And I call myself a cartoonist, who is working in the field of journalism.” “The term ‘graphic novels’ is a way of making adults feel like they’re not buying a comic book,” he says. The books, also including The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo and other titles, are customarily labelled “graphic novels,” a description Sacco rejects. That book, hailed by the New York Times as one of the year’s best, sold well and in the process created the commercial impetus for compiling the earlier Middle East reporting into a single volume. Initially, Sacco’s reputation didn’t extend much beyond the comic -book community, but that changed in 2000 with the publication of Safe Area Gorazde. By the end of the 1980s, he was moving in the direction of combining the two vocations, travelling to the Middle East and producing the serialized strips ultimately compiled in Palestine. Sacco, who had drawn comics since childhood, eventually started contributing his graphic handiwork to a variety of publications.

Newspaper jobs were hard to come by, however, and he ended up working for in-house publications such as the journal for the National Notary Association. National Book Award and, most recently, 2009’s Footnotes in Gaza, a historical investigation into two 1956 massacres that resulted in the death of nearly 400 Palestinians.īorn in Malta, raised in Los Angeles and now resident in Portland, Ore., Sacco imagined a more conventional reporting career when he graduated from the University of Oregon in 1981. It is a process that has produced three groundbreaking books: Safe Area Gorazde, a 2000 account of the war in the former Yugoslavia Palestine, a 2001 compilation of earlier reporting that won a U.S. Sacco, paying a rare visit to Toronto this week, will elucidate his working process during a public appearance Thursday at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall. You can report that there are 200,000 people in Tahrir Square, but if you want to draw the scene it takes a lot of effort.” But beyond that, it takes a long time to write and draw my stuff, especially the drawing.

“I have a desire to go there and see things and talk to people. His tools might include pen, paper, recording device and camera, but his medium is the long-form comic strip, which doesn’t readily lend itself to a daily deadline. A part of him would have liked nothing better than to have been camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last month with the protesters who eventually ended the 30-year reign of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.īut Sacco is not like most journalists. Joe Sacco, like any veteran foreign correspondent, yearns to be where the action is.

The fixer graphic novel