Reportage Drawing, Graphic Journalism, Observational Cartooning. All these terms are used to describe a new phenomenon in journalism: the comics artist as reporter. Before the invention of photography illustrations were quite common in the printed press, later on they became obsolete; only the editorial cartoon remained in fashion. In the nineties of the last century however the drawing returned to the press, when the American artist & journalist.

Joe Sacco invented a new genre and started to make comics about people who live in the war zones of Palestine and Bosnia. Today he is an internationally acclaimed reporter with followers in many countries. Newspapers and magazines like Time, Internazionale, Süddeutsche Zeitung and The Guardian send comics artists as eye witnesses to newsworthy places, and they share their impressions with us, readers and onlookers, in the form of lines on paper. Or lines on screen, because last year the tablet magazine Symbolia was launched in the US, specialized in illustrated journalism for the iPad. One of the main characteristics of the drawn documentary is the role of the artist as a personage in the story itself: the artist is no anonymous bystander who accidentally happens to be on the spot, but he or she is an involved human being that wants to tell us a story: we need to know and see what is going on! This urgency makes graphic journalism all the more fascinating.

Joost Pollman is a curator and journalist, who is specialized in the history of graphic journalism. He lives in Haarlem NL.

Di. 28.5., 19 Uhr, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Neubau 2, Vortragssaal

Drawing by Olivier Kugler