Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco (b. 1960) was born on 2 October 1960 in Kirkop, Malta, and grew up in Australia and the United States. He studied journalism at the University of Oregon. He worked as a magazine editor and cartoonist before traveling to the Middle East and the Balkans.

Life and Career

Palestine (1993–1995, collected 2001) — a nine-issue comic based on two months Sacco spent in the Occupied Territories in 1991–1992 during the First Intifada, interviewing Palestinian refugees, prisoners, and families — won the American Book Award and demonstrated that comics could do what no other medium could: convey the granular, human texture of life in a conflict zone through drawing, dialogue, and the author’s visible presence as a character in his own reporting.

Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995 (2000) — based on four trips to Goražde, a Bosnian Muslim enclave besieged by Serb forces — is his masterwork. Edward Said called it “a political and aesthetic work of extraordinary originality.” The Fixer (2003) — about a Bosnian fixer who helped journalists during the war — was a companion volume.

Footnotes in Gaza (2009) — a 400-page investigation of two massacres of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah in 1956 — took seven years to research and draw.

The Great War (2013) was a 24-foot-long foldout panorama depicting the first day of the Battle of the Somme — a formally unprecedented work that used the comics medium’s sequential potential to create an experience closer to the Bayeux Tapestry than to a conventional graphic novel. Paying the Land (2020) — about indigenous Dene communities in Canada’s Northwest Territories and the impact of resource extraction on their land and culture — was his most recent major work.

Major Works and Themes

Sacco’s innovation was to apply the comics form to journalism — and to discover that the medium could do things that text and photography could not. Drawing takes time: Sacco’s panels are dense with observed detail — the texture of rubble, the expressions on faces, the layout of rooms and streets — that conveys the experience of being physically present in a way that photographs, paradoxically, often fail to achieve. The hand-drawn image also makes visible the artist’s subjectivity: Sacco draws himself into his comics as a character, acknowledging that objective journalism is a fiction and that the reporter’s presence shapes the story.

His politics are sympathetic to the oppressed — to Palestinians, to Bosnian Muslims, to indigenous Canadians — but his journalism is not advocacy. He records what people tell him, including contradictions and self-serving narratives, and trusts the reader to draw conclusions.

Footnotes in Gaza is his most ambitious work: a historical investigation of two largely forgotten massacres rendered in painstaking graphic detail, with the contemporary search for witnesses running alongside the reconstruction of the events themselves.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Sacco is the founder of comics journalism and remains its most important practitioner. His work has influenced a generation of cartoonists who use the medium for non-fiction — including Sarah Glidden, Josh Neufeld, and Dan Archer. Palestine and Safe Area Goražde are taught in journalism schools alongside the text-based classics of the form.

Key Works

• Palestine (1993–2001, collected)
• Safe Area Goražde (2000)
• The Fixer (2003)
• Footnotes in Gaza (2009)
• The Great War (2013)
• Paying the Land (2020)

Collecting Sacco

Palestine — the original nine-issue Fantagraphics run (1993–1995) brings $50–$300 for complete sets in fine condition. The collected edition (2001, Fantagraphics, with introduction by Edward Said) brings $20–$60.

Safe Area Goražde (2000, Fantagraphics) brings $20–$50. Footnotes in Gaza (2009, Metropolitan Books) brings $15–$40.

Sacco signs at comics festivals and literary events. His original art pages — densely detailed ink drawings that represent weeks or months of work — are highly valued when available. The Great War panorama prints are also collected.