I have thought a lot in recent years about how newspapers can do a better job of reaching young people, and when I became interested in writing about teen depression — a malady that affects about 1 in 12 kids each year — I decided to try something different.
I had seen comics-based nonfiction popping up in a lot of places, from memoirs like “Persepolis” to contemporary histories like “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge,” and I thought this would be a perfect marriage of form and subject. After a few months of searching, I found a young guy named T.J. Watson — who, as luck would have it, was a comic book fan — and he agreed to tell his story. Phil Geib, an artist here at the Tribune, did a great job turning T.J.’s words into compelling images.
I hope this story will find its way to young people who aren’t normally inclined to look for information in the paper, and I hope they get something useful out of it. I will be very interested to hear what they have to say about this experiment.
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