Join SCPL and Brock University each month for an engaging and often revelatory dive into history, culture, or the arts. Each month features a different lecture from a Brock University professor.

In this talk, Dr. Robert Alexander will discuss the rise of comics journalism as an upstart genre which is challenging the norms of the conventional news media. With its roots in the underground comix and New Journalism of the 1960s, comics journalism has grown, through the work of such innovators as Joe Sacco, Josh Neufeld, Sarah Glidden, Victoria Lomasko, and others into a widely respected alternative medium of journalistic and artistic expression. Combing the conventions of what comics artist Will Eisner has called “sequential art” with the rigorous immersive reporting practices of the best literary journalism, comics journalists around the world use their unique skills to shed light on events the mainstream news either ignores or treats with a superficiality which, while attentive to the facts, overlooks the felt experience of the individuals on whose lives those facts have the greatest impact.

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Dr. Robert Alexander is Associate Professor of English at Brock University. Most recently, he and Willa McDonald (Macquarie University, Australia) edited the collection Literary Journalism and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). With Christine Isager (University of Copenhagen), he is the editor of Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is currently the President of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies. He is the recipient of the 2022 Brock University Faculty of Humanities Award for Excellence in Teaching.

This event has been co-organized by the Humanities Research Institute and The Centre for Canadian Studies.