Editor’s note: There are plenty of challenges facing newsrooms around the country, so when you can knock off two birds with one stone it’s worth taking notice. In this case the two challenges are: 1) How do we get folks to engage with content that might be outside the comfort zones created by social media news feeds and 2) how do we find new ways to tell stories by taking advantage of digital delivery?

Blake Nelson, a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism, did indeed figure out how to do both by exploring the so-old-it’s-new-again journalistic tool of the comic strip. Here’s how he described it.