (right), there is a range of highly manipulable qualities and progressions in comics representation, which are possible to combine or co-exist in the same frame:

From The Illustrated Explanatory of Bicycle Ailments, Maladies, & Injuries, 2020.

Comics can be useful for transcribing/recording/recovering/documenting/and depicting phenomena, mapping relationships, envisioning scenes and landscapes. But there’s a range of possibilities about HOW you do that, from highlighting complexity, realism, and specificity, to aiming for simplicity, iconicity, and universality. Progressions are highly manipulable, and can be combined, as the panel of bicycle face from one of my comics on the left demonstrates with the aspirational realism of the man and woman, and the iconicity of the scorcher in the middle. Importantly, I have come to understand this by approaching comics as research by researching comics themselves, to appreciate the embodied range of possibilities and representational strategies.

Word and Image are Distinctive Kinds of Signs

More coming…I’m working on this slowly!

Read it…important stuff. Click on the image.