The Best We Could Do

Sarah Shay Mirk and Eleri Mai Harris, award-winning graphic journalists and longtime editors of the critically acclaimed graphic journalism site the Nib, have compiled the perfect field guide to graphic journalism while showcasing valuable skills and practices for creating nonfiction comics. Mixing comics, prose, infographics, illustrations, and interviews with some of the world’s most influential nonfiction comics creators, Harris and Mirk introduce readers to nonfiction visual stories while also articulating the standards and ethics around blending traditional journalism with the visual language of comics.

The Cleaving brings together Vietnamese artists and writers from around the world in conversation about their craft and how their work has been shaped and received by mainstream culture and their own communities. This collection highlights how Vietnamese diasporic writers speak about having been cleaved—a condition in which they have been separated from, yet still hew to, the country that they have left behind. Composed of eighteen dialogues among thirty-seven writers from France, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United States, the book expands on the many lives that Vietnamese writers inhabit.

This field guide gives readers unprecedented insight into the techniques of 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers reflection and instruction informed by their own methods and processes. This is a book for writers who want to make graphic narratives and literary collage, illustrators and comics artists exploring new approaches to storytelling, teachers encouraging their students to work with image and text, and anyone curious about what one contributor calls “comics magic.”

A Washington Post Best Graphic Novel of 2021 and New York Public Library “Must-Read” Comic, COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology collects more than sixty such short comics from a diverse set of creators, including indie powerhouses, mainstream artists, Ignatz and Eisner Award winners, and media cartoonists. At times heartbreaking and at others hopeful and humorous, these comics express the anger, anxiety, fear, and bewilderment we feel in the era of COVID-19. Above all, they highlight the power of art and community to help us make sense of a world in crisis, reminding us that we are truly all in this together.

The Nib’s seventh issue documents how the plague year of 2020 revealed both stark inequities and brilliant moments of resilience. Includes In/Vulnerable by Thi Bui and the reporting team at Reveal on inequity in the pandemic.

The sixth issue of The Nib captures portraits of power at a time of unprecedented crisis. Cartoonists reflect on fire, plague, police, and a power-mad president. Includes In/Vulnerable by Thi Bui and the reporting team at Reveal on inequity in the pandemic.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen called on 17 fellow refugee writers from across the globe to shed light on their experiences, and the result is The Displaced, a powerful dispatch from the individual lives behind current headlines.

“There is no single refugee story, and as the editor of The Displaced, a collection of refugee writers exploring and reflecting on their experiences, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives these stories room to breath and unfurl.” —Millions

Edited by Thi Bui. Ninth and tenth grade students at Oakland International High School in Oakland, California created this comic book as part of an interdisciplinary project combining art, reading and literacy, and social studies. Seniors from the Publishing Class helped edit the stories of their younger schoolmates. Students were asked to tell their immigration stories in order to understand that history is ongoing and something that they play a part in. The goal is for the students was to see that “their stories are part of something bigger.” Their stories are an attempt to answer the question, “Who am I?” and collectively, “Who are we?”