Some images from ReDistricted comics, going clockwise: D.C.’s Graffiti Masters, The Cherished Cherry Blossoms and Other Tales, Up The River: The Story of Captain Henry Fleet, and Emancipation Day. (Courtesy of ReDistricted)

When people question whether comics are effective teaching tools, Matt Dembicki points to his own experience.

The editor of ReDistricted, a digital comic anthology that puts a spotlight on local D.C. history, grew up the son of Polish immigrants and struggled with English as a kid. That’s when his mom bought him a bunch of comics.

“It was a great marriage between words and pictures,” says Dembicki. “If I didn’t understand the words, I could use the images for context.” From there blossomed a love of both reading and drawing. He and his elementary school friends “used to draw our own comics and exchange them like baseball cards,” he says.

Channeling that passion into D.C. history began a little less than a decade ago, when Dembicki and Andrew Cohen (an associate editor at ReDistricted, along with Tabitha Whissemore) collaborated on The Brewmaster’s Castle. The 20-page comic delved into Dupont’s Christian Heurich Mansion, which was across the street from Dembicki’s office.

The realization that his longtime curiosity about the house, satisfied in graphic novel form, was of interest to others “got me thinking,” says Dembicki, co-founder of comic book collective D.C. Conspiracy. “There are so many unique stories about Washington that most people don’t know about.”

In exploring those, he came up with District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington, D.C., a 2012 anthology spanning District history from 1794 to 2009, with contributions from a bevy of writers and artists.

From that 250-page book, the seeds for ReDistricted were planted. Like District Comics, ReDistricted uses the comic format and different creators to convey lesser-known local history but it differs in some key ways. Each story is two tabloid-sized pages, with a list of resources at the end for readers looking to learn more, and it’s available online. He’s published more than 20 since the autumn of 2016.

“These are really vignettes,” says Dembicki. “With two pages, you can’t tell the whole story of a person or event, so you look for slice of life that summarizes the person succinctly.”

He’s trying to reach out to new collaborators, too, including historians, who he says enjoy the challenge of distilling their research in a new medium. Dembicki pays the writers and artists, mostly out of his own pocket (his day job is with a higher education association), though the site accepts donations.

Once a topic is decided, the next question is “what can we tell about story that we can use pictures to tell, and what will we flesh out with text?” While one person might draw and write, ReDistricted also plays matchmaker sometimes. If the story has a darker theme to it, Dembicki will chose an artist with a darker style, whereas a more cheery story might end up with a more cartoony aesthetic.

He says the cartoon that best distills what ReDistricted is all about is “Emancipation Day,” which has a story by Chad Lambert and art by Mark McMurray, and recently won a Ringo Award.

“That was a great story because Emancipation Day is very much about Washington D.C.,” says Dembicki. “The writer researched it and made it into a narrative rather than being numbers and facts thrown at you, and the artwork for that is outstanding.”

Dembicki is currently in talks with publishers to potentially put together a print version of ReDistricted, and is also considering a Kickstarter. And in the interim, he’s continuing to solicit ideas for future ReDistricted stories, including one about D.C. denizens’ love of turtle soup centuries ago.

“In an ideal world, it’d be ongoing,” he says. “If there’s an interest, we go with it. If not, maybe we table it for a bit and go on to another project.”

One of his major goals over the next year is to develop some lesson plans along with the ReDistricted stories. “I want to build this as robust resource for local teachers,” says Dembicki.