Joe Sacco

Born October 2, 1960 (Malta)
Maltese author, illustrator, journalist

Joe Sacco is one of the leading proponents of the union between comic book art and journalism. His central theme is war, which he spotlights in his graphic novels. He is not concerned with combat heroics. Instead, he recounts the plights and fates of individuals caught up in the chaos of battle. He explores the personalities of those responsible for instigating war, but primarily he focuses on war's survivors, and how they get on with their lives while processing their memories of combat and killing.

"The main benefit [to comics] is that you can make your subject very accessible. You open the book and suddenly you're in the place."

Sacco's drawings are in black and white, which serves to accentuate the grim tone of his subject matter. Often appearing in his work is his own image, observing the activities around him. He draws himself with oversized lips and vacant eyes. More often than not, he looks bewildered or scared.

"Mr. Sacco seeks to make complex political and historical conflicts understandable to a mass audience," observed Robert K. Elder, writing in the New York Times in 2000. Sacco explained to the Guardian the qualities comics offer: "The main benefit is that you can make your subject very accessible. You open the book and suddenly you're in the place. Maybe there's also a guilty pleasure as people think back to their childhood days reading comics and they think, 'This might be fun, it might be an easy way to learn something about this.' It's a very subversive medium, it's appealing but what's in the comic itself could be very hard, even difficult, material."

Indeed Sacco has used comics to offer up some tremendously difficult content. Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow noted in the online January Magazine in 2003, "Like Art Spiegelman before him, Sacco uses comics to deliver familiar content in an unfamiliar form, disarming us of our numbness to images of war and privation. Visual novelty aside, Sacco's focus—preferring the anecdotal to the panoramic [specific tales versus wider scope]—excavates details that seldom make it to the news or the history books." Added Dave Gilson, writing in Mother Jones in 2005, "By presenting his first-hand reporting from hot spots like Gaza, Sarajevo, and Iraq in gritty black-and-white comics, Sacco has won over serious fans of comics and nonfiction alike … Sacco's work is often called 'comic journalism,' but that label doesn't fully capture how he's managed to simultaneously blend and defy both genres."

Best-Known Works

Graphic Novels

Spotlight on the Genius That Is Joe Sacco (1994).

Palestine: A Nation Occupied (1994).

War Junkie (1995).

Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996).

Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2000).

The Fixer: A Story of Sarajevo (2003).

Notes from a Defeatist (2003).

War's End: Profiles from Bosnia (2005).

Early years form artistic sensibility

Joe Sacco was born on October 2, 1960, in Malta. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a teacher. He began drawing at age six, and throughout his childhood viewed art as a hobby. He was, however, fascinated by life and survival in war zones, with his interest sparked by his parents' reminiscences of the bombing of Malta during World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan).

In the early 1970s, Sacco and his parents came to the United States. They settled first in Los Angeles, and then relocated to Portland, Oregon. His adolescence was uneventful. "A lot of [underground comic book artists] spent their high school years feeling alone and alienated," he told Time magazine's Joel Stein. "I had pretty good teen years.… I was short and all, but I wasn't picked on."

Sacco graduated from the University of Oregon in 1981, where he majored in journalism. "I took one class in journalism school on cartoons, but it wasn't about drawing them so much as looking at them and appreciating them in some way," he told Howard Price, in an interview on the Comic Book Resources Web site. "We had a couple of exercises where we had to draw some things, but it wasn't a drawing class. I've never taken any art classes after junior high school."

Creates unique career in journalism

Sacco spent most of the 1980s working primarily as a writer, editor, and copy editor. Some of his jobs—writing for a journal published by the National Notary Association, for example—simply bored and frustrated him. Others—a stint with the magazine The Comics Journal—were more challenging. In 1983, he published several romance comics in his native Malta. In 1985 and 1986, he was one of the publishers and editors of the Portland Permanent Press, an alternative humor magazine. He also briefly edited Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a comics anthology.

Up to this point, Sacco was dissatisfied with the progress of his journalism career, and he decided to become a full-time cartoonist. In the late 1980s, he traveled through Europe with the rock band the Miracle Workers and recorded his experiences in sketches and words. He began writing and drawing Yahoo, a comics magazine published between 1988 and 1992. In Yahoo, Sacco put forth his views on a range of subjects. "In the Company of Long Hair" recalled his experiences while touring with the Miracle Workers. In "When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People," he recounted the history of aerial bombing that targets civilian populations.

Sacco had come to view himself not as an artist but as a journalist whose reportage consisted of words and images. He had long been dissatisfied with what he perceived as the narrow, one-dimensional manner in which the mainstream media reported on current events. His aim was to travel to, spend time in, and report on the sounds and sights of the world's hot spots. "The whole point of my life, or of my career anyway," he told Robert K. Elder of the New York Times, "is to get the general public interested. There's a cumulative hope that the more people know, the better the democracy is going to be."

Develops creative process

Through the years, Sacco developed his own research style. His primary task while traveling is to seek out unusual stories and form relationships with the individuals connected to the stories. He conducts countless interviews while taking notes and photographs and making rudimentary sketches. He told January magazine, "If I'm writing about the Middle East, I have to go there, and if possible, stay long enough to get a real feeling for what's going on." Upon arriving home, Sacco organizes his notes, writes his stories, and completes the bulk of his drawing. His primary influences range from the legendary underground comic artist R. Crumb (1943–), to writers George Orwell (1903–1950), the author of Animal Farm and 1984, and Michael Herr, an acclaimed journalist who covered the war in Vietnam; to famed eccentric journalist Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005).

Reports Palestinian plight

Sacco developed an interest in the Middle East and, for two months in 1991 and 1992, traveled to Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. This journey resulted in Palestine, a nine-part comic book series published in 1993, in which he scrutinizes the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Sacco spotlights the experiences and views of a range of refugees; some are cynical and radical, while others are more accepting of their situation. While offering their testimony, he adds his own personal observations.

With the publication of Palestine, Sacco won his first major acclaim. Gordon Flagg, writing in Booklist in 1996, dubbed the series "The first major work of comics journalism," adding that, "Although Sacco's sympathies, expressed through the first-person narration, are definitely with the Palestinians, the work overall is far too nuanced to be deemed propaganda [or material that is supposed to influence people's opinions]." Palestine: A Nation Occupied, consisting of stories from the first five issues of Palestine, was published in 1994. A follow-up, Palestine: In the Gaza Strip, featuring material from the final four issues, came out in 1996.

On Politics, Journalism, and Comic Art

As he discusses his rationale for traveling into war zones and drawing what he observes, Sacco often comes across as a man on a mission. "Anger is what took me to the Middle East and what took me to Bosnia," he told Rebecca Armstrong in London's Independent in 2004. "I was angry because I feel like people's stories are being misrepresented and it's like what Orwell said about 'he who controls the present controls the past.' You see people's stories [being] told for them by their enemies."

After the publication of War's End: Profiles from Bosnia, Mother Jones's Dave Gilson asked Sacco why he was continuing to draw and write about Bosnia. "I think any journalist who spends time in a place realizes that there are lots of stories around beyond their primary story," he explained. "You meet so many interesting people and have all kinds of experiences."

At their best, Sacco's books offer uncompromising, deglamorized views of life and death in wartime. They are explicitly political—which is a rarity even among comic book artists who tackle adult subject matter. In 2002, Margo Jefferson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde as "brilliant, excruciating books of war reportage." "I thought I had read diligently about the Serbian war on Bosnia and about the Palestinians in camps in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank," Jefferson added. "But I had not felt the facts as I did this time around. This medium will not let us separate actions, faces, bodies or scenes from the words that explain and amplify them."

During this time, Sacco also began publishing compilations of his early work. One was War Junkie, a collection of short pieces in which he explores a range of themes, from the political (in which he spotlights the nature and effect of warfare) to the autobiographical (in which he recalls his European tour with the Miracle Workers). In particular, Sacco won praise for his war stories. Publishers Weekly called "More Women, More Children, More Quickly," an account of Sacco's mother's childhood memories of life in Malta during World War II, as "a tour de force, capturing the extraordinary hardship and terror experienced by a child caught in the midst of total war." In 2003, Sacco again reused much of this material in Notes from a Defeatist, another compilation.

Focuses on Bosnian War

After his experiences in the Middle East, Sacco was drawn to the civil war in Bosnia, where rival Muslims, Serbs, and Croats battled for control of this portion of the former nation of Yugoslavia. He traveled to the region during a four-week period in 1995 and 1996, when the war was in its final stages. Sacco embedded himself in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where he spent time hanging out in bars and restaurants and forming relationships with the war's survivors. He also journeyed to Gorazde, a small town that was besieged by Serbian nationalists (devotion to the interests or culture of a specific nation) and was the locale for some of the war's most heated battles.

In 2000, 2003, and 2005, respectively, Sacco published three authoritative, highly acclaimed accounts of the war: Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95; The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo; and War's End: Profiles from Bosnia. In Safe Area Gorazde, he recounts the conflict through the reminiscences of his interviewees and explores how neighbors become enemies, all in the name of nationalism. His stories are wrought with irony, as he reports on the plight of starving adolescent girls who express their yearning for normalcy by imploring him to bring them Levi's 501 blue jeans. At its most vivid, his reportage charts genocidal massacres perpetrated on Bosnians by Serbian nationalists.

Time labeled Safe Area Gorazde an "epic comic book," adding, "Like Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's book juxtaposes the pop style of comics with human tragedy, making the brutality of war all the more jarring." "Who would have imagined that the best dramatic evocation of the Bosnian catastrophe would turn out to be a book-length comic strip written by an American of Maltese origin who arrived in the Balkans only in late 1995, after the shooting had largely stopped, and stayed just four weeks?" observed David Rieff in the New York Times Book Review. "And yet Joe Sacco … has produced a work that improbably manages to combine rare insight into what the war in Bosnia felt like on the ground with a mature and nuanced political and historical understanding of the conflict."

Offers unique perspectives

The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo is the real-life account of Neven, a Sarajevo native and former soldier and guerilla fighter who escorts Westerners through the war-torn region. Sacco had worked with Neven while researching Safe Area Gorazde and came to realize that the guide's own multifaceted life was substance for a graphic novel. "He's an interesting character," Sacco told Publishers Weekly, "and using him allowed me to tell the story of how journalists often have to rely on totally uncreditable people who have their own agendas. It's a story that isn't told very much. The book makes it clear that you can never trust Neven, you can never know what's really true. He's not a sympathetic character but he can be a poignant character." In its review of The Fixer, Publishers Weekly observed that "Sacco marvelously weaves in his own feelings of uneasiness and awe at his guide's grim life story … Sacco's finely wrought, expressively rendered b&w drawings perfectly capture the emotional character of Sarajevo and the people who struggle to live there."

War's End: Profiles from Bosnia consists of two war stories, "Christmas with Karadzic," in which Sacco and other journalists attempt to interview the infamous Serbian leader and war criminal Radovan Karadzic (1945–), and "Soba," in which a Sarajevo-born artist and ex-soldier attempts to deal with his recollections of the horrors of war. Reviewers praised the work's brutal honesty and Andrew D. Arnold, author of a long-standing column on graphic novels for Time magazine, added that Sacco's "Hogarthian black-and-white images and vibrant characterizations make for some of the most vivid and dramatic comics being published today."

For More Information

Periodicals

Armstrong, Rebecca. "Drawn to Slaughter; What Drives Joe Sacco to War? Why Would a Guy 'Who Just Likes Drawing Stuff' Risk Everything for a Comic Book? And Can We, Asks Rebecca Armstrong, Really Trust Him?" Independent (November 7, 2004).

Arnold, Andrew D. "5 Fantastic Graphic Novels: These Books Are Topical, Complex and Well Written. They're Also Illustrated." Time (June 13, 2005).

Bennett, Kathleen E. "Joe Sacco's Palestine: Where Comics Meets Journalism." Stranger (1994). Also available online at http://www.infogoddess.com/comix/joe.sacco.int.html (accessed on January 10, 2006).

Blincoe, Nicholas. "Cartoon Wars: By Dramatising Events in Comic-Book Form, Joe Sacco's Palestine Exposes the Fantasy of the Israeli Occupation." New Statesman (January 6, 2003).

Campbell, Duncan. "I Do Comics, not Graphic Novels: Whether He's Depicting War Crimes in Bosnia or Musing on Palestinian Tea, Joe Sacco Is One of the Most Original Cartoonists Working Today." Guardian (October 23, 2003).

Elder, Robert K. "The Agony in Bosnia, Frame by Comic Book Frame." New York Times (October 18, 2000).

Flagg, Gordon. "Palestine: In the Gaza Strip." Booklist (January 1, 1996).

Flagg, Gordon. "War's End: Profiles from Bosnia." Booklist (June 1, 2005).

Gilson, Dave. "Joe Sacco: The Art of War." Mother Jones (July-August 2005).

Jefferson, Margo. "No Frigate Like a Book." New York Times Book Review (September 1, 2002).

Reid, Calvin. "Joe Sacco, Comics Journalist." Publishers Weekly (November 24, 2003).

Rieff, David. "Bosnia Beyond Words: Joe Sacco Recalls the Horrors of the Balkans in a Comic-Book Format." New York Times Book Review (December 24, 2000).

Stein, Joel. "What's Going On? Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde Is a Comic-Book Look at a Horrible War." Time (May 1, 2000).

"The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo." Publishers Weekly (November 24, 2003).

"War Junkie." Publishers Weekly (June 12, 1995).

Web Sites

Groth, Gary. "Joe Sacco, Frontline Journalist." The Comics Journal.http://www.tcj.com/aa02ws/i_sacco.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Price, Howard. "Joe Sacco Interview." CBR. http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=618 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca. "Joe Sacco." January Magazine.http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/jsacco.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).