Paper Short Abstract:

This paper describes the creative process of creating a graphic narrative depicting roads in the Himalayas. The comics medium merges image and text, offering expressive possibilities and constraints that differ from expository prose. My experiments with this medium reveals tensions inherent in building minimalist depictions from many voices and views.

Paper Abstract:

Among multimodal ethnographic forms, the medium of comics (graphic narrative) offers unique opportunities and constraints. The comics medium combines images and text in collage-like page compositions that offer intriguing possibilities for expressing multivocality, point of view, place and space, and sensory, affective, and embodied experiences. The principles of “show, don’t tell” and “less is more” guide comic writing-drawing, underscoring the narrative impact of leaving things out. This paper describes alternative narrative and representational structures that I have considered while experimenting, as an amateur, with creating a research-based comics about road-building in the Nepal Himalayas. Relying on assistance from artists, the project also draws on the insights of researcher-collaborators in Nepal and internationally, who in turn rely on the insights of interlocutors in Nepal. The resulting tangle of voices, views, and creativity presents opportunities for telling a non-linear, cacophonous story that resists explanatory closure. It also presents challenges for establishing a coherent authorial voice. In laying bare my (over)thinking about how this story could be framed, told, and composed, I show how the very process of creating this type of work rests on coproduced ways of seeing and telling.