Joe Sacco is probably the only comic book artist who’s ever been issued press credentials by the New York Times. But then Sacco is the only journalist who reports on international affairs in comic-book format.
Born in Malta in 1960, and raised in Australia and the U.S., Sacco picked up a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981. A series of unsatisfying journalism posts led him to revisit his passion for drawing.
In 1992, he visited the Occupied Territories. His experiences there led to the comic book series Palestine, which appeared in 1995, netting him an American Book Award a year later. Sacco visited Bosnia shortly before the war ended and produced a second, critically acclaimed comic book called Safe Area Garazde.
His latest offering, The Fixer, documents the strange world of “fixers”-people who, during the Bosnian war, would arrange just about anything for foreigners, for a price-everything from interviews with generals to a night with a prostitute.
The Fixer is already generating a buzz among those familiar with his previous work. “Joe’s stuff is great. I haven’t read the book, but I’m looking forward to it,” said local artist Chester Brown at Sacco’s talk at the Royal Ontario Museum last Thursday. Brown is the author of a much-anticipated graphic novel detailing the rebellion of Metis leader Louis Riel.
Sacco has been generally well received, with lots of press coverage of late now that comic books (or graphic novels, as the more ‘serious’ works are called) seem to be garnering more mainstream attention, but not everyone is a fan of his work, which has focused on conflict zones. “I’ve been criticized,” Sacco said at the ROM. “People will say, ‘How dare you write about such a subject in such a form?'”
But he feels the medium offers possibilities that conventional journalism doesn’t.
People like Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said provide good, straight political commentary, he says, but his thing is “the human stories. When people ask me, ‘What is the advantage of doing journalism in comics?’, to me the great one is the accessibility of them. You can suck people in with the visual matter and you can take a reader and put him or her into a time or place.”
For Sacco, bringing readers to a different time or place requires recreating the prevailing mood and atmosphere. A panel from Palestine that Sacco showed at Thursday’s event illustrated the mood on a van ride Sacco took around a Gaza refugee camp. The view is from inside the van, with Sacco himself appearing as a silhouette peering out at the people passing by. All of them have hard stares for the reader. “I felt so much like I was on safari… I just felt very uncomfortable,” Sacco explained.
The final images in Palestine are of a Palestinian boy kept squatting in the rain by Israeli soldiers, who keep dry at the edge of a shelter while they question him. “What must be inside a boy like that?” Sacco asks. “What’s going to happen in the future? He’s going to learn to hate these people who are oppressing him. What’s he going to become?”
Ironically, sometimes Sacco achieves a more true-to-life portrayal of things by departing from strict realism. His depiction of a Sarajevo nightclub exaggerates people’s movements and expressions in order to better convey the swirling motion of dancers and the wild party atmosphere.
“I came out of that whole movement of autobiographical cartoonists that were doing their work in the ’80s,” Sacco said. His pre-Palestine work was quite different-one of his ’80s comics was based on his experiences following a rock band around. But the seeds of Sacco’s more political work were still there. “Even in the stuff that was funnier or autobiographical, I was bringing a lot of politics into it.”
While Sacco’s readers are mostly in North America, it’s clear he feels a strong connection with and responsibility to the people he depicts in conflict zones abroad.
“To me it’s important-and I think it’s something you can do well with comics-to depict a particular place. It’s not just any place in Bosnia, it’s Garazde. And what I like is for people from Garazde to look at this and say, ‘Yeah, that’s my town-that’s not Sarajevo, that’s not [just] any place here.'”
He sent copies of Safe Area Garazde back to the people he interviewed there: “All the people who were main characters in there got a book.”
He says the reaction he gets from his subjects is generally positive. “Most people like to be in a comic book, even if there’s a bit of character assassination involved,” he quipped.
His work is extremely time-consuming: it takes him three years to finish a book like Garazde, which was 240 pages long. But his outrage over injustice keeps him going. In Bosnia, it was “the way the international community was dealing with it, everyone sort of passing the buck, pretending it was a humanitarian problem: ‘Let’s feed the victims, that’s enough.’ I was really getting pissed off.”
For his next project, he’ll tackle a 1956 incident in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His previous books have an impressionistic feel, departing from a strict, linear story structure in order to better convey mood and atmosphere, but he says that this next project will be more controlled: “For better or for worse, it’s just the way my mind is thinking now.”
Interest in comics like Sacco’s has exploded over the past few years. Back in 1995, his publisher sold less than two thousand copies of Palestine. “I was in despair,” Sacco recalled. Eight years later, his work appears in publications like Time, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine. Outlets like the CBC and the National Post sent reporters to his talk here last week, and CityTV corralled him for an episode of BookTV.
“We don’t have to apologize for comics as we used to even five years ago,” says Sacco.
The genre received another boost recently with the release of the film American Splendor, based on the life story of American underground comics artist Harvey Pekar (“the father of us all,” said Sacco, who was hired to draw several issues of Pekar’s Splendor series).
While greater recognition has changed some things for Sacco, some things stay the same. When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, he was virtually unknown. This time around, he was contacted by some big media outlets, who suggested he should go to Iraq to report. But his newfound fame got him only so much mileage: no one was willing to actually pay for the trip, so he stayed home.
But Sacco has begun to accept that he is as much of a journalist as an artist, working largely with images rather than words to tell a story. When he first started, he was a bit apprehensive about the reaction of other journalists: “I never felt like [a journalist] when I was first in Palestine. Whenever I came across a journalist I never mentioned what I was doing,” Sacco explained.
But he’s grown more confident with time. Other journalists are very supportive, he says, even envious. While many of them have to file a story each day, Sacco can spend more time getting deep into a particular story.
And in the end, that’s what he is-a storyteller. Where another artist would roughly sketch a bunch of faces in a crowd, Sacco brings out every last detailed expression. While some dub him a ‘war junkie’, it’s clear that Sacco’s horror stories stay with him as much as they do with his readers. Returning to Bosnia in The Fixer, he takes us back to a place that many have all but forgotten-unlike the rest of the media monolith who hit the latest hot zone only to jump on the next bandwagon weeks later, Sacco’s talent lies in exposing the small details-in short, uncovering the truth.
“I feel like I know what I’m doing now with journalism,” he mused at the ROM talk. “I feel confident about what I’m doing.”
