Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco is the world’s foremost creator of “comics journalism”—a contemporary field he basically invented. His previous books, including Palestine—for which Sacco interviewed hundreds of people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict—record, sometimes in minute detail, what is absent from the flash of news reports: the texture of lives on the ground. Sacco doesn’t flinch when depicting some of the most atrocious episodes in recent global history; in Safe Area Gorazde, his extraordinary volume on Bosnia, he presents intricately rendered drawings of mass graves. Sacco, who was himself born to a Catholic family in Malta, is skilled at distilling complicated timelines and eliciting testimonies, but his work, permeated by literary rhythms and a New Journalism sensibility, is also characterized by his own presence on the page.
