New Delhi: Legendary comics journalist, cartoonist and author Joe Sacco comes to The Wire for a discussion on November 11 at New Delhi’s Jawahar Bhawan at 6pm.
📢Event Announcement: ‘Drawing a Line’
Cartoonist Joe Socco will be in conversation with @seemay, Editor of The Wire, on the Gaza war and the challenges facing cartoonists, artists, writers and journalists today.
🗓November 11 | 6 PM onwards🕠
Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi pic.twitter.com/Y7fhSM6DGD— The Wire (@thewire_in) November 9, 2024
Malta-born and now US-based artist-journalist Joe Sacco’s work has revolutionised the coverage and understanding of war and conflict reporting. He looks at personal stories and has pioneered the application of “artistic and literary conventions of comics to war reporting.” He has got the American Book Award (1996) and the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel (2010), as well as the British Eagle Award in 2001. His Footnotes in Gaza won the Ridenhour Book Prize (2010) and the first Oregon Book Award for Graphic Literature (2012). He has won Time magazine’s Best Comic Book of 2000 award as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001).
A detail from ‘Palestine’.
Sacco’s work on Palestine, his nine graphic novels put together as Palestine, A Nation Occupied followed two months spent there in 1991-2. The book had Edward Said writing the foreword where he acknowledged, “certainly his images are more graphic than anything you can either read or see on television.” Sacco draws himself into his work, literally and says about it in Journalism, “by admitting I am present at the scene, I meant to signal to the reader that journalism is a process with seams and imperfections practiced by a human being – it is not a cold science carried out behind Plexiglas by a robot.”
Joe Sacco was born on October 2, 1960 to parents who had survived the bombing of Malta during World War II. His family immigrated to Australia when Joe was a year old. As a child living outside Melbourne, he heard stories of the conflicts in West Asia and later remembered commemorations of World War II, which kindled his interest in bearing witness to and reporting conflicts in the war zones.
Sacco’s family immigrated to the United States in 1972 and Sacco as a child, began drawing and worked on a comic about the Vietnam war. He graduated from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon in 1978. Sacco worked as a reporter for The Comics Journal, which covers freedom-of-speech issues. In 1988, he developed Yahoo, published by Fantagraphics, further honing his craft which he describes as “comics journalism.”
In his work, Sacco has described and reflected on his own experiences, and worked with a variety of subjects, including the Miracle Workers, an Oregon punk group, designing their T-shirts and an album cover. He has also sketched and created work about the music group, Rolling Stones and American blues.
Sacco’s work includes his mother, Carmen Sacco’s recollections of the bombing of Malta in World War II, in “More Women, More Children, More Quickly, Malta 1935-43” and “When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People.”
His best known works remain Palestine, then Safe Area Gorade: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95; The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo; Footnotes in Gaza; Journalism, a collection on Iraq, conflicts in Chechnya, African migrations to Malta, poverty in India, and the Bosnia Serb war crimes trials; and Paying the Land, on the Dene people of the Canadian Northwest Territories and attitudes about resource extraction and the effects of colonisation.
‘In his work, Sacco has described and reflected on his own experiences, and worked with a variety of subjects.’
Sacco has also collaborated with Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Chris Hedges to illustrate Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt in 2012, a book on corporate capitalism. In 2016, Sacco spent time with people in Portland where he is currently based, who experienced Portland’s rising rent hikes and home prices.
The Wire’s editor Seema Chishti will be in conversation with Joe Sacco and they will discuss his work, what motivates him, the threats to journalism generally in the world today and the challenges more specifically that the violence in Gaza on the people of Palestine, and targeted elimination of journalists there poses to the world, to the future of documenting and remembering. This conversation is under the aegis of Nehru Dialogues and in partnership with Midland Bookshop.
