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ABSTRACT
Joe Sacco’s graphic novels are often described as comics journalism, even though many of them evidence a distinctly historical method. This essay discusses the development of an engagement with the past in Sacco’s oeuvre and asserts that Safe Area Gorazde is the first long-form work where he fully deploys journalism and history together. A close reading of that work demonstrates that these two approaches are not combined into a synthesis as many scholars often assume. Instead, journalism and history largely unfold as separate modes of discourse alongside one another and as such are doubly performative: they transform our awareness of the present as well as our understanding of the past. Sacco was born on Malta but his family soon moved to Australia and then to the United States, where he studied journalism in college. He became involved with alternative comics in the 1980s. While travelling during the early 1990s, he visited the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and his experience there led to the work Palestine, which gained him critical attention. That work and the others that followed established him as a "comics journalist."
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Even if a search is limited to the mere titles of scholarly essays and books, the term ‘comics journalism’ appears at least 11 times in conjunction with Joe Sacco’s name. See Alla Gadassik and Sarah Henstra (2012), Isabel Macdonald (2015), Brigid Maher (Citation2012; Citation2015), Juscelino Neco (Citation2013), Sarah Owj (Citation2017), Adam Rosenblatt and Andrea A. Lunsford (2010; 2011), Tristram Walker (Citation2010), Kristian Williams (Citation2005), Benjamin Woo (2010), as well as the title of the edited volume by Daniel Worden (2015).
2. The word ‘history’ only appears twice in titles of scholarly works about Sacco. See Hillary Chute’s (Citation2016) book chapter ‘History and the Visible in Joe Sacco’ and Ben Owen’s (2015) essay.
3. In a book by Noam Chomsky, Sacco had read a reference to a document by the United Nations about the massacres of Khan Younis and Rafah. Sacco said he then ‘just went down to the U.N. archives and found that document, and then started looking around to see what else I could find’ (Sacco Citation2011a).
4. For a more detailed description of Milosevic’s political downfall, see Steven Woehrel (2007, 236ff).
5. Overt references to years in the black-bordered chapters of Safe Area Gorazde (with page numbers) are: 1941 (21), 1980 (36), 1991 (37), April 1992 (39), April 1992 (41), early May 1992 (68), late May 1992 (78), June 1992 (110), end of 1992 (119), end of 1992 (134), March 1993 (143), April 1993 (148), February 1994 (162), February 1994 (164), April 1994 (165), April 1994 (167), April 1994 (179), April 1994 (184), May 1995 (197), June 1995 (197), July 1995 (198), July 1995 (203), late July 1995 (204), August 1995 (206), September–October 1995 (208), and November 1995 (212).
6. In a section at the end of the graphic novel entitled ‘Special Thank Yous’ [sic.], Sacco writes ‘Edin and his family welcomed me in to their home like a brother and a son […] If it wasn’t for him, this book would not exist’ (229).