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4.31 AVERAGE
4.31 AVERAGE
Learned a lot - Joe Sacco's graphic novels / journalistic comics are very well done (but I still did not enjoy the men being vaguely creepy around young women and thinking it was kind of charming in this graphic novel either).
Joe Sacco compels an empathetic understanding of the war in Bosnia by accompanying personal accounts with illustrations of the conflict. His graphic novel Safe Are Goražde relies on the testimony of the Muslim survivors in the small Eastern Bosnian town of Goražde. The personal accounts Sacco derives from his relationships with victims of the conflict demonstrate the intricacies of the war and illuminate the extent of it’s impact. By analyzing only a finite amount historical information, as Sacco does, the audience becomes comprehensively acquainted with specifics of a convoluted war.
This was incredibly intense. I learned a great deal about the Serbian/Bosnian conflict. I grew up during the war and remember hearing bits and pieces of it on the news. Because I grew up in a town with such a rich Slav heritage, we actually read a book about the war in grammar school (Zlata's Diary). Like so much of the discussion about the war, that book was based in Sarajevo and it was very refreshing to see the perspective from Gorazde.
Anything by Joe Sacco is a great read, but this book of his hit home for me the most.
Anything by Joe Sacco is a great read, but this book of his hit home for me the most.
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
Brutal account of the war in Bosnia. For me, the graphic novel format made the stories more understandable, but I wish Sacco had told the story in a chronological fashion.
This shares a lot of the strengths of Sacco’s earlier work, Palestine, but with a slightly more mature and polished tone — since the earlier book, Sacco has learned the value of framing his comics with more structure and storyline (it helps that this was envisioned as a graphic novel from the start, whereas Palestine is a collect of individual comics issues that weren’t cohesively planned).
Sacco admits this himself in an essay in this edition: “Well, Palestine was pretty organic. What happened, happened and I laid it out almost chronologically. There were redundancies that I allowed because I wanted to show how redundant these stories are. I wanted to show how often the same sort of story came up to demonstrate how prevalent some of the excesses of the occupation are. With the Gorazde book, I realized I had certain types of information and I wondered how I was going to organize it. You begin to think, "What does the reader need?"”
So, as a result this book is structured primarily around two tracks - the chronology of the was in Yugoslavia, detailing events for an audience that may be completely unfamiliar with the region and its history, and then the story of specific people who Sacco meet during his time in Gorazde.
That said - while the structure and polish does result in what I think is undeniably a technically better book than Palestine, I do miss a bit of the organic draw-it-as-it-comes early Sacco.
Also, do I even need to say it, but the art is great. Sacco also matures his art style a little here. It's still signature him, but it leans away from the cartoonist and more towards the documentarian (particularly when it comes to backgrounds, buildings and landscape, for which I can only imagine the amount of reference images that must have been needed).
Also, do I even need to say it, but the art is great. Sacco also matures his art style a little here. It's still signature him, but it leans away from the cartoonist and more towards the documentarian (particularly when it comes to backgrounds, buildings and landscape, for which I can only imagine the amount of reference images that must have been needed).
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
tense
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Gore, Sexual violence, Violence, Medical trauma, Murder, War
I have been a fan of Joe Sacco ever since I heard him speak and learned to value well done graphic journalism. This book did not disappoint. One is drawn gradually into the horror of the final offensive, the UN inaction perceived as betrayal of the safe area. The conflict is retold through experiences of survivor Sacco interviews and those who became his friends. It is a personal look at an international event, much more meaningful than the day to day reporting that was contemporary.