Before I got there myself, I read some very evocative journalism about Gorazde, but I was at a loss to picture the town in my mind. I didn't know if it was a little village or what. When I got there, I saw it was a town of multi-story buildings and apartment complexes. Comics can provide a great deal of visual information, which I think makes a place like Gorazde REAL in the reader's eye. And not just the place, but the people, because through background detail one can see what they wore, how they chopped wood, the extent of the damage to their homes, etc.
Comics is a very engaging journalistic medium.
It allows a sense of time and place to seep in through repeated images. It's a more organic way of creating an atmosphere than photojournalism, which usually tries to use one picture to sum up a whole story. Not that I don't appreciate photojournalism, by the way. So I went to Bosnia knowing I could handle the material. As I learned, the reader learned.