White River Junction’s Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) made the Boston Globe recently with their new publication, When I Returned.
I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but I have finally gotten around to ordering a copy and I will post a review when I manage to get it together.
Through my day job I get to visit CCS from time to time to talk about ethnography and comics, and the first trip my colleague Greg Sharrow and I made over there several years ago was connected to this particular effort.
Not that this is an ethnographic project, mind you. When I last talked about it with CCS folks the orientation was really around journalism and oral history – with emphasis on the authorial voice of the cartoonists rather than on the collaborative construction of narrative/meaning with the storytellers.
Nothing wrong with this, of course, there are plenty of valid ways to go about telling other people’s stories. I’m really curious to see how it all turned out.