'In a world where Photoshop has outed the photograph to be a liar, one can now allow artists to return to their original function – as reporters," said award-winning comic book creator Art Spiegelman. And he seems to have been right. Currently there's a new wave of journalistic comic book artists. The most notable are Marjane Satrapi, whose beautifully detailed comic-book memoirs of her childhood in Iran, Persepolis, were recently made into an animated film; and Joe Sacco who has produced The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde about the Balkans, and Palestine, a journalistic travelogue about his time in... well, Palestine. And there are plenty of other examples of the genre. There's Ted Rall's To Afghanistan and Back, online comic book artist Coco Wang's China 5.12 tales from the Chinese earthquake, Josh Neufeld's Hurricane Katrina stories A.D.– After the Deluge, and comic book creator and singer/songwriter Jeffrey Lewis's various comic book history lessons (like his hilarious yet heavily detailed History of Communism Parts 1 to 5).


This isn't entirely new. In the past, sequential picture stories often had finger-wagging, didactic purposes. Apart from the sketch artists and cartoonists who dominated newspapers before the invention of photography, there were also ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics which told tales of pharaohs and gods in essentially pictorial form. Then there were tableaux painters like Hogarth, who, in A Rake's Progress, used a series of pictures to depict a young gentleman's descent into debauchery. And closer to home there are The Stations of the Cross – the story of Christ's journey from Pilate's court to crucifix as told in sequential form in almost every Catholic church.


This educational function remained in the comic book in the 20th century despite the proliferation of escapist superhero, war, horror and sci fi comics. In the '50s, The Eagle attempted to tell historical and religious stories alongside the space operatic adventures of Dan Dare, and even war comics like Battle featured heavily researched and credible war stories like Pat Mills' and Joe Colquhoun's Charley's War.


"During the '50s, there were comic book artists who did 'true stories of combat' and there were some amazing examples," says American comic book creator and songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. "Harvey Kurtzman, one of the original artists of Mad magazine, did a lot of those war stories. Some of those guys had actually served in the war. At the time, there was also this idea that comics were corrupting young people so there was an attempt to make comics which would be enlightening and educational and positive. Of course, a lot of these supposedly educational comics just weren't as much fun."


The rules all changed, however, when the graphic novel started to get plaudits as a literary medium and award-winning artists like Art Spiegelman turned their hands toward reportage and memoir. In 1992, Spiegelman's Maus told the story of the holocaust based on interviews with his Auschwitz-surviving father. In his harrowing and detailed retelling, the Jews were depicted as mice and the Nazis as cats, an effect that would be impossible to achieve with either prose or film, argues Irish comic book artist Chris Judge. "Maus was sitting on the shelves for years at home and my older brother had it," he says. "At first I didn't get it, but then when I was 15 I picked it up and it just blew me away. It suited the story so perfectly to take these simple drawings and tell this horrible story. Schindler's List can do that job but in a totally different way. The visual metaphor is very powerful and very simple. You instantly knew who the Nazis were and who the Jews were."


Indeed, this combination of straight fact with beautiful layouts and visual metaphor brings something new to reportage and a number of younger creators have followed Spiegelman's lead. Jeffrey Lewis's own comics include live performances of the histories of Chinese, Russian and Cuban communism (which he displays live accompanied by music) as well as histories of the Guggenheim family. Lewis, like many alternative comic book creators of the '80s and '90s, had been flirting with a confessional, memoir-style of comic book writing, and stylistically, he says, it wasn't a huge jump to simply recount the stories of other people (and nations).


"Comic books are a medium I know how to operate in," he says. "And truth is as amazing as fiction. It can be really difficult as a writer of comic books to come up with stories from scratch that are as fascinating and moving and amazing as real stories that have happened in the recent century."


Another American cartoonist, Ted Rall, is most celebrated for his editorial cartoons, but he found himself engaged in comic-book reporting after a trip to war-torn Afghanistan.


"I didn't go there with the intention of writing a comic book, I went there to cover the war as a journalist," he says. "But when I came back I was constantly being asked– 'What was it like?' Not about the politics, which of course people were interested in too, but they were asking 'What was Afghanistan like?' 'What did it feel like?' 'What did the dust feel like?' 'What were the people like?' There was just an incredible curiosity about that. So I sort of hit upon the idea of doing the political analysis part in prose form, and the 'What was it like?' part in cartoon form. And that's where the book came from. Comics create that 'you are there' mode more effectively than prose. Prose is often too specific. But because of the abstract nature of comics, as a reader you can project yourself into the story."


But why are comic book creators realising this potential now? One suggestion is that the depersonalised nature of news production has left audiences craving something more intimate. "Comics can provide a much more focussed point of view," says Jeffrey Lewis. "They're visual, accessible and immediate but they don't require a huge team of people unlike, say, a news show or even a film where you need different people involved in every aspect of the production and that means different people's opinions and different people's political viewpoints and lots of different people's money and sponsorship. Comic books are much more grassroots and one person acting alone can put forward exactly what they've experienced without any compromise. And that's a very direct kind of reporting."


Furthermore, with wider internet access, comic book producers don't even need a publisher. Coco Wang has been producing a series of true life stories about the recent Chinese earthquake (earthquakestrips.blogspot.com) and, as mentioned, Josh Neufeld has been producing a graphic novel, called A.D. – After the Deluge (smithmag.net/
afterthedeluge) based on interviews with victims of Hurricane Katrina, and in each instance, new instalments are posted online (A.D. is to be collected in a book by Pantheon in 2009).


"A.D. is all about real people and their real stories," says Neufeld. "I found the characters in a pretty traditional journalistic way – through friends down in New Orleans and through people I met when I was a volunteer with the Red Cross. I interviewed them and re-interviewed them and got all the details of their stories right. Comics can bring a story to life in a way that a prose account with a couple of photographs can't."


One disadvantage, Lewis notes, is that comic production is slow work, so that it's probably never going to be used for quick turn-around, front-page news stories. This makes Neufeld laugh with recognition.


"Being slow isn't always a bad thing," he says. "Many people from New Orleans have told me they're happy someone is still writing about what they went through. It isn't about speed, it was more about presenting people's experiences and representing what they went through.


"Of course, it wouldn't have worked if my job was to warn people about the Hurricane," he starts to laugh. "I wasn't sitting there sketching frantically, saying 'Oh, if only I could draw quicker! Then people could get out of the city!'"