Even though comics are widely regarded as a form of entertainment, or a literary genre at best, designed for telling (fictional) stories, Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer of the University of Stanford discovered that the comic strip is actually one of the seven main genres of information dissimination. The illustration above comes from their study, Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data (pdf link). It’s not clear from the study in which case comics are the ideal genre to bring across factual data to your audience, but it confirms my ideas about non-fiction comics being a genre that deserves more attention.
(via Information Aesthetics)
