Bea Ngalula Kabutakapua;s interview with Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco: the art of making people interested in what you are interested in
Im interested in the things Im interested in and then for me the job is to make other people interested in what I am interested in Joe Sacco is considered a luminary in comic journalism. He calls himself a cartoonist whose career started at the age of seven when he drew a frog watching TV. Clearly that drawing does not have a place in the history of comics but it gave a glimpse on what Sacco was going to be: a narrator. Also, his mother was his first mentor. He used to copy her while she was drawing. Though, her pieces of art were not comics. I was doing comics since I was a kid, probable since I was six years old. That doesnt mean I was getting published. And I just never stopped doing it. As far as trying to make a living of it, that happened in my mid-twenties, after I got out of university and got a degree in journalism. I didnt like the sort of journalism jobs I was getting, so I began to fall back on comics as a means of self-expression. Speaking to Joe Sacco over the phone is as much an experience as reading his books. His slow, clear voice spells every word thoroughly putting them in the frame of a colourful American accent. Though, he was born and he is still a citizen of Malta where he wrote his first comic, True Love. The romance comic was the first ever published in Maltese literature. Sacco then merged his passion for travelling with comics and started travelling around Europe and Middle East. One of the results of those trips is Palestine, a collection of comics he drew after spending two months in the Occupied Territories in Palestine in 1991-1992 during the first intifada against the Israeli occupation. The comic received the American Book Award and opened a door of praise from all over the world to Sacco and his work, both as a journalist and as a cartoonist. The idea of mixing comics with journalism was somehow accidental. I was interested in the Middle East and I wanted to go and see what was going on for myself. And when I was there my journalistic instinct kicked in. My intention was to do comics about my own experiences, almost like an autobiographical travel log. And what ended up happening was that I began interviewing people, and getting stories. And when I was finishing with the trip, and I was putting those stories together they came out partially as travel log, partially as journalism and of course all drawn as comics.

It wasnt like I had a theory of what I was going to do before I did it. It was more an organic process of bringing comics and journalism together. Since then Sacco started to understand how his process of drawing comics and gathering information worked. He understood what he wanted to achieve and what stories to cover. It has to hit me in the gut. What really hit him in the gut was the story of Palestinians and the process Bosnia was going through. After the trip to Bosnia, he gave birth to Safe Area Gorade. The front page is a military green drawing of a city in the streets of which the UN trucks are passing through. The environment is silent; bombed houses are falling apart and unusable cars are abandoned along the street. Hung on a tree at the bottom of the page, a panel introduces the topic: In the fall of 1995, the future of Gorade and its 57,000 inhabitants was by no means clear Those issues matter. Pretty much every single assignment Ive gone on, any projects Ive undertaken, I thought this is really what I want to do and the subject has to mean something to me. Drawing comics requires time and dedication. That is what Sacco strongly wants to underline, they take a long time. Recently he has published Footnotes in Gaza, the story of an almost unknown massacre that took place in Gaza in the 1950s. The reconstruction involved historical researches and journalistic information gathering. Last time Sacco went to Gaza it was 2003. Footnotes was published in 2010. The drawing process is the longest process; with this book on Gaza, the time I spent on drawing is probably four years that stretch out over about six and an half years. Saccos drawing is not as one could expect: in a caricature style, though he is slightly influenced by the feelings he has for the people he portraits. His comics are not coming out immediately as Steve Bell portraying British politicians. Joe Sacco starts working once in place. Im not drawing so much at the time. Its when Im back in my home, in my studio working, that I write a script and then I start drawing. Writing, to me is always a very inexact procedure, because I never know if is going to take six weeks or six months to write a script because you never know if you are going to get the words right. Drawing, I know approximately how long is going to take to draw one page. The script would be perhaps much like a movie script would be. You would have the name of the person and then the dialogue that they are saying, all taken from my notes. The difference would be that I dont normally add any kind of visual clue. I do not say long

shot or all these men in a school. I leave all that up to the day that Im drawing so that at least theres something fresh. In Saccos books you can see people and places drawn in such a precise way you feel you are in Gorade, Gaza or Palestine. Everything is in black and white which stands as forceful as colours thanks to the ability of Sacco to let people express their emotions through his drawings. To do so he needs what he calls visual clues. An ensemble of pictures, photographs, visual stories and a journal entry that will help him draw a realistic scene, not just in terms of drawings but also of representation of places and people as they really are. For Footnotes in Gaza Im reconstructing a lot of what took place in the 1950s, and I got photographs from the UN archive in Gaza. And when Im drawing the memorandum for the script I just have those photographs on my desk and I can reconstruct through a logic sense what those camps looked like. That is very much a question of flow. Sometimes you dont know exactly how you should draw things until you are actually sitting with your pencil in your hand and you got the blank sheet of paper in front of you. The word reconstructions echo back to something controversial. Sacco in fact has been accused many times of lacking of objectivity in his comics. Also, in a previous book, The Fixer he drew about his informer who he started to doubt about. Footnotes from Gaza is even more controversial because of the reconstruction based on different voices of older people. I hope the readers understand that Im a filter and things have been filtered through me and I can go only so far into historical accuracy but I do try to be as historical accurate as possible. In Gaza, I collected every photograph I could. Then I do research on the uniforms of the soldiers, the sort of weapons theyd been carrying, the vehicles they used. Obviously I have to research things like costumes and how people lived, and their kitchen utensils and things like that. As much as possible Im acquiring those kinds of visual libraries for myself and then I see if I can try to work from that. Sacco has been questioned several times about his nature, is he journalist or artist? His answer is always the same: Im a cartoonist. Though, perhaps influenced by his journalistic education he accepts that his works can be seen on different levels. There is a journalistic level you go to, which is getting the words right of the people who are telling you their stories. Then there is the artistic level which is a much harder level actually, because then you have to draw everything. There is a sort of higher standard you have to bring yourself to in a way. When Im in places like Gaza, Im very much working as a journalist and maybe there were two major trips that I took. If you put that time together it was about two and half months. And Im really behaving, in a way, as a journalist, Im gathering information, Im taking notes, Im interviewing people and maybe in my questions Im asking what I call visual questions; questions that will help me visualise what a persons story is.

In his journalistic comics work Sacco is the one who decides what to cover. His starting points are his interests. My feeling as a journalist is that you have to go and write what you are interested in. The art is to get other people interested in what you are interested in. ---

Timeline
1960 Joe Sacco was born in Malta 1981 BA in Journalism at the University of Oregon 1983 back in Malta writes True Love, first comics to be published 1985 -1986 co-edited and co-published Portland Permanent Press, monthly comic newspaper 1986 in LA working for the Fantagraphics Books 1988 1992 Sacco travelled in Malta and around EU with a rock band drawing Yahoo 1991 1992 spends two months in Israel 1993 first issue of Palestine 1996 American Book Award for Palestine 1998 Sacco cover the Bosnian War Crime Trials in the Hague, Netherlands for Details magazine 2000 Joe Sacco finishes Safe Area Gorade, a follow-up to Palestine 2003 The Fixer, follow-up of Safe Area Gorade 2004-2005 Sacco is staff cartoonist at The Washington Monthly 2006 release of But I Like It, Saccos rock and roll and blues oriented strips 2009 Sacco publishes a short comic about Chechen refugees in I Live Here, benefit book for Amnesty International 2010 Footnotes from Gaza is published and receives the Ridenhour Book Prize