I am a story enhancer. As a producer at The Atavist, my job is to take a story and enhance it using the overwhelming number of digital tools I have at my disposal. But just because it’s easy to throw an image, or a piece of video, or a map, or a musical snippet, or an interactive graphic at a story using the Atavist platform, doesn’t mean it will always improve the story. So I try to practice restraint when adding media to a story. Some results are better than others. But the biggest challenge I face is not related to producing a story, but explaining exactly what the finished product is.
A lot of people have been asking me*:
What the heck is an “Enhanced E-Comic?”
Many people are familiar with the term “enhanced e-book,” but our new nonfiction comics work Stowaway is one of the world’s first “enhanced e-comics.”
To be sure, comics have rapidly gone digital, and comics artists and fans were early adopters of the iPad platform, which has enabled some incredible works of comics art. A standout is Operation Ajax, a detailed history of the 1953 Iranian coup. It’s an elaborate production that exists somewhere between comics and animation in a space some people call “motion comics.” It comes with a haunting soundtrack and digital features too numerous to name, and you should definitely download it immediately. (It’s a story you can spend hours with—and it’s also a story that took a large staff several years to produce.)
Our enhanced e-comic, Stowaway, includes a soundtrack and behind-the-scenes extras that illuminate the boundaries between journalism and art. The music, sound effects, and video animations elevate it beyond a print comics reading experience and the audio extras allow you to engage with the creators of the piece in a way that would be impossible in a print medium. In this way, Stowaway creates an embedded dialogue about the subjectivity of the comics form (which you could argue is no more subjective than written journalism).
So why not be a part of history, and experience the future of comics journalism?
—Olivia Koski, Senior Producer
*No one has asked me this, actually. But they should.
