How Interactive Comics And Virtual Reality Are Exploding Journalism: An Interview With Dan Archer

Dan Archer isn’t your typical journalist. For starters, he tells his stories using comics, and has embraced 3D simulations and the potential of virtual reality as a journalistic tool. Blurring the lines between graphic novels, firsthand reportage, and even illustrated interviews, the Brooklyn-based Englishman is one of the world’s most respected proponents of ‘empathetic media’ – the namesake of the cross-platform visual-journalism organisation he co-founded last year, which uses virtual and augmented reality to immerse readers in news stories.

Archer has done comics about everything from a prison escape at Alcatraz to human trafficking in Nepal, and he’s been outspoken about pushing comics into unique dimensions: “We’re really exploding things. You’re already seeing how malleable the visual format can be, so it’s a natural progression to think about how it could work harder,” he says. “Readers [aren’t] bound to a passive constraint of a timeline or one single thread of a narrative. They can really choose where they want to read.”

Coming to Sydney next month for The Walkley Foundation’s Storyology festival in Sydney, Archer has covered everything from a CIA-assisted coup in the Honduras to human trafficking in Nepal. He specialises in finding stories that aren’t being told elsewhere, and telling them in an entirely new way.

For example, his latest project taps virtual-reality technology for an interactive recreation of the scene in Ferguson, Missouri where teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot last year.

Beyond publishing his work far and wide, he has penned high-profile pieces about its cutting-edge nature for Medium , the BBC and Ars Technica.

Ahead of his time in just about every way, Archer talked to Junkee about the challenges of what he does, countering the “typical Twitter firehose” of information, and making visual formats more interactive.

Junkee: From the outside, comics journalism seems like a real hybrid medium, combining elements of sequential art, journalism, documentary, and political cartoons.

Dan Archer: I stray away from the political-cartooning line; [with] single-panel editorial cartoons, I don’t find they really open up dialogue around a topic so much as shut it down. It’s more soapbox-based opinions and punditry. I was drawn to comics journalism [instead] because it’s much more sequential, and you can get a longer narrative arc out of it.

Joe Sacco was really my inspiration for getting into it. He did a [1996] graphic novel called Palestine. That, in addition to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which won the Pulitzer in the ’90s, were a real push for legitimising the form.

Since then a whole host of others have done similar work, albeit more memoir-based. I use it more like drawn reportage.

Your work has so much potential for compacting history and making unwieldy subjects more digestible.

When I first started out that was definitely my focus: to condense, and render more accessible, topics that I cared deeply about [but] felt people were desensitised to, or didn’t find compelling. That certainly was the ethos behind the graphic history of the Honduran coup in 2009. But since then I’ve gravitated towards more human-interest pieces, if you can call them that. I’ve covered a lot of human trafficking, domestic violence – more stories on the margins of society.

You adapted the comic about Honduras into an app. How else have you used new technology in your work?

Comics is obviously a very lo-fi, lo-tech form: really all you need is a mark-making device and some sort of material. But given the proliferation of visual and graphic content online and how undeniably viral that sort of content is, it represents a massive opportunity for people. Now that the internet is evolving, we can make it work a lot harder to tell stories that are uniquely suited to this medium.

That’s really what I’m trying to do throughout my 3D work [too]. Now that the technology is more accessible, you can really put some quite complex graphics onto people’s smartphones, relatively speaking …

I think with the potential death of newspapers, people are seeing that you have to go where the consumer is. Often that’s their smartphone. That means thinking about how we can optimise these formats.

Graphic novels often encourage you to slow down and appreciate the detail of the illustrations, rather than just blowing through the words.

It’s an anathema to the typical Twitter firehose we see. That’s really what accounts for its popularity, in a lot of ways. It’s very hand-drawn and deliberately done. You get a much better sense of it if you just sit and read it slowly.

You’ve spoken before about a data narrative, in terms of breaking down information to tell a compelling story. Was it hard to get good at that?

Well, certainly practice makes perfect. I’ve gotten to a point now where I really enjoy live sketching. It’s like a distillation of the editorial process, [doing] a live sketch in front of people as I interview them. I enjoy trying to bring the art into a much more real, fluid state than just me hacking away in my studio. That social aspect makes it far more interesting to me.

#Livesketch of the undeniable benefits of gaming according to @avantgame #superbetter @G4C @aburak pic.twitter.com/HE8H5p7ASO

— Dan Archer (@archcomix) September 15, 2015

But certainly there are a lot of barriers to overcome. You can get so tied up in an issue that you lose focus, and so breaking it down for a new pair of eyes can be quite challenging.

For me it’s about establishing a real connection with people and telling their stories in a unique medium so they can get more eyeballs, basically.

The other beauty of live sketching is that people will see the drawing when I finish. It’s not like a piece of film, [where] it’s unlikely they’ll ever see the final edit. It was a grand jury – a terrible experience at the Old Bailey in England – that actually got me to do my first piece. As I was covering this, there were so many paralinguistic – non-textual – clues going on. The defendant, who was black, adopted kind of a threatening pose without necessarily meaning it, and he was glaring, and you could see how all these little things were having a deep effect on the jurors. So I ended up doing a comic about it. That was my first-ever comic.

You’re giving a master class and a workshop at Storyology, and you’ve juggled your work with teaching in the past. How have you found that?

I don’t teach as much as I used to. I’m more committed these days to getting Empathetic Media into legacy newsrooms. There’s so much fanfare at the moment about how virtual reality is the most empathetic means [of new media]; a lot of people just assume that if you stick an expensive video apparatus in the middle of some scene in some far-flung corner of the world, then naturally the readers are going to have an empathetic response.

But for me, it builds on the narrative conventions I learnt as a cartoonist. You have to be thinking about perspective and mechanics: how do I move through the story? So, in a lot of ways, comics really prepped me for this.

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Dan Archer is speaking at Storyology on Thursday November 12 (‘Building a world: Immersive visual storytelling‘), Friday (‘Interactive storytelling demo‘ masterclass) and Saturday (‘Storyboarding and sketching‘ workshop).

For more information tickets to Storyology, which takes place from November 11-14 at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington Town Hall, head to their website.

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Doug Wallen is Music Editor of The Big Issue. He also writes for Rolling Stone, FasterLouder and Australian Book Review.

Feature image screenshot via Sean O’Connor / Spovisual.com.