"When I went to Bosnia, I was there to tell someone else's story and I was more methodical." -- Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco (born October 2, 1960) is a Maltese-American comics artist and journalist. He achieved international fame through the 1996 American Book Award-winning Palestine, and his graphic novel on the Bosnian War, Safe Area Gora?de.
"And I think I find, I know a lot of people around, in different cities, and so it's not - it might sound strange - but it's not that hard to say good-bye, because I know there's other people where I'm going. I can sort of fit in in a lot of places.""And, in some ways I like traveling, in other ways I'm sort of fed up by the whole notion.""I don't like just traveling in for a short time. I've done that before, because sometimes you work for magazines and they have a budget, and if you're working for them, they want something by a certain time.""I don't often go to a place just to check out all the cultural sites of a city.""I think any journalist who spends time in a place realizes that there are lots of stories around beyond their primary story. You meet so many interesting people and have all kinds of experiences.""I think I'm generally a good listener anyway.""I tried to draw people more realistically, but the figure I neglected to update was myself.""I try to ask visual questions. I'll ask what someone was wearing, if that seems relevant. If possible, I'll walk over the same ground that they're depicting. Of course, I can never get it precisely as it was.""I will interview bigwigs if I get the chance, but you are seldom surprised by people in power - you've got to get awfully damn close to get anything new.""I'd much rather hang out in a cafe. That's where things are really happening.""I'd rather go to a place and spend a couple of months, get to know it, get to know the people.""I'm not a good tourist, I don't like tourism.""It became clear to me that I had to push it toward a more representational way of drawing.""It's a visual world and people respond to visuals.""My guide had a copy of Palestine on my last trip to Gaza. He'd bring it out and show people what I was trying to do. That usually went over pretty well.""Of course, I'm drawn to a place like Iraq because It's the biggest story of our generation.""Oh, it's essential. I mean, you have to - 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.""Robert Crumb is an influence on how I draw, but not on the subject matter I take or my approach. One thing I do like about Crumb is that he's chronicled his age, his times, and I think that is what artists should do.""There's probably one more story about Bosnia that I'd like to do, because I spent a fair amount of time on the Serb side of the lines, which isn't apparent in the other books.""When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing.""With comics you can put interesting and solid information in a format that's pretty palatable."
Sacco was born in Malta on October 2, 1960. His father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. At the age of one, he moved with his family to Australia, where he spent his childhood until 1972, when they moved to Los Angeles. He began his journalism career working on the Sunset High School[1] newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.
Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring," and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC.
He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Im?abba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told The Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not."
Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In 1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic Yahoo. The trip led him towards the ongoing Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in Yahoo #2), and in 1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as Palestine.
The Gulf War segment of Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories to research his first long work. Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 1995 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996.
Sacco next travelled to Sarajevo and Gora?de near the end of the Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as Palestine: the comics Safe Area Gora?de, The Fixer, and the stories collected in War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001. Safe Area Gora?de won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001.
He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. In 2005 he wrote and drew two eight-page comics depicting events in Iraq published in The Guardian. He also contributed a 16-page piece in April 2007's issue of Harper's Magazine, entitled Down! Up! You're in the Iraqi army now. His most recent major journalistic work is Footnotes in Gaza.
1988—92: Yahoo #1—6. Collected and published in Notes from a Defeatist (2003), Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 1-56097-510-5.
1993—5: Palestine #1—9. Collected and published in Palestine (2001), Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 1-56097-432-X.
1994: Spotlight on the Genius that is Joe Sacco. Fantagraphics Books.
1997: Christmas with Karadzic, published in Zero Zero #15 (Fantagraphics Books) and later in the collection War's End (2005), Drawn and Quarterly, ISBN 1-56097-510-5.
1997: War Junkie, Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 1-56097-170-3.
1998: Soba, published in Stories from Bosnia #1 and later in the collection War's End (2005), Drawn and Quarterly, ISBN 1-56097-510-5.
1998: Stones, published in Zero Zero #25 (Fantagraphics Books).
2008: Oregon, published in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, Ecco, ISBN 9780061470905
Collections
2000: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992—1995. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 1-56097-470-2
2001: Palestine. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 1-56097-432-X
2003: A Story from Sarajevo. Drawn and Quarterly Books. ISBN 1-896597-60-2
2003: Notes from a Defeatist. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 1-56097-510-5
2005: Profiles from Bosnia 1995—96. Drawn and Quarterly. ISBN 1-896597-92-0
2006: But I Like It. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 1-56097-729-9
2009: Footnotes in Gaza. Metropolitan Books, ISBN 0805073477. Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0224071092
