In a paper titled “Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data,” Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer of Stanford University identified the comic strip as one of the seven genres of narrative visualization. Other genres include the flow chart and the partitioned poster. Infographics in general have become very popular on the web and in print, with The New York Times publishing multimedia content on topics such as the US Census, and sites like Information is Beautiful and GOOD specialize in creating graphics that are not only informative, but aesthetically-pleasing.
Perhaps it was only inevitable that people would take the art of creating comics and break it down, infographic-style. Well, that’s what Scott McCloud’s trilogy of nonfiction comics—Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics—were all about, but Damian Niolet has done one better and created a giant cheat sheet with all the things “a finished work of fiction in comic book form should demonstrate careful consideration of.”
Scott McCloud himself has called it “big, beautiful, and kinda terrifying” but for any established or aspiring comic creator, it’s worth a look.