Joe Sacco and Graphic Literary Journalism – The Blending of Literature, Comics, Journalism, and History

Abstract

The essay discusses the work of a comics artist-literary journalist Joe Sacco. Literary journalism in the form of graphic novels is a type of narrative that is rapidly gaining acclaim and popularity. With their combining of objective documentary evidence with oral and visual testimony of the author and eyewitnesses (thus introducing the more subjective note of literary journalism), such comics expand the spectrum of representation (of immediate or historical reality). Moreover, they humanize the stories in a way that conventional journalism never could, and, with their visual component, make the stories more vivid and more easily accessible to various audiences. Today, information about war and conflict has penetrated into every tiny confine of both journalistic and scholarly discourse. There is an endless stream of images and narratives that depict violence in one form or another. However, both (conventional) journalistic practice and academic representations of atrocities normally focus on the perspective of an outside documenter of the depicted crimes. While factual journalism advocates distance as a necessary stance for writing an objective, unbiased story, Joe Sacco, like a proper literary journalist, depends mostly on his own experience and the experience of the witnesses he interviews, weaving it all together in a graphic narrative with a literary flavor. The essay predominantly illuminates Sacco’s portrayal of the Middle Eastern crisis, as exposed in his graphic books Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and Palestine (1996). Footnotes in Gaza is a complex and detailed portrait of the unending clash between Palestinians and Israelis that, both on the textual and visual level, upgrades Palestine. We show how the conventions of literary journalism (such as the author’s immersion in the subject matter, structured narrative, high standard of accuracy, the presence of the individual voice of the writer/journalist, the use of novelistic techniques, and lastly, responsibility and an ethical stance towards the characters of the narrative) conjoin with the conventions of comic books (e.g. representation of time on the comics page, the use of cartooning as an indication of the author’s attempt to eschew “neutrality” of conventional journalism). Furthermore, the essay examines how Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine filter and frame history, using subjectivized memories of the witnesses, photographs and other archival documentation, and moreover, how efficient graphic narratives can be when it comes to portraying human traumas and trauma-related memories.