Guest Lecture - Augusto Paim (Porto Alegre): Doing journalism with comics: news, interview, reportage, and other journalistic genres

The field of comics journalism has been gaining more and more attention since the 1990s, when the journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco produced his comics series Palestine, a milestone in the genre of the comic reportage. He was not the first to bring journalism and comics together, but his strongly journalistic approach raised him above other experiments done before by artists without a background in journalism. Indeed, Sacco does not only use comics to depict in his books the reality he researches on; more than that, he uses the language of comics to reflect on journalism itself. In The Fixer, a comics profile, he turns the spotlight to a kind of person who is mostly underseen in traditional reporting, despite the fact fixers are fundamental for the journalistic making: they translate between languages, they mediate interviews, they present spots to reporters, and they give information to international correspondents. Shortly, they decisively influence the way a worldwide audience will be informed about a determined local situation, like the Bosnian war.

In this presentation, Augusto Paim will introduce the main topics of his doctoral research, like the use of sketchbooks as a journalistic tool and the aesthetics of comics reportage. Several examples of journalistic comics will be showed, as well as discussions related to this field.

Augusto Paim is a journalist graduated from the Federal University of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, with a master’s degree in creative writing from UFRGS, Porto Alegre. Still in Brazil, he organized with the Goethe-Institut the International Meetings of Comics Journalism and a residency project for comic artists called Osmose. As a writer and reporter, he developed the comic reportages Inside the favelas and So Close, Faraway! for the platform Cartoon Movement, among other works of comics journalism in Portuguese and German. Besides, he translates German novels and graphic novels into Brazilian Portuguese. In 2019, he concluded his PhD on aesthetics of journalistic comics at the Bauhaus University in Germany. Between 2019 and 2021, Paim worked at the Literary Colloquium Berlin, a house for literature in the German capital, where he was responsible for LCB diplomatique, an alternative portal of literary journalism around the world.