Quickly in the draw: A weekly interview with comics journalist Dan Archer

So he quit his job in the publishing industry and enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program. He had been drawn to independent comic storytelling for years. Now he knew what his next step would be: the relatively niche field of graphic journalism, which uses the comics format to report news and current events

Archer’s work has since been published by the BBC, National Geographic, Associated Press and Poynter. He has covered the 2009 coup in Honduras, the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square by American security forces in 2007, and the protests that erupted in 2014 following the police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri , broke out.

He has been nominated for the prestigious Eisner Awards and has created immersive virtual reality and augmented reality experiences that tell stories about mental health, homelessness, incarceration, state-sponsored violence and human trafficking.

Now he has released his first book, a graphic novel called Voices from Nepal: Uncovering Human Trafficking Through Comics Journalism.

It is the culmination of over a decade of reporting and research. His hand-drawn watercolor panels put readers in the shoes of human trafficking victims and former traffickers, transforming the subject of little-noticed news reports into deeply powerful, human stories.

Archer’s love of comics long predates his interest in journalism. He grew up on a steady diet of Asterix, Calvin & Hobbes and British newspapers such as The Dandy and Beano.

As a teenager, he began preferring the works of underground artists such as Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb to superhero franchises. The former introduced him to a world in which this “supposedly child-friendly art form” was used to tell adult stories about countercultures, police brutality and the fight for human rights.

He later discovered the work of comics journalist Joe Sacco, author of the graphic novels Palestine (1993) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), who would have a decisive influence.

“Palestine completely changed my perspective on graphic novels in general,” says Archer. “It was an aesthetic work of art, but also because it told this powerful story and shared perspectives in a way that I hadn’t seen in traditional reporting.”

Then in 2007/2009 he worked as a jury member and received an MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.

His early visual news reports covered the problems of local farmers in Vermont and the struggles of undocumented tomato pickers along the Florida coast.

These early comics were more like DIY zines, he says, put together with little more than pen, paper and a copy machine.

“That accessibility is what makes comics so appealing to me, that you don’t need sophisticated tools to tell these stories. There’s a real punk aesthetic and passion behind it…getting the stories out of your head and getting them straight to the press and then selling them at conventions and events.”

In 2009, Archer and American author and editor Nikil Saval (now a U.S. senator) told the story of the Honduran coup in a 32-page work that made headlines and won them fans and recognition online.

Two years later, Archer created The Nisoor Square Shootings, a multimedia work that allowed the reader to move through the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater employees and view the events from multiple perspectives.

“In journalistic reporting, there is often this he-said-she-said argument about how events are viewed from different perspectives,” says Archer. “The beauty of comics is that you can juxtapose these narratives in real time. You can have two separate testimonials and consume them at the same time.”

The idea of ​​multiple perspectives, he adds, “is a very important reminder that there is no single truth.”

With this in mind, Archer began researching human trafficking in 2010 while working with Fulbright Scholar Olga Trusova on Borderland, a graphic novel documenting true stories of human trafficking survivors in her native Ukraine.

In 2011, at Stanford – where he became the first comics journalist to receive a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship – he met Nepali journalists Madhu Acharya and Jaya Luintel.

They invited him to visit Kathmandu, and he ended up spending over a year visiting brick kilns and sari factories in Nepal and speaking to victims of forced labor.

Until 2012, he was involved in an international research project led by researchers from the University of California Berkeley and York University. “So the graphic novel is part illustrated report, part comic journalism field book, and part improvised documentation of how we put together this research study. It is also a clear call to approach this problem differently,” says Archer.

The research project was essentially about effective messaging, and Archer also worked on posters, comics, animated videos and a radio play.

“We looked at the impact of positive and negative news – empowerment versus fear-based – as well as the impact of the type of medium,” he says. The empowerment narratives were consistently found to be more effective and resonant.

But enough about him. The focus must be on the survivors, he says with a smile. Click here to see more of his book and the stories contained within.