No laughing matter: Marisa Bowe on Joe Sacco.

In 1991, when Joe Sacco created the thirty-three-page, multipart comic "How I Loved the War," about his coming-of-age as a couch-potato war junkie during the first Gulf conflict, he went into flashback mode to tell the story of a long-distance romance (Sacco was then living in Germany, his girlfriend in Iowa). Near the beginning of the tale, he drew himself, referring to the couple's idealism in agreeing to an "open relationship concept" while apart; printed in small letters were the words "Confident phase." The next frame, dark and suffocating, depicted Sacco on a small mattress in what was presumably his Berlin bedroom, beginning a staccato series of panels that shrank successively, until they were smaller than a postage stamp, as Sacco's obsession with his girlfriend's waning affection grew fiercer and the intervals between his bouts of angsting about it shorter.

As that passion burned itself out, the national amp-up to the war became more inflamed, and Sacco's parallel pacing was perfect. In two side-by-side panels, one, an empty, dark horizon, was captioned, "Anytime after next Tuesday after midnight the 'mother of all battles' will begin"; the other, equally dark, showed Sacco back in his bedroom, lying immobile, his face a death mask of self-pitying agony. "Meanwhile, a smaller battle is all but over," the caption read. When he finally breaks off the relationship, he reports feeling much better. "And, anyway ..." he continues in the next panel--the cartoon Sacco is back in his apartment but now standing up and slipping off his jacket, implying that he's just been out and about--"I still had my other relationship ... 'Honey, I'm home!'" he smilingly calls out to the TV, as it continues to broad-cast: "Our Gulf War coverage continues after this...."

Although the elements were cleverly intertwined, they were not self-consciously wrought to emphasize theme and structure. They simply blended the quotidian and the spectacular, the same way the two come together in Sacco's later work, as his war jones pulls him away from the TV and into the more exotic and frightening terrains of Palestine and Bosnia. Construing Big Meaning from these events isn't Sacco's bag. He abstains with remarkable discipline from infusing his material with any sort of "wisdom," instead trying to show only that which, despite relentless "coverage," hasn't been shown. So although his own, some-what abstracted figure (blank eyeglasses, cartoony gestures) makes frequent appearances throughout his work, it's only to remind readers that what they are reading is being observed and constructed by Sacco; it is not an "objective" fragment.

Noticing the visual changes that reveal Sacco's increasing strategic subtlety is one way to grasp the evolutionary leaps in his work; charting the press attention is an easier one. "How I Loved the War" made Sacco a comics-world practitioner to watch. Palestine (Fantagraphics, 2002), his book on the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank from the point of view of ordinary Palestinians, vaulted him to the cross-over top. It was a genre breakthrough; no comics artist had ever before taken on contemporary political events with anywhere near such depth and scope. Media machers took note. Some of them were almost gushing in their praise. Of Palestine, Edward Said wrote: "With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco." Reviewing Safe Area Gorazde (Fantagraphics, 2000), about Bosnians' experiences during and after the little-understood war there, David Rieff commented in the New York Times: "The best dramatic evocation of the Bosnian catastrophe ... Few have told the truth more bravely."

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Sacco hadn't intended to pioneer a new genre. He received a journalism degree from the University of Oregon in 1980, but hadn't done much with it. Then, as he described it to Publishers Weekly in 2003, "I had always wanted to go to the Middle East, to the occupied territories, and after I got there I thought, Well, I should do comics about this and my experiences. My journalism training just kicked in." We should all be so successful at what we're not setting out to accomplish.

The most recent addition to the Sacco oeuvre, the just-published War's End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995-96 (Drawn & Quarterly), combines two Bosnian stories previously published in comic-book form. "Christmas with Karadzic" has Sacco and two journalist companions in Bosnia chasing phony leads in an attempt to track down Radovan Karadzic, who, along with Ratko Mladic and Slobodan Milosevic, bears most of the responsibility for thewar crimes committed during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. When Sacco and his companions finally do catch up with Karadzic, the event is quintessentially anticlimactic--though it bears noting that in so doing, Sacco and his colleagues achieved what, in nine years of trying, NATO has still been unable to do. The first story, "Soba," is a sympathetic and moving portrait of a young Sarajevan artist and rock singer whose life as he knew it, like those of so many others, went into long-term suspension when the Serbian Chetniks began their siege of the city. Here, the characters Sacco creates show spectacular development, even more than in his first Bosnian portrait, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (2003, Drawn & Quarterly), most likely because he knew Soba far better than he did The Fixer's shadowy protagonist. Soba comes off as funny, reflective, charismatic, inspiring, heroic--and utterly real:

   Vlado and Soba are discussing the porn flick they want to make some
   day, starring Soba of course ... Soba posits the opening scene of his
   porno flick. He and Vlado are lying on a bed, see, talking
   philosophy, Hegel, then the camera pans down and--
     Soba:--"and there's a couple of girls
   smoking our dicks!"
     "Sucking our dicks."

Sacco's tonal finesse makes transitions from humor and irony to grisly terror to mind-bending tragedy both smooth and plausible. The artistry is at least as much visual as it is verbal: Sacco's drawing style, clearly influenced by Robert Crumb, is deceptively informal, emphasizing the ugly and misshapen (at times one wonders how such unlovely-looking characters can lust for one another), and yet it is exactingly considered and precise. Devoting ample space to horrific gore without sensationalizing it, it lends its subjects an aching humanity without descending into melodrama. Sacco is an explorer of the psychology of war--how some people survive it, others justify it, some see it from afar, and still others ignore it. His dedication to accuracy doesn't allow for emotional contamination.

Although he himself has never been through a war, Sacco did absorb some of World War II's effects secondhand during his childhood. "My parents went through World War II in Malta, and I grew up hearing about it. We lived outside Melbourne when I was a kid, and all their friends in Australia went through the war, too. Whenever they got together that's all they talked about," he explained to LA Weekly last year. "It made me understand that the world can be violent; war etc. are a real possibility," Sacco told me recently. "You can have many years of your life robbed by political events. It's not just something put on screen by Steven Spielberg." Sacco drew on his mother's experiences in creating "More Women, More Children, More Quickly: Malta 1935-43 as Recollected by Carmen M. Sacco," a story collected in Notes from a Defeatist (Fantagraphics, 2003).

Sacco was born in Malta in 1960; he and his family moved shortly thereafter to Australia, where they lived until he was twelve. After two years in Los Angeles, they settled in Portland, Oregon, where he has continued to live between long stints in Malta (again), Berlin, New York, Switzerland, and, of course, the places portrayed in his work.

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Portland is a convivial comics scene--it's home to comic-book publishers Dark Horse and Top Shelf Productions, and Fantagraphics, the most well known altcomics publisher, is in nearby Seattle--but Sacco had fallen in love with the medium long before he lived in Oregon. "I've been doing comics since I was six years old," he told I.A Weekly. When he moved to the United States, he came upon MAD magazine, a formative influence. In high school he discovered the work of Sergio Leone, which so impressed the teenage Sacco with "the way shots were framed, the close-ups, the way it gloried in gritty ugliness, the sweating, dogs, old growth of beard" that he remembers drawing an homage called "A Fistful of Tequila."

During college, Sacco was focused on his studies, so he "wasn't really pursuing pop culture," though he did come across the comics of Crumb for the first time. Despite his affinity for Leone's grungy world, he didn't like Crumb's work "because it was too ugly and ... too depressing for me," he told Thom Powers in a 2003 interview for WNET's Egg television program. "Later on, of course, I modified that opinion. At a certain point, Crumb did begin to influence me because his drawings were so organic. Everything looked like it had a soul. The chair, the table, a spoon, all looked like he had put thought [into them]. He had a big impact on me."

Another model for Sacco was Brueghel. "I love the solidity of the people in his paintings," he told LA Weekly, "and his work provides a window into daily life in Flanders during the sixteenth century in a way the Italian Renaissance simply doesn't." After college, Sacco discovered others whose work would contribute to molding his own. "Celine was influential for the way I break down panels," he says. "The way he stacked words and ellipses, using four-word phrases and expressions redundantly, made a staggering impact." Michael Herr's Dispatches and the work of Hunter S. Thompson and George Orwell were also inspirations, as were the autobiographical comics of Harvey Pekar.

When Sacco graduated, good jobs in journalism were scarce, and he ended up moving to Los Angeles to work for the journal of the National Notary Association. Unfulfilled by the fast-paced world of actuarial news, he returned to Portland a year later, in 1985, and, after a stint at a local weekly, he founded a local alternative magazine called The Permanent Press. When that tanked fifteen months later, he became a staff news writer at The Comics Journal, covering freedom of speech and censorship issues in the industry. In 1987 he started a comics anthology, Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy (the name of a children's game in Huxley's Brave New World), and the year after that, his own comic, Yahoo (borrowing the title from Jonathan Swift), each of which lasted about a half-dozen issues.

After reading Edward Said and Noam Chomsky on the Middle East in the mid-1980s, Sacco took off for Israel in 1991 to see the situation for himself. That trip began his transformation into a rigorous international journalist, a transformation that would result in multiple awards for him, including an American Book Award and a Guggenheim.

Sacco's early comics career didn't necessarily indicate future greatness. Judging from the compilation of his pre-fame work, Notes from a Defeatist, his preoccupations avoided the most juvenile of typical comics themes (hacked, exploding, and/or festering bodies; potty humor; the ever-baffling mystery of Gurlz), but they were essentially the same as those of seemingly all the young alt-comics dudes. The self-absorbed whines, the kittenlike swipes of the snarky junior satirist, the not-so-epic quest for sex, drugs, and/or rock 'n' roll--Sacco undertook all these with the same predictability as other members of his guild. But he got better results: Even back then, in a story most of his peers would have rendered as self-indulgent autobiography--"Cartoon Genius," a pseudoreport on his lack of success at the time--he demonstrated a relaxed mastery of figural gesture and nuance that belies the irony of the title.

The first panel has Sacco lying on his disheveled bed, one knee bent, arms behind his head. His posture telegraphs the funny combination of arrogance and loserdom he riffs on for the remainder of the story. A later page is topped with an image of Sacco leaping for joy--borderless, above-margin, crowning the other panels--at being offered the kind of temporary hack work he had faux-nobly denounced only a couple pages before: "The S.S. 'Joe Sacco' sails the sea of truth ... Fuck the market!... I'm a cartoon fucking genius!"

Unlike his later work, the drawings in Defeatist vary quite a bit stylistically, wandering from goofily named characters (Alessio Easelsmear, Stanton K. Pragmatron, Oliver Limpdingle) whose cartoonish features convey their stereotyped personae (square-jawed popular jock; beret'd and goateed artiste; thin-shouldered, receding-hairlined corporate drone) to an absurd, Brueghelesque medieval tale, to a piece whose visual references range from faded black-and-white snapshots to Soviet social realism to Fernando Botero. The longer, more journalistic pieces near the end resemble the expressive realism of the quasi-muckraking comics that Sacco would later become known for. But if the pieces as a whole demonstrate a rich gift for comics artistry, they give little hint of the political depth he was to display later on.

That begins with "When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People," a transitional piece that combines drawings and text ... and text ... and more text ... to expose the hypocrisy, ruthlessness, and detachment of the British and American generals and politicians responsible for the bombings of Germany, Japan, and Libya. While Sacco's passion is manifest, the piling on of wordy evidence undercuts the comic's effectiveness. They bring to mind another category of young American male: the fanatical lefty-politics geek, hammering home his second-hand Chomsky over and over again. Luckily, Sacco was wise enough not to linger in this phase of his artistic development.

In their puzzlement over how to describe Sacco's work, readers have ranged from wondering whether to praise him as "the world's best comics journalist"--if in fact he's the only comics journalist--to denying that what he does is "mere" comics. That question notwithstanding, if one accepts the descriptor "comics journalist" (another coinage, "reality comics," is too good to leave forever on the editing-room floor), what kind of journalism is it that Sacco is doing?

"Oral history" is an inadequate term, bringing to mind tape-recorded interviews with Depression-era agricultural workers rather than a range of spoken testimony that includes stories about ongoing events. "Comics" implies work created solely for the purpose of humor, and "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer," Scott McCloud's definition of the term in his 1993 book Understanding Comics, is just too cumbersome. "Documentary," though happily growing more and more flexible in terms of form and subject matter, generally refers to film. However, it's not exactly radical these days to say that drawings can have as much documentary credibility as anything shot through a lens. So, pretending for a moment that all of these terms are more apt than they are, let's refer to Sacco's work as "documentary oral history in comics form."

Although military and political leaders put in camco appearances in his comics, what Sacco provides is purely "history from below," giving voice to "ordinary" individuals. Like any skilled visual interpreter, he tends to show rather than tell. To list statistics on poverty in Palestine is good reporting; to show, in nearly every panel set there, trashy, decrepit streets, abandoned cars, and tin-roofed shanties, made from cinder blocks with rain leaking in on the scanty makeshift furniture inside, is great documentary history.

But Sacco's work provides nothing so coherent as a history lesson, composed as his images are of vignettes and episodes whose contexts are mostly assumed to be known to the reader (in fact it would have been helpful if he had included more back-ground information in the Bosnia books, for those who hadn't followed or have forgotten the intricate details of that conflict). It is also not intended to be objective, in the impoverished, J-school sense of the word, which creates the illusion of detachment, accuracy, and balance when in fact there are none. For Sacco, Palestine, which shows very little of the Israeli point of view, is a drop-in-the-bucket attempt to balance the overwhelmingly pro-Israel bias of the US media. When an Israeli woman in the comic says, "Shouldn't you be seeing our side of the story," Sacco replies honestly: "I've heard nothing but the Israeli side most of my life."

"I try to use what's representative, not necessarily what's extreme," he says. "For example, for stories about torture in Palestine, I picked stories I'd heard over and over again." He doesn't leave out unflattering details about those he finds sympathetic for fear that it will make them seem less so. "Palestinians have been historically wronged. That doesn't make them angels. People crave the perfect individual. I'd rather portray the balance."

The painstakingly methodical Sacco prepares intensively before traveling anywhere for the first time, continuing to read and research as much as he can throughout the entire process. He makes repeated visits to his chosen locations, for months at a time (he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories in 1991-92, and four months in Bosnia in 1995-96), interviewing people, taping them when possible, and taking notes, which he indexes each night. Once back home, he transcribes his tapes, spending months boiling them down into a written script before he finally sits down to draw it. During that process, he says, the script shrinks as he realizes which parts of it can be shown rather than told.

Needless to say, it's a very time-consuming and laborious process. But it has its advantages: "I can make the crane that allows me to hover above a city--I don't have to hire a helicopter to get the picture--and I can take the reader into someone's past. I can ask visual questions that allow me to render it as faithfully as a film director," Sacco told LA Weekly. Indeed, in a 2003 New York Review of Books article, David Hajdu described Sacco's "shot language," observing that his sequences are "composed and paced ... like feature movies, particularly films of the studio era ... Landscapes put the subjects in perspective; figures are often shown at full length and in groups, so we can see their body language, watch their interaction, and examine their relationships; the close-up is used sparingly, for impact."

If Sacco's work can bear comparison to yet another genre, it wouldn't hurt to mention media criticism. After a generation or two of abstruse, academic media deconstruction, Sacco has absorbed what's valuable from such critique and deploys it constructively. In fact one might even view Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck) as a forebear of Sacco's work. First published in Chile in 1971, that small book, which features snippets of the Disney comic scattered throughout a discussion of its propagandistic use in Latin America, is one of the parents of Marxist pop-culture media criticism. Sacco's work, particularly on Palestine, represents an evolutionary march from that book straight into the present. Asked in 1994 why he chose occupied Palestine over other important subjects, Sacco told Kathleen E. Bennet: "Having a journalism background, and getting it drummed in about objectivity, you know, and the Truth, and the Facts, and then when I finally started learning about the Palestinian question ... it seemed something was really strange here. I read some books [about] ... how the media has manipulated us ... Noam Chomsky's Fateful Triangle [1983], which outlines in detail America's relationship to Israel, and how that affects the Palestinians."

In their introduction (titled "Apology for Duckology"), the authors of Pato Donald wrote: "The kind of language we use here ... is part of an effort to achieve a wider, more massive distribution of the basic ideas contained in this book." Sacco's remarks to the New York Times in 2000 echo that goal: "The whole point of my life, or of my career anyway, 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." His mild expression of that hope belies the very strong feelings he revealed to Salon in 2003 when asked what he thought about the American public's awareness of foreign conflicts:

   I think the American population should be sent to The Hague to be
   judged.... It's appalling the amount of ignorance here about world
   events ... To me it seems almost criminal that the people who live
   here ... if they really knew how other people's lives are affected by
   American policies, maybe they would pay more attention.

But Sacco doesn't let these fierce emotions sway his portrayal of the occasional moral ambiguities in his pursuit of journalistic game, nor is he mistaken about the work's power to change things. In one of Palestine's early pages, he shows an encounter between himself and a man in Nablus whose trust he has just won. "Palestinian victims all right!" he sardonically shows himself thinking. "The real-life adaptation of all those affidavits I've been reading! The flesh and blood stuff!"

"You write something about us?... You tell about us?"

"Of course! Of course! I'm off to fill my notebook! I will alert the world to your suffering! Watch your local comic book store...."

Marisa Bowe is coeditor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs (Crown, 2000). (See Contributors.)