In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World ed. by Daniel Worden
  • Mihaela Precup (bio)
Daniel Worden, editor. The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World. UP of Mississippi, 2016. 272 pp. ISBN 978-1496802217, $60.00.

Published in the Critical Approaches to Comics Artists series recently established at the University Press of Mississippi, Daniel Worden's edited collection on graphic journalist Joe Sacco's critically acclaimed work makes a valuable contribution to several intersecting fields: comics studies, memory and trauma studies, and journalism, as well as visual and popular culture. This is a welcome first full-length collection of essays on Sacco's graphic reportage, which is examined here by both emerging and established scholars whose work is structured into four sections: "The Form of Comics Journalism," "Space and Maps," "The Politics and Aesthetics of Joe Sacco," and "Drawing History, Visualizing World Politics."

The productive dialogue created among the contributors is one of the most exciting features of the book, as it zeroes in on current debates that include the contribution that the medium of comics can make to the visual representation of disaster, violence, and trauma, particularly in cultures whose visibility is usually occluded in the mainstream media; the role of translation in the process of journalistic investigation; as well as the stance of objectivity in contemporary journalism. The authors are in conversation not only with contemporary comics scholars such as Hillary Chute and Jared Gardner (who contributes a chapter), but also poststructuralist theoreticians such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben (whose work on the representation of violence and vulnerability is particularly valuable in this case), and scholars from fields as diverse as geography, translation studies, journalism, photography studies, thing theory, human rights studies, and ethical and political philosophy.

The first section, "The Form of Comics Journalism," begins with a strong contribution by Jared Gardner, who has written extensively on the medium of comics and who draws attention to Sacco's ability to expose "the fiction of synchronized time" that is usually shared by people outside of conflict zones (23). By differentiating between the representation of the politics of time in Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–1995 and Palestine, Gardner throws into sharp relief the Eurocentric bias that surrounds "universal claims of networked time" (36). The other chapters from this section focus specifically on Sacco's interest in drawing attention to the mediated nature of [End Page 386] journalistic investigation by placing the figure of the journalist (himself) on the page. Lan Dong looks at the blend of subjective truth and objective fact in Safe Area Goražde, while Isabel Macdonald reads Sacco's short story "The Underground War in Gaza" to point out Sacco's incorporation of figures and voices commonly neglected by "objective journalism" (56). Marc Singer picks up some of the same issues as Macdonald but with reference to Palestine and in order to critique Sacco's "defiance of journalistic objectivity" (68), as well as to point out Sacco's vacillation between voicing and silencing his own reading of the events he is reporting, according to those matters that trouble "his own sympathies" (74).

Considering Sacco's subject matter, cartographic representation forms an essential part of his work, and it deserves the more extensive investigation it receives in the second section, "Space and Maps." By working mostly on Safe Area Goražde, Edward C. Holland differentiates between mappings-in-text, which "underscore the processual and evolutionary nature of cartography" (97) and whose instability usefully allows the readers to position themselves in the event, and maps-in-text, whose purpose is to offer a basis for the understanding of Bosnia's position and historical background. Georgiana Banita and Richard Todd Stafford work on Sacco's collaboration with journalist Chris Hedges in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, a work that is part traditional text, part illustration, and part comics. While Banita focuses on the stillness generated by Sacco's drawings, showing that this stillness conveys the hopelessness and eventlessness of the future of sacrifice zones from the United States, Stafford examines Sacco's landscapes and portraits separately and shows that they work similarly toward revealing...

pdf