Summary
[JOE SACCO] has taken his time - six years and 400 carefully drawn pages- to assemble the evidence, weigh it, and present it fairly. He is honest about his difficulties, about his doubts and frustrations. He shows us the differences in the various accounts, notes the contradictory evidence, and admits to discarding stories that he or his aides consider unreliable. His chosen medium - the comic - is perfect for this sort of work. For the comic allows the reader to literally see the different perspectives. The narration can run alongside, or overtop, the imagery, the two elements complementing one another while preserving the possibility of irony, uncertainty, tension, or conflict. But just as important are the things the medium doesn't do. It doesn't provide us with a pseudo-reality like film or the disembodied objectivity of journalistic prose. The comic is obviously an artifice, a creation. And Saceos narrative style - putting himself in the frame, recounting not only the product of his research but the process as well- makes the most of the mediums unique features.
See the full content of this document
Extract
Palestine Revisited
BOOKS
Palestine RevisitedJOE SACCO HAS spent his career covering war zones - Palestine, Bosnia, Iraq. But unlike most war correspondents, his dispatches arrive in the form of comics. Sacco uses cartoon renderings...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
