Inspired by the idea that comics can deal with ‘serious’ issues, geographers, including myself are increasingly translating research into comics. You don’t even have to be a long-standing reader of comics or a highly skilled illustrator to create them either! Comics can push your research in new directions, allow you to communicate parts of your research that are not possible in other mediums and encourage you to engage with research participants and artists in ways that you might never have before. Below I outline a few opportunities for geographers working in the comic medium, including some dos and don’ts.
With the illustrator John Cei Douglas, I created the comic, After Maria: Everyday Recovery from Disaster in 2019, based on my one-year ethnography about Puerto Rican families’ recovery from Hurricane Maria. Later in 2022, I created a second comic, Everyday Stories of Climate Change, with the illustrator Cat Sims, and fellow geographers, Gina Ziervogel, and Adeeba Nuraina Risha. That story threads together vignettes from our research about the everyday ways that low-income families adapt to climate change in Bangladesh, South Africa, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, and Barbuda.
Taking readers to hidden moments and places
Comics celebrate character-driven narratives and the feminist politics of everyday life, often through first-person narratives and stories at the scale of lived experiences. This storytelling can transport readers to places and moments that are typically inaccessible to researchers. For example, after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, many people temporarily lived with extended family, often sleeping on mattresses in living rooms until their houses were reconstructed. However, several people told me that this lack of privacy made it difficult to be sexually intimate with their partners (see image 3). Such personal moments are impossible to capture using audio-visual equipment. Yet, illustration allows readers to ‘go’ to some of the most intimate, mundane, and routine spaces that make up the landscape of research participants’ everyday lives. This can allow you to create convincing worlds where your characters—or research participants—live.
Visualising participants’ histories and aspirations, as well as possible futures
Comics are not bound by linear time as they can sustain and illustrate multiple and simultaneous temporalities where readers can see past, present, and future laid out before them on a single page. This allows you to visualise the histories, memories, aspirations, and even daydreams of people that are difficult to capture in other visual media such as photography or video. For example, in Bolivia people aspired to construct resilient (and beautiful) houses in their landslide-prone neighbourhoods. The illustrator Cat Sims brilliantly captured these imaginations (see image 4), revealing the intricate aspirations that people have for their lives despite living with the adverse impacts of climate change. Portraying people as future-oriented agents allowed me to challenge persistent stereotypes about people in the so-called ‘global south’ as ‘static’ and ‘traditional’. Comics can also allow you to visualise alternative and still possible future scenarios, which can be an exciting and playful way for you to critically present potential solutions and policy recommendations that your research has revealed.
Participatory research with participants and artists
When creating a comic research participants can become active collaborators providing feedback on draft sketches, which de-centres the researcher as the chief ‘storyteller’. I found that when participants can ‘see’ representations of themselves, their streets, houses, schools or even pets they are more invested in providing feedback because it holds greater personal significance. And unless you’re confident with drawing you will inevitably work closely with an illustrator who will bring your script to life. Illustrators prefer scripts composed of ‘thick descriptions’ that include information such as dialogue, narration, captions, thoughts, sounds, smells, what is happening, whom we can see, the layout of each panel, the ambience, the emotion of characters, the time of day – as much detail as possible! As academics who are comfortable communicating in text, your initial script will probably rely too much on dialogue to drive the story. However, working with an illustrator presents an exciting opportunity to strip back text to craft a visual argument where readers can use their imagination and wider knowledge to unpack the story’s images and text, which can feel less directive.
Final thoughts
Comics can facilitate geographers to work more creatively, no longer holed up alone in a room writing for hours on end. They offer an exciting opportunity to communicate beautiful, sensitive, and compelling first-person narratives that can evoke in readers “a critical outrage grounded in empathy.” (Fall, 2014: 106). And as different publics continue to develop visual literacy, comics can be revelatory for understanding and representing the everyday, hidden, and multitemporal experiences of research participants. Enjoy the process!
Suggestions for translating your research into a comic
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Read lots of comics and graphic novels! This will really help you to imagine your research as a visual story and to write the script.
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Work with an illustrator who is familiar with comics’ unique language and syntax because being good at illustration does not automatically make you good at drawing comics.
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Try to keep dialogue and captions to a minimum so that the images drive the story.
Further reading
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Dittmer, J. (2010). Comic book visualities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(2), 222– 236.
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Cameron, E. (2012). New geographies of story and storytelling. Progress in Human Geography, 36(5), 573– 592.
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Fall, J. J. (2014). Put your body on the line. In J. Dittmer (Ed.), Comic book geographies (pp. 91– 108). Coll. Media Geography.
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Peterle, G. (2021). Comics as a research practice. Routledge.
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Sou, G., and Hall, S.M. (2023). Comics and zines for creative research impact: ethics, politics and praxis in geographical research. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers.
About this guide
There’s long tradition of geographers communicating research ‘beyond the academy’ - to policy, to publics, to young people, to school teachers - whether to recruit students, for career development, critical praxis and activism, or requirements of funders to document ‘impact’. Ten years ago we published the Communicating Geographical Research Beyond the Academy guide. It sought to bring together and share collective experience and learning, from within and beyond the academy. Today, there are ever more opportunities and modes and media with which to do this. While many of the points made – about audience, about access, about brevity and the use of plain English – still stand, this collection covers these already familiar issues as well as bringing new perspectives to encourage readers to reflect on motives, means and methods and to illuminate examples of good practice.