Quick on the draw: A Wknd interview with comic journalist Dan Archer

It was a stint of jury duty at the Old Bailey, London’s oldest criminal court, that first convinced Dan Archer to make the switch to comics journalism.

The jury experience itself was terrible, he says. But he did notice that while photography wasn’t allowed in the courtroom, sketching was. This was 15 years ago; he was in his 20s.

“That experience led me to the realisation that drawing could be a really powerful way to represent a story, and a perspective on things,” Archer says.
So he quit his job in the publishing industry and enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme. 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 on news and current affairs
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 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square by American security contractors, and the protests that erupted in 2014 following the police shooting of the black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
He has been nominated for the prestigious Eisner awards, and has created immersive virtual-reality and augmented-reality experiences that tell stories of mental health, homelessness, incarceration, state-sponsored violence, and human trafficking.
He now has his first book out, a graphic novel titled Voices from Nepal: Uncovering Human Trafficking Through Comics Journalism.
It is the culmination of over a decade of reporting and research. His hand-drawn, watercolour panels put the reader in the shoes of trafficking victims and former traffickers, turning the subject of barely noticed news reports into deeply immersive, human stories.
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Archer’s love for comics long predates his interest in journalism. He grew up on a steady diet of Asterix, Calvin & Hobbes, and UK dailies staples such as The Dandy and Beano.
As a teen, he grew to prefer the work of underground artists such as Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb to the 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.
Later, he discovered the work of comics journalist Joe Sacco, author of the graphic novels Palestine (1993) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), who would be a seminal influence.
“Palestine completely changed the way I looked at graphic novels in general,” Archer says. “It was an aesthetic piece of art, but also because it told this immersive story and shared perspectives in a way that I hadn’t seen traditional news coverage do.”
Then came the jury service experience, and the MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, in 2007-09.
His early visual news stories were about the problems faced by local farmers in Vermont, and the struggles of undocumented tomato pickers all the way down the coast in Florida.
These early comics were more like DIY zines, he says, put together with little more than pen, paper and a copying machine.
“That accessibility is very much part of the appeal of comics for me, that you don’t need sophisticated tools to tell these stories. There is a real punk aesthetic and passion to it… getting the stories out of one’s head and straight onto a press, then selling those stories at conventions and events.”
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In 2009, Archer and American writer-editor Nikil Saval (now a US state senator) told the story of the Honduran coup in a 32-page work that made headlines and earned 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 employees of Blackwater, viewing events as they unfolded from multiple perspectives.
“Often with journalistic coverage, there’s this he-said-she-said dispute in terms of how events are witnessed from different perspectives,” Archer says. “The beauty of comics is that you can juxtapose these narratives in real time. You can have two separate testimonials and consume them simultaneously.”
The idea of multiple perspectives, he adds, “is a very important reminder that there is no one single truth”.
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Amid it all, in 2010, Archer started researching human trafficking, while working with Fulbright fellow Olga Trusova on Borderland, a graphic novel that documents true stories of trafficking survivors in her native Ukraine.
In 2011, at Stanford — where he was the first comics journalist to be awarded a John S Knight journalism fellowship — he met the 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 labour.
By 2012, he had joined an international research project there, led by researchers from University of California Berkeley and York University. “So the graphic novel is part illustrated reportage, part comics journalism field book, and part fly-on-the-wall drawn documentary of how we put this research study together. It’s also a clarion call for a different way of addressing this issue,” Archer says.
The research project was fundamentally about effective messaging, and so Archer also worked on posters, comics, animated videos and a radio drama.
“We looked at the impact of positive messaging vs negative messaging — ie, empowerment-focused vs fear-based — as well as the impact of the type of medium,” he says. Over and over, the empowerment narratives were found to be more effective, more resonant.
But enough about him. The focus should be on the survivors, he says, smiling. Click here to see more of his book, and the stories in it.