Susie Cagle is one of our contributors and a comic journalist who is pushing the medium to the forefront in America. It's not always an easy process.
While covering Occupy Oakland full time, she has been tear gassed and arrested. But when the Associate Press released a list of journalists arrested ot Occupy protests, they didn't include her name. It's not hard to imagine why.
On her blog, Cagle writes about the process of being laid off as a words journalist and getting her career going again through comics--and the confusion that has resulted.
After nearly a year producing drawn reportage outside of the “comics” sphere and in the regular news and feature sections of newspapers, magazines and websites, I was frustrated with the lack of respect given to visual journalism.
Even as all of media seems to be creaming their pants over infographics, few are making the connection between images and information.
Most of our media is still controlled by word people. Word people don’t understand picture people; and to be fair, most picture people don’t understand word people. If you’ve worked at a publication, you understand the turf battle I’m talking about — people on both sides fighting for more space for what they perceive to be the most important part of the news, and the best way of disseminating it to readers.
Also of note is a recent article by Michael Cavna at The Washington Post's Comic Riffs blog. Cavna contrasts the approaches to Occupy by Cagle with Nate Beeler, a conservative editorial cartoonist without much love for the movement.