Why – and why not – use comics as a research method

by Lydia Wysocki

In 2022 the Methodspace focus is on Research<>Relevance. How do we make the research process and findings relevant to people outside of academia? Lydia Wysocki offers comics as a way to reach new readers. In addition to her Methodspace posts, learn more on her comics website: https://appliedcomicsetc.com and follow her on Twitter: @appliedcomics.

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Making comics is not difficult.

Whether working alone or with collaborators, you can get a long way  with a biro and scrap paper. Making good comics that are effective in the context of a specific research project is a more challenging undertaking. In this blog post I want to encourage your own explorations in using comics as a research method, and to do so by adding some notes of caution to balance any excitement you might have.

I set myself a challenge in writing this series of 3 blog posts. Writing a first draft early in 2021 was a way to commit to contributing to the literature on methods, at a time when ongoing disruption meant constantly tearing up and rewriting my research and publication plans. Updating that first blog post and writing two new posts has been a chance to reflect on (laugh at?) how my own ongoing and planned use of comics at multiple stages in multiple research projects has changed beyond recognition. Like many of us, those research plans are still holding on but are not the same as they were.

In 2021 I have had the privilege of being tweeted at and tagged into conversations as part of various flurries of interest in comics and research. It is great to be part of an emergent area of research methods, and each conversation has been useful in making new connections and refreshing my review of relevant academic methods literature. The vast majority of those conversations on ‘comics and research’, and/or ‘comics as a research method’, have however pulled towards a focus on the communication of research, particularly in dissemination, public engagement, teaching, and/or participant information materials. Dissemination-based uses of comics can be great, but must not be mistaken for the entirety of uses of comics as a method that can include: building relationships with research participants, data elicitation and collection, transcription and presentation, analysis, and refinement of findings.

To continue the growth of interest in comics as a research methods, my gift to you is a list of reasons not to make comics. You can use these as reasons to say no to taking on new work at a busy time. Alternatively, use this list to bounce around your own ideas of how to effectively use comics as a research method.

• Don’t be too clever when making comics. A comic that is too simplistic can be an ideal point of entry for participants to grasp what is important about your research, as a reassuring baseline from which to advance to more complex conversations. A joke that is overworked is no joke at all, unless that’s the joke. A depiction that relies on high-concept artwork and printing can go wrong at multiple stages in artworking, printing or digital publication, and indeed in being read. Clear concepts and clear lines avoid many production problems, and still open up discussions around multiple possible interpretations.

• Don’t make boring comics, unless you want them to be boring. A talking head approach in which a barely-moving character’s thought process unfolds can be the duller than the dullest lecture, but can also be used to great effect with reference to older comics.

• Don’t make comics for a general audience. Identifying a target age group, interest group, demographic category - down to the attendees of a specific community centre, or one class in one school – will give an invaluable focus when planning and making your comic. A well-made comic for a niche audience is likely to also be of interest well beyond your target group. But comics made for anyone and everyone risk becoming art made by committee, which ultimately resonates with no-one.

• Don’t make comics expecting that this will simplify the process of making research tools and instruments. As with many forms of writing, there are layers of drafting and redrafting behind even the most simplistic stick figure cartoons. Unlike text-based forms of writing, making comics needs attention to visual and to verbal representation. My first blog post in this series indicated the drafting and re-drafting needed to make a comics-form questionnaire, and making a comics-form peer reviewed journal article can also be more time-consuming than text-only writing even before choosing a detailed drawing style. You may well encounter cycles of planning and revision that can spiral into obsession - or, that can provide a useful framework for setting out aspects of your research in meticulous step-by-step ways: unlike standalone illustrations, comics include multiple panels that need planning as individual panels, as units of a page, and as parts of a complete work

• Don’t make comics unless you have to. Explorations in comics-form transcription and presentation of research participants’ interactions used sequences of video screenshots to go beyond text-based transcripts, or line drawings to go beyond text-based or single-image representations, or used multiple forms of lettering to show multi-layered interactions. If text-based transcription is sufficient for your research needs, use text-based transcription. If you need something more, particularly considering the audience(s) for your work, have a go at comics-form transcription.

• Don’t make comics without making a comic. A comics-form journal abstract that puts each sentence of your written abstract into a panel and adds a relevant image could be a useful gimmick to attract your academic competitors’ attention to your journal article, but is unlikely to be a readable comic. Making comics involves drawing words and writing pictures, which is a more involved process than rearranging text written for another audience and hoping for the best. Some of the best comics creation does of course involve a healthy amount of hoping for the best, but my point is that making something that looks like a comic is not the same as making a readable comic. Without translating academic language into accessible language, and using that process of translation to guide choices of words and pictures, it is easy to spend a lot of time making something beautiful but unreadable - and thus all but useless for its intended purpose in research.

In short: have a go, and remember what it is you’re aiming for through various disruptions and revisions. And keep an eye on what comics-based methods are doing, or trying to do, that sets this medium-based visual method apart from the constellation of methods available to social science and interdisciplinary researchers.

In this series of three blog posts I have shared examples of using comics as a research method from my own solo and collaborative work, as well as signposting colleagues’ work. These examples will, I hope, help your own explorations in the emergent field of comics as a research method. If you are also a person who is interested in this sort of thing, do please join in with the Applied Comics Network, which I co-host with Ian Horton and John Swogger: our twitter account links to resources from our previous events and conferences, as well as sharing examples of informational and research-y comics that come our way.