New narrative styles in comic journalism. A case study: The crack

Abstract

There is an old and close relationship between comic and journalism which is reflected in newspapers through caricatures, bullet points and comic strips. However, comic journalism has emerged in the last decades as a new genre, a creative formula that hybridize comic codes and routines with narratives resources used in inmersive journalism. In the early 1990s, Joe Sacco stood out among a number of authors who popularized this new format, became aware of the journalistic genre condition as an information medium and sought his own formula for telling non-fiction stories. The photographer, originally published in 2003, involved the inclusion of photographs to make this formula more realistic and to describe Didier Lefèvre´s experience in the war in Afghanistan in 1986. In 2016, journalists Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril published The crack, a story that once again mixes journalism and comic codes, where photographs subjected to a special chromatic treatment replace the drawings in each vignette. This study analyzes the impact and evolution of comic journalism through this field diary of two reporters who travel the path from Africa to the Arctic follow a boundary line that extends from Africa to the Artic, in order to unravel the causes and consequences of Europe´s identity crisis. A work translated into several languages and awarded with international prizes, which opens up new paths for narrative and aesthetic experimentation in the field of comic journalism. This paper takes as a starting point the theoretical review of the contributions made around the study of the connections between comic and journalism and focuses on the iconic-verbal analysis of The crack, completing the work methodology with open-ended interviews with the authors of the mentioned work.