This paper investigates how to make data comics interactive. Data comics are an effective and versatile means for visual communication, leveraging the power of sequential narration and combined textual and visual content, while providing an overview of the storyline through panels assembled in expressive layouts. While a powerful static storytelling medium that works well on paper support, adding interactivity to data comics can enable non-linear storytelling, personalization, levels of details, explanations, and potentially enriched user experiences. This paper introduces a set of operations tailored to support data comics narrative goals that go beyond the traditional linear, immutable storyline curated by a story author. The goals and operations include adding and removing panels into pre-defined layouts to support branching, change of perspective, or access to detail-on-demand, as well as providing and modifying data, and interacting with data representation, to support personalization and reader-defined data focus. We propose a lightweight specification language, COMICSCRIPT, for designers to add such interactivity to static comics. To assess the viability of our authoring process, we recruited six professional illustrators, designers and data comics enthusiasts and asked them to craft an interactive comic, allowing us to understand authoring workflow and potential of our approach. We present examples of interactive comics in a gallery. This initial step towards understanding the design space of interactive comics can inform the design of creation tools and experiences for interactive storytelling.

This paper introduces the concept of 'cheat sheets' for data visualization techniques, a set of concise graphical explanations and textual annotations inspired by infographics, data comics, and cheat sheets in other domains. Cheat sheets aim to address the increasing need for accessible material that supports a wide audience in understanding data visualization techniques, their use, their fallacies and so forth. We have carried out an iterative design process with practitioners, teachers and students of data science and visualization, resulting six types of cheat sheet (anatomy, construction, visual patterns, pitfalls, false-friends and well-known relatives) for six types of visualization, and formats for presentation. We assess these with a qualitative user study using 11 participants that demonstrates the readability and usefulness of our cheat sheets.

This paper compares the effectiveness of data comics and infographics for data-driven storytelling. While infographics are widely used, comics are increasingly popular for explaining complex and scientific concepts. However, empirical evidence comparing the effectiveness and engagement of infographics, comics and illustrated texts is still lacking. We report on the results of two complementary studies, one in a controlled setting and one in the wild. Our results suggest participants largely prefer data comics in terms of enjoyment, focus, and overall engagement and that comics improve understanding and recall of information in the stories. Our findings help to understand the respective roles of the investigated formats as well as inform the design of more effective data comics and infographics.