Journalism

A first for the world's greatest cartoon reporter, a collection of journalism, including articles on the American military in Iraq that have never been published in the United States

Over the past decade, Joe Sacco, "our moral draughtsman" (Christopher Hitchens), has increasingly turned to short-form comics journalism to report from the sidelines of wars around the world. Collected here for the first time, Sacco's darkly funny, revealing reportage confirms his standing as one of the foremost war correspondents working today.

In "The Unwanted," Sacco chronicles the detention of Saharan refugees who have washed up on the shores of Malta; "Chechen War, Chechen Women" documents the trial without end of widows in the Caucasus; and "Kushinagar" goes deep into the lives of India's untouchables, who are hanging "onto the planet by their fingernails." Other pieces take Sacco to the smuggling tunnels of Gaza; the trial of Milan Kovacevic, Bosnian warlord, in The Hague; and the darkest chapter in recent American history, Abu Ghraib. And on a mission with American troops — pieces never published in the United States — he confronts the misery and absurdity of the war in Iraq.

Among Sacco's most mature, accomplished work, Journalism demonstrates the power of our premier cartoonist to chronicle human experience with a force that often eludes other media.

"We see the potent brew of Sacco's reporting, with its combination of engagement and complicity....This is what visual storytelling has to offer, this kind of immediacy, of empathy, this ability to open up the narrative in a way that transcends words." David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Joe Sacco is the author of the Eisner Award-winning graphic novels Footnotes in Gaza and Safe Area Goražde, among other books. His works have been translated into fourteen languages and his comics reporting has appeared in Details, the New York Times Magazine, Time, and Harper's. He lives in Portland, Oregon.