[Part 1 of this series looked at the turn toward individuals telling true stories via comics, while Part 2 illustrated how comics began to use a subjective vantage point to record history.]
[caption id="attachment_1098" align="alignleft" width="239" caption="Le Photographe, Tome 3/Dupuis"][/caption]
Emmanuel Guibert’s and Didier Lefèvre’s Le Photographe moves the field of nonfiction comics toward narrative journalism by revealing the documentary potential of graphic storytelling. Guibert recounts the journey of a photographer (Lefèvre) who records the work of a Medecins Sans Frontières mission in northeastern Afghanistan in 1986. Released in France between 2003 and 2006, the three volumes span 260 pages and follow Lefèvre from Pakistan to Afghanistan and back.
Though its achievements are similar to those of Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde (discussed in Part 2 of this series), Le Photographe unfolds in radically different form. The series’ most striking aspect is the unusual combination of documentary photography (Lefèvre's original work) and highly stylized drawings.
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The best print narratives often take the form of either movie or metaphor. The first approach hinges on complete scenes, allowing a story to unfold as it would in film, through a discrete series of moments or events. This style … Read more
