Comics and Graphic Storytelling in Technical Communication

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. The guest editors briefly overview intersections between comics and technical communication, then introduce the special issue’s contents and contributions to ongoing conversations in the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual rhetoric
• graphic storytelling
• comics
• visual narrative
• design of communication

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. At the time of finishing this special issue, it was early April, a precarious time for many of us. Around the world, news and cases of COVID-19 continued to surface around the world at an alarming rate, pushing technical communication scholars, teachers, and practitioners to homes and online spaces. Comics practitioners were distributing public health and COVID-19 stories on their web platforms and social media and digital literacy centers sought out comics to teach basic computer skills remotely via low-tech methods, further amplifying the relationship between comics and technical communication.

Speaking to the above relationship, this special issue places practitioners and scholars in conversation, reframing questions of creativity, accessibility, and digital media in the field of technical communication (refer to Boyle & Rivers, 2016). Comics are primarily defined as images and text organized in a deliberate sequence, and can be represented in physical, digital, and mobile media (refer to Bergs, 2017; McCloud, 2008; Meyer, 2013; Samanci & Tewari, 2012). Comics and graphic storytelling offer one set of many creative approaches to technical communication practices, including videogames, infographics, poetry, wordless instructions and other visual and multimodal forms that work to bridge what William J. White (2017) calls “the persistence of the gap between science and the arts [that] remains a chief feature of efforts to incorporate visual information and argumentation in” science (and technical) communication (p. 113). There is a long history of overlap between comics and technical communication: from Rudolphe Töpffer’s 19th-century physiognomy diagrams (Töpffer & Figueiredo, 2017), to Will Eisner’s (1969) “M16A1 Operation and Preventative Maintenance” manual for the US Army, to McCloud’s (2008) comic on the inner workings of Google Chrome, and to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s comic, “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic” (2012). Put differently, comics and graphic storytelling have figured into technical communication for decades, but as a field, our research on such a relationship remains under-explored. As a result, this special issue gives creative industries and practitioners their due as innovative technical communicators.

Reading the past and working in the present, we were excited about article proposals that approached comics and technical communication in ways that foreground innovative and marginalized perspectives. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, comics have the potential to demonstrate the limits of existing technical communication practices (Yu), emphasize existing cultural assumptions about users’ literacy abilities (Abbott; Garrison-Joyner & Caravella), challenge dominant cultural perspectives about topics in technical communication (Petersen & Matheson), and bridge existing practices to support more socially just and accessible technical communication (Sanchez). (For an illustrated overview of this special issue's contents, please see the online supplementary materials.)

Technical Communication Quarterly Volume 5, Issue 1 (Wickliff & Bosley, 1996) was the last special issue of this journal devoted to visual elements of document design, and visual information technologies and practices have continued to expand since its publication over two decades ago. There is growing interest among technical communication scholars in better understanding how the creative industries promote innovation through storytelling technologies, evidenced by Technical Communication Quarterly’s 2016 special issue on “Games in Technical Communication” (25.3), edited by Stephanie Vie and Jennifer deWinter. Comics address multiple audiences, from readers of instruction manuals to fans who then perform uptake of work in various technical environments. Comics represent complex data in engaging ways but also raise new ethical questions on visual representation and accessibility. These questions have led to a series of recent experiments in the design, purpose, and production of graphic storytelling, such as Andre Berg’s 3D app-based interactive comic, Protanopia; Ozge Samanci and Anuj Tewari’s 2010 place-based mobile comic, GPS Comics; Phillip Meyer’s braille-based tactile comic for people who are blind, Life; Guy Hasson’s Comics Empower, an online store offering audio comics for visually impaired audiences; and Ian Williams’ GraphicMedicine.org, a blog exploring the intersection of comics and healthcare. Moreover, comics industries and production processes provide rich data sources for expanding technical communication research and practice (refer to Woo, 2018). After engaging in productive dialogs with researchers and practitioners in this issue, we are firmly convinced that this special issue is a rich contribution to the field and a starting place for exploring how technical communication can better attend to creative methods and practices that create immersive and experiential user-centered documentation.

Due to the technical constraints of publishing an image-heavy special issue in print, we are pleased to partner with Taylor & Francis’s FigShare hosting services to host media files beyond the capabilities of the print publication. Additionally, we are pleased to offer Garrison-Joyner and Caravella’s article as an online exclusive in order to fully integrate its strong full-color visual dimensions within the companion essay. Whether online or print, all materials have undergone the same rigorous peer review process and are essential contributions to this special issue.

We would like to give special thanks to Rebecca Walton and Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq for their editorial guidance and assistance, and to Sherena Huntsman for sharing her expertise as an accessibility consultant in the early stages of preparing this special issue. Many thanks also to the peer reviewers for graciously offering their time and insight to strengthening this special issue’s contributions to conversations on comics and technical communication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Kathleen Bahl

Erin Kathleen Bahl, who illustrated this introduction and our call for proposals, is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. Her research explores the possibilities digital technologies afford for creating knowledge and telling stories. She publishes scholarship on comics and makes folklore-inspired vector art webcomics.

Sergio Figueiredo

Sergio Figueiredo is an associate professor in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on the relationship between comics, new and emerging media, the histories of rhetoric, and electracy. In 2017, he published a translation of Rodolphe Topffer’s essays on the invention of modern comics, Inventing Comics (Parlor Press, 2017).

Rich Shivener

Rich Shivener is an assistant professor in the Writing Department at York University. His research revolves around digital media composing and emotions. Prior to his professorship, he was a technical communicator and reported on comics for magazines.