For one thing, the fifties-style sofa, big, solid, was an indication he finally was making some real money and that futon he thought was cool at 22 and pathetic at 32 could finally be taken to the dump.
For another, it meant that after several peripatetic decades -- birth in Malta, childhood in Australia, California and Oregon, journalism school in Portland, Ore., crash pads in Los Angeles, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Gaza, Bosnia, New York and elsewhere -- he was ready to call a particular place home, in this instance, an apartment in Portland, far from "that strain, say, that New York can be." The couch further signalled a determination to give himself three years to take his work to another level.
Not that the work isn't already at a very high level, the work in this case being comic-book illustration. In fact, Sacco is one of the world's best-known and most lauded comic-book artists. But to call him a comic-book artist is at once to understate and misstate the case since his forte is neither ultramuscular superheroes in tights nor sassy talking cats enduring endearingly inept human owners. He is, rather, a kind of illustrative journalist, a war correspondent with pen and brush or, if you prefer, a creator of non-fiction illustrated narratives.
In the past 10 or 12 years, Sacco has been one of about a dozen illustrator/writers who have taken the word balloons, crosshatching, Ben-Day dots and rectangular frames of the comics idiom and given them a visceral content that resonates with the intensity of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a Robert Capa photograph and Bob Dylan's Tangled Up in Blue. Along the way, Sacco has picked up some pretty heavy-duty fans, both individual and institutional -- Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said (both of whom contributed forewords to his books of unfunny funnies), David Rieff, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Details, Time.
The watershed for this "new seriousness" occurred in 1992 when Art Speigelman won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, illustrated book-length histories of his parents' Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences, with the Jews of Europe portrayed as mice, their Nazi persecutors as cats.
Sacco's work isn't that metaphoric or fanciful, but it's just as ambitious. The "Sacco style" is to take himself to a trouble spot -- the occupied territories, say, or eastern Bosnia or Chechnya -- and stay with the people there for weeks, even months at a time, eating their food, living in their homes, taking notes, making "little drawings," doing taped interviews, snapping photographs. Then he returns home -- wherever that may be -- to transcribe and organize his notes, whereupon he starts to shape them into an illustrated narrative that, as one admirer has put it, "spotlights the overlooked minutiae of oppression -- the humiliation, the tedium and the inconveniences of all shapes and sizes -- in addition to the statistic-friendly horrors."
Sacco's 2000 book, Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95, with its foreword by Hitchens, is as good a template of his methodology as any. Sacco went to Bosnia for four months in 1995-96, including a total of five weeks in Gorazde (pronounced go-rajh-duh), a largely Muslim community of about 60,000 in eastern Bosnia that was surrounded by Serb forces allied with Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic. At the time Sacco visited, Gorazde was experiencing a ceasefire after enduring a bloody siege lasting almost three years. The area had been declared a "safe area" by the United Nations, which was now running relief convoys into the city (This was how Sacco got in and out of Gorazde). However, since the UN had also deemed Srebrenica a "safe area" -- a designation that proved entirely fictitious as the infamous "ethnic cleansing" by Serb forces there showed -- the residents and refugees of Gorazde remained in a state of high anxiety.
After departing Bosnia, Sacco spent the next 3½ years organizing, writing, then drawing the stories he heard and the experiences he had in Gorazde for the book that eventually became Safe Area Gorazde. He also inked two more modest explorations of the Bosnian War, one a 41-page comic called Soba, published in 1998, about the people he met in Sarajevo, the other, a shorter piece titled Christmas with Karadzic published in the 1997 anthology Zero Zero.
It is, Sacco acknowledged during a recent visit to Toronto, an exhaustive, laborious process, not least because he prides himself on accurately recounting what he has experienced, both in terms of imagery and conversation.
"It's just not in me to suggest, as it were, in quick, brisk strokes. . . . I veer toward detail," he explained, citing the paintings of the 16th-century Flemish master Pieter Brueghel as "a big, big influence." In fact, during the time he was there, Gorazde felt "like it had fallen back into the Middle Ages. There were very few cars that functioned. People were gathering and chopping wood. Vehicles, wagons, carriages, they were all being pulled by horses. I could see it already on the page when I was there, because of Brueghel."
As he moves ever deeper into his creations, it's not unusual for Sacco to unplug his phone for days at a time -- "My drawings are supposed to put the reader into someone else's shoes. I want to give myself the opportunity of inhabiting that experience in my own way" -- and to stack his CD player with songs by such blues legends as Son House and Robert Johnson. "I know nothing about sharecropping in the thirties," he said with a smile. "The boll-weevil blight isn't part of my life. But the passion in those old-time singers, the universality of it, that's what I draw from. Somehow it just gets you into that frame of mind."
Sacco's latest, The Fixer, to be published Wednesday by Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly Press, marks a return of sorts to Bosnia. At a little over 100 pages, it's nowhere near the epic that Safe Area Gorazde is; instead, it focuses largely on the life and times of Neven, a roguish freelance aide to foreign reporters whom Sacco first met in rubble-strewn Sarajevo in 1995. Before this, Neven was a sniper with the infamously trigger-happy Bosnian paramilitary brigades.
In 2001, Sacco decided to return to Sarajevo where he again linked up with his friend Neven, who, as The Fixer depicts, is now fat, balding and quite ill, content to spend most of his waking hours playing cards, chain-smoking, drinking coffee and musing on the horrors of the Balkans in the 1990s. "I felt the need to step away from the bigger story for a while," Sacco explained. "I wanted to concentrate on a problematic character."
Right now, Sacco is gearing up for his next epic of comic reportage, a story "set in Gaza that's a mixture of what's going on there now and an examination of a historical episode that occurred in 1956." (He didn't want to specify the episode.) As before, Sacco did his research in situ, spending two weeks in and around the Rafah refugee camp in November, 2002, and virtually all of February and March there this year.
It's not the first time he's visited the region: In fact, in 2001, he published his breakthrough book, Palestine, a 300-page sprawler based in large part on a two-month stay in late 1991/early 1992 with the Palestinians of the occupied territories. His reportage from that stay initially was published in a series of nine comic books, the first issued in 1993, the last in 1996. It was these nine comics that, when published in two volumes, got him an American Book Award in 1996. Palestine as a single volume has since been reprinted three times; Safe Area Gorazde, now in paperback, went through three editions in hardcover.
Given all this apparent success, it's a bit surprising to hear Sacco say that as little as three or four years ago he was thinking of quitting comic-book journalism altogether. After "10 years of slogging," the advances he was getting from publishers were still "pathetic." The work was draining, the travel expensive. His personal life was almost non-existent. And he was tired of living like an impoverished university student.
Thankfully, at the moment of his greatest despair, things started to turn around. He got an agent. The money got "much, much better," the books began to reach a wide audience, and he started to score travel grants from organizations like the Guggenheim Foundation.
Amazingly, perhaps, for such a rambling man, Sacco really doesn't like to travel. He does so, however, because "the places I go matter to me. I feel compelled to go. I want to see what's going on in the world, not feel like I'm just a tourist. And when you spend time with these people, it means I'd better produce something that is as close to the truth of their situation as I can make it.
"It bothers me that people are suffering in Gaza. And I want it to bother other people, too. It's as simple as that."
