 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Joe Sacco (1960- ) was born in Malta, moved with his family to Australia between 1961 and 1972, before settling in Portland, Oregon, USA. From an early age he developed a fascination for all things connected to war and conflict. While still in school he spent his free time researching and working on a comic about the Vietnam war (which years later would be submitted to, and rejected by, RAW magazine). Early comic influences on Joe were the political and satirical work of Gilbert Shelton and Bill Griffith. "It made me think that some people were doing interesting stuff." He went to college in Eugene, Oregon with the intention of becoming a journalist but after graduating he was unable to find "a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." He returned to his homeland of Malta for a year and got a job writing travel guidebooks for a local publisher. As a way to make money he came up with the idea for the publisher to print six of his 64 page romance comics written in the local Maltese language. Returning to the USA, he published 15 issues of a free, humor magazine called the Portland Permanent Press showcasing his own work and that of other cartoonists, which he co-edited with his business partner, Tom Richards. Lack of money forced that publication to fold and Joe took a job as a staff news writer at Fantagraphics Books for whom he would go on to edit the humor/satirical magazines Honk! and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. Joe's own work was the focus of his next title, Yahoo!, which included prime examples of his now trade mark 'cartoon journalism' approach to comics and his powerful commentary on modern warfare. Between 1993 and 1995, Joe wrote and drew nine issues of Palestine which documented his two months spent in the Occupied Territories in the winter of 1991-92 and which shows the human effects of the Israeli occupation and subsequent intifada that goes unreported in the mainstream media. The series was a major success and won Joe the 1996 American Book Award. His concern about the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the lack of intervention by the international community led him to want to document the lives of people suffering in, as well as the politics behind, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990's, during which an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 people died. "...my stomach was in knots, basically, about it." In 1995-96, Joe traveled four times to Bosnia where he established intimate ties and close friendships that continue to this day. Back in the US, Joe has produced four harrowing accounts of his time in Bosnia, Christmas With Karadzic, Soba, Safe Area Gorazde, and The Fixer. Interviews: Resources: Reviews: |
 |
ESSENTIAL READING: |
|
"Sacco is a pioneer... he captures the soul of the experience
with all its mud, sweat, ignoble fears, four-letter words, and
lasting damages... The Palestine books
deserve a place among the best of documentary." |
||
|
||
"Harrowing and bleakly humorous, Sacco's account of life
during the Balkan conflict is a timeless portrait of ordinary
people caught in desperate circumstances. It's also a work of
genius in an unlikely genre: journalism in comic book form." |
||
|
||
|
"The Fixer is more morally complex and more artistically ambitious
than many well-reviewed novels...
There are kinds of subtlety and metaphorical allusiveness that are easier to
achieve in comics than in novels.
" |
||
|
||
"I know Sacco, barely. But that's not why I'm proclaiming him
one of our best cartoonists and writers. It's because of his
work, which transcends not comics but journalism to pose the
same questions as literature. War's End asks, 'If, when a war
breaks out, all hell breaks loose, once it's over, where does
hell go?'" |
||
|
||
| SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: | ||
Graphic Novels/Collections: Comics: Short Stories In... As Editor and Contributor: |
War's End