Maltese-American comic journalist JOE SACCO speaks to Giulia Magri on what keeps him drawing, his inspirations and why he doesn’t draw his eyes.
Over the past two decades, Maltese-born cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco has travelled across the globe, reporting from Palestinian territories, Bosnia, the Gaza Strip and, most recently, from the frozen northern territories of Canada.
By visiting such places and gathering first-hand testimonies, Sacco, who coined the term ‘comic journalism’, has illustrated conflict, the horrors of war, human suffering and the voice of the oppressed – powerfully panelled in his black-and-white detailed illustrations.
Born in Malta in 1960, Sacco was in Malta last week as an international guest of the 2022 Malta Book Festival, organised by the National Book Council.
He is hailed as one of the world’s greatest cartoonists, with his work capturing the lives of ordinary people living in conflict zones and delving into stories that might not have been featured in the evening news.
One of his best-known novels is Palestine, which delves into his time meeting with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The work, which was awarded the 1996 American Book Award, involves comic panels focusing on people’s daily lives in the war zone.
Another work of his, Footnotes in Gaza, throws a spotlight on the massacres that took place in Khan Yunis and Rafah in Gaza in November 1956. This work won the Eisner Award and Time Magazine’s best comic book of 2000.
So, what motivates Sacco to continue telling such hidden stories?
“Anger,” he said without hesitation.
“I am just angry at how things are. You know, I am a pretty upbeat person, but I am pissed off by how people are run over and how power treats people,” he told Times of Malta.
Currently living in the US, Sacco described how he detests how people are made to live in tents in his city and that others are living in occupation, year after year, saying in light of this that he opts to be constructive about it.
“That is what journalism is all about – channelling that [anger] in a constructive way.”
He recalled how in a recent interview he was asked if he would travel to Ukraine to report the current war crisis.
“There are so many things going on that never get any airing at all and you have to choose which story to tell,” he said.
“You realise the bigger picture is that there are people going through a lot and no one cares and no one is ever going to know – you do what you can do.”
Challenges and inspirations
Sacco graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and said he always wanted to be a writer.
“I have always been interested in history and satire,” he said, reflecting on how his earliest inspirations were George Orwell and American underground comic artists such as Robert Crumb and Bill Griffin.
“I never learnt how to draw; I always did it growing up and I got into drawing journalistic comics once I graduated from journalism,” he said.
I am just angry at how things are
With time, Sacco began travelling and chronicling his trips through his comic work. For both Palestine and Bosnia, he travelled there with no story or plan in mind, just the drive to see what was happening.
Sacco mainly relies on the hospitality of others and their willingness to tell their stories. His novels gather first-hand testimonies and explained that he worked similarly to any other journalist, taking notes and recording interviews, but would ask for more visual details.
“If they are describing something in the past which I didn’t see myself, I would ask them what the streets were like then, and even ask them to sketch something for me,” he explained. He would later compare such testimonies to archival pictures of the places he would draw.
His main challenge is how long his comics take to draw, saying he would spend three to four years on one novel.
“I am okay with that, but I do like being in the field, interviewing people and seeing things,” he said.
Sacco is also very present in his work, depicting himself as part of the action and, at times, the narrator. While Sacco gives acute detail to his characters, his own presence in his novels is seen as ‘comical’ and he never draws his eyes.
“I don’t want to show all my emotions. I show what is going on, but I don’t want to show everything,” he explained.
“People keep asking me that question. I should just draw my eyes from now on,” he said, laughing.
When asked what he believes is his most important comic, Sacco said they all matter to him.
“I suppose the one place that blew my mind was being with Indigenous people in Canada,” he said, reflecting on his latest publication Paying the Land, which explores the impact of resource extraction among the Dene communities in Canada.
“We see land as property, to be bought, sold and a place on which to build skyscrapers, and people believe they are owned by the land. Philosophically, that was the biggest thing I ever learnt.”
Sacco was born in Malta in 1960 but migrated with his family to Australia at the age of one, and later to the US. In his 20s, he moved back to Malta and wrote a few romance comics, some of the first art comics in the Maltese language.
Apart from that, he has also illustrated his mother’s memories of World War II and the Maltese immigration crisis, which appeared in his short-form collections Notes from a Defeatist and Journalism.
Does he consider ever working on a comic set in Malta?
“As a journalist, I start looking at possible stories and thinking I should come back to Malta and do a whole series, but then there is a question of time,” Sacco said.
“Who knows though,” he continued. “I can’t say for sure.”