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Joe Sacco presents his first-hand reporting from worldwide trouble spots in the form of comic books. Far from trivialising his subjects, his work has a depth and humanity often missing from more traditional forms of journalism. Olivia Snaije spoke to him at his home in Portland, Oregon
“I’D RATHER HANG OUT IN A CAFÉ.
That’s where things are really happening.” Joe Sacco is telling me about how he goes about gathering the material for his books. Cafés are fertile ground for a reporter who likes to let his characters talk, sketching out their lives and relating what are all too often painful events. As they talk, there is Sacco, who is always present in his comics, a rubbery figure with a notebook and eyes hidden behind his spectacles.
He is there in the pictures because he likes to show the process of getting the story – the frustration, the impatience and, every so often, the elation when a source comes good. Sacco’s journalism isn’t slick or glamorous; rather, he’s like an archaeologist, scraping away layers to get as close as he can to the truth.
It took Sacco seven years to research, write and draw his recently released comic book, Footnotes in Gaza, which focuses on two little-known massacres of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military in 1956. These incidents are what Sacco calls “footnotes” – events that drop “to the bottom of history’s pages”.
He first became interested in the incidents on assignment for a US magazine. Along with fellow journalist Chris Hedges he gathered eyewitness testimony in Khan Younis (Gaza), but the episode was subsequently cut from the final article. This was enough to pique Sacco, whodecided to return to Gaza and dig up the history.
one to act, hopefully in a positive way,” he says. “I need to channel it. Anger is a fuel that can propel me for years.”
Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated to Australia and then to the United States. He completed a journalism degree at the University of Oregon, and after a series of go-nowhere jobs he decided to do his own thing, which included producing his own comic. The first piece of graphic reportage came out of accompanying a rock band on tour around Europe. Then, in 1991, Sacco decided he wanted to take a closer look at the Palestinian situation because he didn’t think the American media was providing the whole story.
Without any mainstream media accreditation and with very little money, Sacco arrived in Palestine as a self-described inexperienced, neurotic, slightly panicky and bumbling reporter. What he saw and heard there provided the material for a series of nine comics entitled Palestine, which, says Sacco, were a complete flop in terms of sales. His next work fared much better.
Time spent in Bosnia resulted in Safe Area Gorazde, which received huge crictical acclaim and was hailed by the New York Times as “a notable book of the year”. On the back of this success Palestine was reprinted as a single volume and went on to sell 60,000 copies in the United States alone. Respected Palestinian intellectual Edward Said supplied an introduction in which he 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”.
Sacco went on to write and draw further assignments for high-profile international news publications including Harper’s magazine, UK newspaper the Guardian and the New York Times Magazine, visiting conflict zones such as Sarajevo and Iraq.
When on the job, Sacco tapes or takes notes during interviews and usually photographs his subjects. For Footnotes in Gaza he had access to the photo archives of UNRWA in Gaza City in order to be able to draw the refugee camps of the 1950s. Sacco’s technique is old-school – his first lines are drawn in pencil, followed by pen, cross-hatching all the way. If he makes a mistake he takes a scalpel, cuts out the panel and pastes a new one in, the old-fashioned way. He works regular hours, completing two pages of artwork every five days. The 432 pages of Footnotes took him four years to produce.
His style has become far more sophisticated with each graphic novel, his characters more representational and less “cartoony”. Sacco has said that he was influenced by the drawing style of Robert Crumb, a celebrated comic artist whose satirical work was synonymous with the underground subculture of 1970s America, but he says the Flemish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries have been inspirational as well. Towards the end of Footnotes there is a double-page spread that could almost be a scene from a Dürer engraving, so intricate is the cross-hatching.
Part of what draws the reader into Footnotes is that Sacco interweaves the events of 1956 with the present and shows how he forges relationships with the characters that help him during his research. Central to the story is his guide Abed, a solid, reassuring figure who evolves into a friend and constant companion: “Morning, noon and night I’m with Abed, and if I’m with Abed, I must be okay,” says Sacco.
In 2002 and 2003 Sacco made trips to Khan Younis and then Rafah. The situation was far from calm, and the sound of gunfire and squeaking Israeli tank tracks punctuated the night. The only time we see Sacco without his glasses in Footnotes is when he sits up one night, unable to sleep with all the noise. Despite the chaos, Sacco is “elsewhere, lost in the filigree of the intricacies of a few hours in November 1956”.
As Sacco and Abed accumulate eyewitness accounts and sift through them with a fine-toothed comb for inconsistencies, they eat honey-soaked pastries and consume large quantities of coffee. Abed becomes as obsessed as Sacco about getting the facts straight: “The more we hear, the more we fill in our picture of that day in ’56, and the more critical we become of each tale we hear,” Sacco says. In the end, Sacco and Abed get their stories; the result is a compelling body of work that reintegrates these footnotes into history.
What’s next for Sacco? Obviously, “heavy” issues don’t frighten him. Currently at work on several stories, including one about African migrant workers who attempt to get into Europe via Malta and one about an investigation into rural poverty in India, Sacco has nevertheless found a balance – he returns to his home in Portland, Oregon, where he can peacefully concentrate on recreating in drawings the stories he brings back from the rest of the world. Footnotes in Gaza is published by Jonathan Cape, London
R e s u m é
1960 Joe Sacco is born in Malta. His father is an engineer, his mother a teacher. The family emigrates to Australia and then to the United States.
1981 After graduating in journalism from the University of Oregon and becoming frustrated with dead-end jobs, Sacco heads to Europe, drawing comics in Malta.
1985 Sacco returns to the US and publishes his first graphic stories in small-press magazines in the US and Canada.
1990-91 Living in Berlin, Sacco becomes interested in the Middle East: “It’s so under-reported in America. I thought maybe it is conceivable I could do a comic about it.”
1993 Sacco publishes the first of nine issues of his comic Palestine: “I was this naïve person who didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing.”
1994- 95 Sacco spends time in Bosnia, out of which comes his breakthrough book Safe Area Gorazde.
2001 Palestine is published in book form. Sacco returns to Gaza for the first of two visits gathering new material.
2009 Footnotes in Gaza is published. Beyond his current projects, Sacco plans on stepping away from reporting to work on a graphic memoir of the Rolling Stones.
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