Safe area America

Graphic novelist Joe Sacco goes back to Sarajevo with his powerful new book "The Fixer" -- and talks about why the entire U.S. population should be tried for war crimes.

By Christopher Farah

Dec 5, 2003 | Joe Sacco has a hard time sitting still -- a potential problem for a man who makes his living writing and illustrating graphic novels, or comic books for adults. Over the last 15 years, Sacco has jumped from one city, one nation, one war zone to another. In the late 1980s and early '90s, there was Germany and Malta, his home country, followed by Israel and the Gaza Strip. Later came Bosnia, Chechnya, another trip to Gaza, some time in The Hague, Netherlands, for a war crimes tribunal (for Slobodan Milosevic and company, not him) and even a tour of Mississippi with a blues band.

Sprinkled among all of those trips were sporadic stays in Portland, Ore. That gave Sacco just enough time to write and draw, to parlay his many journeys into award-winning books like "Palestine" and "Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995," and in the process to become one of the most critically acclaimed and successful graphic novelists of his generation. Not long ago, that distinction wouldn't have meant much. Comic books were considered kid stuff, and graphic novels were a fringe movement. But with the increasing popularity of works like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" -- a graphic rendering of the Holocaust -- and the profoundly mundane "American Splendor," written by Harvey Pekar with various illustrators, graphic novels have become a respected art form, even a literary phenomenon.

Sacco, now 43, added his own distinct flavor to the renaissance by combining in-depth first-person reportage with the graphic medium, creating a synthesis of the traditional journalism he had studied (he received a journalism degree from the University of Oregon in 1981) and the comics he had grown up drawing; one of his original collaborations was a short-lived series called "Centrifugal Bumble Puppy."

Although his initial serializations of "Palestine" garnered acclaim within the comics world, it wasn't until the 2000 publication of "Safe Area Gorazde" that the mainstream media finally began to recognize Sacco's genius. "Safe Area" is a brilliant portrayal of a small town in eastern Bosnia, Gorazde (pronounced "go-RAHJ-du"), and the suffering of its people during the war. The book garnered rave reviews from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR and Time, among others.

Sacco's meticulous drawings, combined with detailed, personal accounts of his "subjects" (the word feels too sterile to describe his three-dimensional renderings), provide the kind of human, emotional context so lacking in traditional media reports. Newspaper articles and even television broadcasts may excel at describing the bare facts of a situation -- the number of people killed and wounded, the number of houses burned -- but they tend to fail at conveying atmosphere, nuance, meaning. (Sacco also co-authored "A Blues for Drago Drugilovic," a 1999 installment of Salon's comic series "The Dark Hotel.")

In "The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo," released last month by the comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, Sacco revisits the Bosnian war. This time, he highlights his relationship with a man named Neven, a former soldier turned "fixer" -- that is, a freelance agent paid by journalists to set them up with local stories. Through Neven's tale, Sacco recounts the story of the several warlords who defended -- and dominated -- Sarajevo throughout the years of battle with surrounding Serb forces. More than that, Neven embodies on a personal level the effects of war on the individual. His relationship with Sacco paints an intimate picture of the dilemmas faced by journalists reporting from a war zone. They often feel lost and dependent in a foreign land, must trust people whose credibility is suspect, and feel a moral obligation to the people they write about.

Salon discussed the issues raised by "The Fixer" -- and the nation's newfound respect for graphic novels -- with Sacco in a telephone interview from his home in Portland.

Reading about your travels, it seems like you almost don't have a home.

(Laughs) Well, I'm sitting on my couch, which I bought. Now that I bought a couch, for the first time ever, I think I can finally say I have a home. I move, I move, I move -- it sort of scares me a little.

Many people hear about conflicts taking place across the world, and a lot of them might even be curious -- but not too many actually go to experience those places firsthand.

Anger generates action. It's not that every issue of equal magnitude pulls me in the same way, because I'd be a wreck. But some issues just kick me in the gut.

What happened with Bosnia is that I met a guy at a party here in Portland, who was a poet, but he'd been doing some journalism in Sarajevo. This is during the war, like in 1993. Talking to him demystified the whole process of getting over there. Nothing was stopping me.

In the couple of major trips I've done, I've had no money and no clout. So you tend not to talk to the people who aren't even going to be interested in talking to you. Why would a politician talk to me? Or a general? So I never got any of that, and it's a good thing. Because it made me hang out with people who were on my level. It wasn't a well-thought-out idea, but I think that's what directed my stories to the street level.

Did you have a publisher when you went to Bosnia the first time?

No. I went to New York, and I spent a month, and I went to many publishers and none of them were interested. Times change -- now lots of people are interested. People pay more attention and see that comics are a viable way of telling these stories. It helps that there are other cartoonists doing good work. It seems like the whole idea of comics as a medium is of interest; people aren't just dismissing it offhand anymore.

Did you ever think you'd actually be able to make a living the way you do now?

Ultimately, at some point, you've burned all your bridges. When you realize you're 35, and you haven't had a regular job in I don't know how many years, you know that if you had to write your résumé, employers would take one look at it and say, "What were you doing all this time?" And you'd say, "Drawing comics that were never sold." (Laughs)

If you want to know the truth, I was about to give it up. When I finished the Gorazde book -- maybe I had a hundred pages to go -- I was ready to give it up. I thought, OK, I'll finish this book, and then I'll become a math teacher.

Next Page: "After the war there's a huge letdown. You're still dependent and no one has any work. The place is a basket case"

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