I have a new long piece at Cartoon Movement about faith-based crisis pregnancy centers in the Bay Area. I visited a bunch of them over the last couple months pretending to be naive and knocked-up. A column detailing why and how I did it will be up later today is right here.
I have a new piece up at Cartoon Movement about my trip with Cartooning for Peace to Corsica in June. And this weekend is Zine Fest! Where I will be selling comics per usual with the inimitable Joey Sayers. It’s the 10th annual Zine Fest, so if you’re in the Bay Area, I recommend stopping by — after all, it’s free.
In two weeks, I will have a big new piece up at Cartoon Movement culminating a lot of research and reporting over the last couple months. I’m pretty excited about this one.
Another month has passed! Holy crap! Here’s the first half of my latest 7×7 piece, about gay pride events in San Francisco; part two is here.
Stay tuned for all the comics I’ve been working on that I am contractually obligated not to show you yet, sorry — two upcoming pieces for Cartoon Movement, plus three other top-secret things are in the works…
I encourage you to listen to the full comics journalism panel from the National Conference on Media Reform, even though it is an hour and a half long. I wrote a bit about it over at Graphic Journos, so please go read that because I don’t like the idea of cross-posting.
I’m working on a few stories right now, including some preparation and investigation for a project in which I will be going under cover in a few months, something I haven’t done before. This year is shaping up to be far and away my best ever as a freelancer, and I have to think this is in part because I’ve gotten a lot gutsier. This was on my mind as I was writing up some new pitches this morning, and then I read this first part of Susannah Breslin’s “How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made” (from Forbes.com, who loves my CC-licensed art!).
I have to imagine there are young female journalists out there who are missing out on stories, jobs, and opportunities because they aren’t being aggressive enough, because they hesitate rather than go barreling after a story, because when push comes to shove, it is easier to not get in a shoving match.
If you are one of those girls, I hope you will go out and do good stories, the hard stories, the weird stories. Not because they need to be told, even though they do, but because they are fun, because they are the places in which you will find yourself, because they are the times that will crystallize your understanding of who you really are. That’s the thing about journalism I always forget until I’m back in it, until days like today. That packing up your gear and heading into the unknown of a story unfolding is really what journalism is all about, not jobs, not your peers, not the words. It’s just you and the story and whatever is about to happen.
So yeah. I liked that.
I went into this weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform expecting a lot of hand-shaking and back-patting — and not necessarily a whole lot else, to be honest. I am forever the cynic, especially when it comes to events where preaching to the choir seems to be the main course (e.g. comics conventions). However, while I don’t want to give away the ending of my illustrated piece for Truthout, I came away from NCMR with quite a different feeling. I think preaching to the choir works when there’s a culture of collaboration instead of straight competition; self-made abundance as opposed to scarcity, that sort of thing. I’m drawing and painting the Truthout piece today and tomorrow, and I’ll be filing as soon as it’s dry.
Not to say there wasn’t hand-shaking and back-patting too. I met a ton of amazing people over the weekend, so many of whom were excited about the possibilities of comics journalism! It was appropriate timing that my piece for Campus Progress was blowing up via Consumerist and the Huffington Post the very same day we gave our (awesome! engaging! well-reviewed!) panel on graphic reportage. Editors, take note: if you want traffic, you want comics.
So along those lines of creating spaces for this kind of work while also fostering collaboration and abundance, I launched GraphicJournos.com this weekend. GraphicJournos had been in the pipeline for a while now, and this seemed like a great time to introduce it to the world. We are a small collective of reportage illustrators of various stripes and interests who are coming together to promote the concept of fact-based graphic storytelling. If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t need to convince you, but please keep your eye on the site, and follow us on Twitter. We’ll be posting our own recent work, as well as the work of other creators we appreciate in comics, illustration and design, writing on topics like the ethics of drawn journalism, process and multimedia experiments, plus best practices and how-tos for editors interested in this stuff (which should be all of you!).
I’m excited! Time to draw.
I am blogging from a bus! It’s the future! But we’re still stuck in traffic.
Just a quick note as I’m headed toward Boston for NCMR this weekend to point you toward this infographic I put together for Campus Progress. (I would include an image here, but I am blogging from a bus!)
I’m pretty sure I say this about 3/4 of the pieces I do lately, but damn was this a fun assignment. Thanks to Kay Steiger and the team at CP for taking a chance on illustrated reportage. This piece seems to really be resonating with people. Tweets and Facebook-likes aside, if I have convinced even one poor veteran not to go to the University of Phoenix, I will consider this a success.
I will try to post again soon, probably not from a bus, about the new book I just put together for MoCCA and Stumptown…
This one even made the Awl.
Special thanks to fellow cartoonist and math-head Matthew Phelan for the peeing-in-the-pool metaphor, and to people everywhere who don’t understand how statistics work, giving me good cartoon fodder. This is the first of this project where I felt like I could’ve really improved the piece by going further into depth and explaining the issue more completely, but deadlines loom. Excuse me while I go draw some unhappy cats.
