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LINES ON PAPER Artist Bio - JOE SACCO





"SAFE AREA GORAZDE" (2000) is the long-awaited follow-up to "PALESTINE", a 240-page graphic novel at the war in the former Yugoslavia. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories that are rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water. "Harrowing and bleakly humorous, Sacco's account of life during the Balkan conflict is a timeless portrait of ordinary people caught in desperate circumstances. It's also a work of genius in an unlikely genre."
- The Utne Reader

"PALESTINE" (2001), a first-person journalistic account of the situation in the occupied territories, told in sequential art form. Naseer H. Aruri, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, wrote, "Sacco brilliantly and poignantly captures the essence of life under a repressive and prolonged occupation. Each page is equivalent to an essay on one of the many aspects of the occupation. His material is presented with a great deal of skill, insight and compassion." Entertainment Weekly wrote, "It figures that one of the first books to make sense of this mess would be a comic book."

"FOOTNOTES IN GAZA" (2010)
Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, has long been a notorious flashpoint in the bitter Middle East conflict. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah―cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake―reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in the daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. As in Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, his unique visual journalism renders a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, Footnotes in Gaza―Sacco's most ambitious work to date―transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience.


Vividly depicting Sacco's own interactions with the people he meets, the stories in "JOURNALISM" (2013) argue for the essential truth in comics reportage, an inevitably subjective journalistic endeavor. Among Sacco's most mature and accomplished work, Journalism demonstrates the power of our premier cartoonist to chronicle lived experience with a force that often eludes other media.
"The images Sacco draws are so powerful that they burn deep into your retina and reconfigure how you see the world... Journalism displays Sacco at the top of his game." - National Post (Toronto)

In  "PAYING THE LAND" (2020, )Joe Sacco travels the frozen North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development. The mining boom is only the latest assault on indigenous culture: Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a residential school system that aimed to “remove the Indian from the child”; the destructive process that drove the Dene from the bush into settlements and turned them into wage laborers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture.

Against a vast and gorgeous landscape that dwarfs all human scale, Paying the Land lends an ear to trappers and chiefs, activists and priests, to tell a sweeping story about money, dependency, loss, and culture―recounted in stunning visual detail by one of the greatest cartoonists alive.

The Cartooning War Correspondant -
article by Steve Surman 2017

Joe Sacco Wikipedia page





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