Sharply drawn
journalism
Local publishers Cumulus Press combine reportage with comics to take a look
at the mining industry
TAR SANDS EXTRACTION PITS:
From Extraction! A “Comix Reportage”
by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU
Local publishers Cumulus Press launch their first foray into the world of journalism and art this week with Extraction! A “Comix Reportage” about the Canadian mining industry and its effects on people and the environment around the globe.
“I didn’t really know what to expect,” says co-editor David Widgington. “I’d never done a comic book before and I didn’t know how it would work.”
Taking inspiration from legendary “journalistic comic” pioneer Joe Sacco, Widgington and co-creator Frédéric Dubois conceived of Extraction! while on a trip to Berlin earlier this year. Searching for a replacement for a project that had fallen through, the two hit on the topic of mining. A visit to a nearby comic store convinced them to do it in cartoon form.
“We started off with four journalists that we asked to write an article about a particular mining project that they were familiar with,” Widgington explains. “Then we gave the scripts to four different artists who converted them into comics.”
While it might not seem obvious, Widgington says mining is well suited to the comix format, an opinion shared by the aforementioned Sacco, who called it “the perfect idea for a graphic treatment.”
“There’s a lot of visual elements to mining,” says Widgington. “There are big trucks and deep holes. It’s very visual, and it’s dynamic.”
In the opening chapter, “Gold: Taking the Heart From the Land,” writer and activist Dawn Paley and award-winning cartoonist Joe Ollmann tell the story of local resistance to a Guatemalan gold mine run by Vancouver-based Goldcorp.
“It was a great project to work on,” says Ollmann, whose distinctive style, dark humour and sharply observed characters and scenes make Gold one of Extraction!’s stronger pieces. “I was really interested in using artwork to do something useful and politically motivated.”
Accustomed to working alone and in total freedom, Ollmann embraced the challenges of journalistic collaboration, and says his partner enjoyed the process as well.
“It’s always fun for someone when they see themselves in a cartoon,” he says. “Dawn gave me a lot of background information; pamphlets, books, Web sites and photos. It wasn’t like you were just handed a script and told, ‘Here’s how you have to draw it.’”
According to Widgington, much effort went into ensuring that both the text and the images were factually sound and adhered to accepted journalistic practice, except the final chapter on Alberta’s tar sands. For “Oil: From the Bottom of the Pit,” reported by Peter Cizek and drawn by Phil Angers and co-editor Marc Tessier, they decided to employ a fictional character on a soapbox to narrate a fact-based story.
“Initially, it was like, ‘Can we actually do this? Are we allowed to do that and still call it journalism?’” he says. “The challenge was to make sure that art was actually representative of reality, and not fiction. We really wanted to maintain journalistic integrity, so that the journalism wasn’t compromised in the transformation into the comics.”
Referring to the comic book form as a “secret weapon,” Widgington hopes to lure in readers who might not otherwise be interested in mining and the pressing environmental and social concerns surrounding it. “They might get sucked in initially by the artwork,” he says. “Then hopefully the story will keep them there.”
