Joe Sacco's war journalism

February 15 - 22, 2001

[Art Reviews]

Orwell with India ink

Joe Sacco's war journalism

by Jon Garelick
Since the publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986 (and its subsequent Pulitzer Prize), the forum for the "serious" comic book has exploded. The arcane investigations of Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl and the various surreal adventures of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan have taken comics into lavish hardcovers, bookstore fiction shelves, and mainstream-press attention. Along the way, a new, wholly inadequate term has been invented: "graphic novel."
The 40-year-old Joe Sacco is yet another type in the comics world -- the comics journalist. Sacco has done humor pieces and even a strip on Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside for Details magazine. But it's as a war correspondent that he's made his name. His latest book, Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, comes with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens; it was reviewed in a full-page piece by the New York Times Book Review. His two anthologies about the Middle East, Palestine: A Nation Occupied and Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (for which he won an American Book Award), will be reprinted this spring in a single volume with an introduction by Edward Said. (All come from Fantagraphics Books.)
Sacco's heroes are not only R. Crumb, but Brueghel, Céline, and George Orwell. In his first long-form collection for Fantagraphics in 1995, Sacco described his return to his native Malta (he'd begun attending the University of Oregon journalism program in 1981) and his tour of Europe with a rock band. But most of the book was given over to war. One 1990 piece, "When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People," was simply a meticulously researched collection of quotes from various contemporary sources -- newspapers, magazines, military men, politicians -- about strategic bombing: Germany by Great Britain, Japan by the US, Libya by the US. The text was accompanied by large illustrations -- a bombardier's-eye view of falling weapons, Britain's Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris laying a fat index finger on a map, a skull's-head Ronald Reagan delivering a Libya-bombing-era speech, a blasted street in Tripoli. Another portion of the book was given over to Sacco's reflections on the Gulf War -- his experience of watching the war unfold on television -- and it crystallized the existential dread that bubbles through all the pieces. Sacco called the book War Junkie.
In 1991 and 1992 he spent two months in Israel, and that's when he stopped examining war from the distance of TV, the library, or the stories his relatives told him about World War II Malta. Living among the Palestinians, Sacco told their stories and drew pictures of the Gaza refugee camps. Despite the clear prejudice in the subtitle A Nation Occupied, Sacco's pieces are remarkably free of cant -- he simply reports what he hears, taking us into the (often dirt-floor) living rooms of the people he's listening to.
It's this street-level eye and ear that makes Sacco's work invaluable. Safe Area Gorazde continues Sacco's obsession with violent conflict -- ethnic conflict in particular. And in it he's living up to the ethos of his heroes. There's still Crumb's energetic line, the bravura full-page and two-page compositions, the meticulous cross-hatching and background detail. But in his later work, Sacco puts aside Crumb's exaggerated human physical features and obsessive depiction of bodily functions (a kind of sophomoric self-disgust) in favor of a sober respect for his subjects. What greet you in page after page of Sacco's two Palestine books and in Safe Area Gorazde -- besides the bombed-out homes, the cold and mud, the stray dogs and slaughtered livestock, the occasional mangled human corpse -- are faces. Each face is carefully individuated -- rarely smiling, often exhausted, men bearded and clean-shaven, women and children, old and young. Sacco's depictions of these distant worlds, which most of us see only on television, bring our own world a little closer. After spending a morning immersed in the faces of Sacco's friends and neighbors, you might find yourself overwhelmed by the infinite variety that emerges from the usual anonymous mass as you walk through the city. And that's where Sacco comes up to the level of that other hero of his: Orwell. Because here's where that carefully observed and depicted "other" becomes much like ourselves -- the same, even.
Sacco's depiction of himself is always the same -- shorter than everyone around him, with blank, bespectacled eyes and thick lips, his head covered in a knit cap (the ponytail of War Junkie long gone). A participant in his narratives, he occasionally mocks his own journalistic voyeurism. "I love hanging out in Palestine," he says in one aside, "making gritty and matter-of-fact inquiries about beatings and bruises and what have you." But most of the time, he stays out of the way. Those comments only give greater credence to his reporting.
And there's also his comic-book skill, the composition of his "sequential narrative." There's no better demonstration of comic-book art than Sacco's depiction of a Palestinian held in solitary confinement by the Israeli police for days on end, his head covered by a bag, his hands tied behind his back. Sacco's frames grow smaller and smaller with each day of imprisonment. Nothing happens, and yet we feel the numbing passage of time. As the comic-book artist and critic Scott McCloud says, "Space does for comics what time does for film." In Safe Area Gorazde, in a chapter called "White Death," a group of Bosnian Muslims march miles through the black, frozen night for supplies, one blackened frame giving way to another.
There are lighter moments, too: friends huddled in a darkened room around the light of a TV set; Sacco's Bosnian friend Riki bursting into Bruce Springsteen songs at the top of his lungs; and, in the midst of the carnage, a young woman crushed with disappointment about a pair of "fake" Levi's that have arrived from Sarajevo (in Sacco's recurring affectionate "Silly Girls" chapters). On one level, Safe Area Gorazde is a much-needed Former Yugoslavia for Dummies, with maps and chronologies, and with more "politics" than his Palestine books. But, as in that book, the careful depiction of details, of differences, makes his people all the more familiar.