The Rise and Fall of Comics Journalism Magazines and Their Legacy: Experiences of Graphic Storytelling in the USA, Italy, and France

Today's use of comics as a new language in journalism was preceded by some "notable failures" of magazines which lasted just a few issues, but still left their mark on the foundation of a new type of storytelling. Magazines like Joe Sacco's Yahoo, which ran 6 issues from 1988 to 1992, paved the way for other international episodes in comics journalism, as did the magazine Mamma! which was printed in Italy, as well as other digitally published "tablet magazines" in the USA and Europe. The American tablet magazine Symbolia, published online from 2013 to 2015, and previous examples of web comics seem to have reached the diffusion limits of media trying to found their way into popular culture. At the same time, comics journalism pioneers succeeded in creating a new readership that led renowned international magazines like Le Monde Diplomatique (in October 2010) and The New York Times Magazine (in June 2017) into running issues entirely based on comics and "bandes dessinées". The French magazine La Revue dessinée, and the US magazines The Nib and World War 3 Illustrated, which are still in print and reach only a select audience of readers, are the most recent attempts to support the struggling industries of newspaper and book publishers with a new form of visual storytelling based on the language of comics. This paper examines multiple case studies, background materials and interviews with people directly involved in comics journalism magazines in Italy, France, and the USA, to construct a broad overview of this form of publishing. In 2002 Joe Sacco declared that "the fifth issue of Yahoo remained his favorite comic book of all time since it was the one where his writing was the least restricted" (Marshall 2004). Is there still space for this kind of creative freedom at the crossroads between comics and journalism? This exploratory inquiry will contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which the legacy of comics journalism pioneers outlived the life of their magazines, and still persists in the use of comics as a language in journalism.