PORT ANGELES — Joe Sacco shared his hard-hitting comic reporting with a Port Angeles audience Wednesday, saying the artistic format is “one way of expressing journalism.”
The Portland, Ore.-based cartoonist, journalist and award-winning author has been hailed as the creator of war reportage comics.
Sacco, the Peninsula College Writer in Residence for 2019, will discuss “Palestine,” “Footnotes in Gaza” and his other non-fiction works in a pair of free programs in Port Angeles and Port Townsend today.
“I didn’t study comics journalism,” Sacco said in a Wednesday presentation at the Elwha Klallam Heritage Center. “It just happened.”
“You pioneered it,” said Rich Riski, Peninsula College journalism professor and Writer in Residence program coordinator.
Sacco will be featured in a free program at the Peninsula College Little Theatre in Port Angeles from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. today.
The second program will be from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. today in Building 202 at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend.
Sacco, whose pen-and-ink illustrations have been featured in Time and The New York Times, said comics in America have traditionally been linked to children’s characters such as Donald Duck, Garfield and Superman.
“Fortunately, over time, there have been a lot of great cartoonists that have broken those barriers,” Sacco told about 20 attendees.
“People like Art Spiegelman did the book ‘Maus,’ which to me sort of answers all the questions about what can you do with a comic book, because if you can tackle something like that, the Holocaust, then clearly it’s possible to use the medium to tackle any number of subjects.”
Sacco has won an American Book Award, an Eisner Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
“I’m not the only one doing this sort of thing,” he said.
“There are others who are adding to this body of work, which sort of demonstrates the potential of comics.”
Sacco displayed examples of his illustrations in an hour-long presentation, including several scenes from the Gaza Strip, where he covered the First Palestinian Intifada in 1991 and 1992.
“Things are going on at the same time,” Sacco said while showing a swirling image of a clash in Ramallah.
“I wanted the reader to get that sort of feeling of simultaneity, everything going on at once, and you actually don’t know what’s going on where. You don’t really know where to put your eye.”
Sacco said he takes photographs of events in the field, transcribes interviews with sources from a digital recorder and draws his cartoons based on a script.
In his book “Safe Area Gorazde” about the Bosnian War, Sacco penned images of a town under siege and Bosnian children playing on makeshift scooters with steering wheels they cut from burnt-out vehicles.
Sacco’s book “The Fixer: A story from Sarajevo” focuses on a former gang member who used his local knowledge and connections to sell stories to western journalists.
“He knows things,” Sacco said. “He can fix them for you.
“He was really sort of a compelling guy, had kind of a difficult story,” Sacco added.
Sacco returned to Palestine to cover the Second Intifada for “Footnotes in Gaza.”
He documented the massacre of 385 Palestinians during the Suez Canal Crisis.
More recently, Sacco worked with former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges to illustrate “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” which chronicles life in poverty in places such as Camden, N.J., Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and the coal regions of West Virginia.
“I’m trying to get away from drawing AK-47s, let’s just say that,” Sacco said.
“The thing I’ve discovered is that there are other forms of violence, and you don’t really get away from it.”
Sacco examined the effect of natural resource extraction on the Dene people, a family of First Nations in northwestern Canada.
His book, “The Dene First People of Western Canada, Exploring the Deadly Truth and Consequences of Resource Extraction & Colonialism,” is not yet published.
“It was probably one of the most difficult stories I’ve done,” Sacco said.
“They talk about land in a way that I have never heard. It made me question my own assumptions about how I think of land, and how we in the west think of land.”
Sacco said he uses landscape as a character in his comics.
Sacco, who was born in Malta, graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Oregon with a desire to be a hard news reporter.
“That’s what I wanted to do, but when I got out of school I couldn’t find a job that honored that somehow,” Sacco said.
“So I got pretty discouraged and eventually ended up in Berlin doing rock posters because I could draw.”
Sacco traveled to the Palestinian territories because he was “very interested in hearing something from the Palestinian side.”
“It ended up that my journalism sort of came back into my comics — it got woven into my comics work — but it was all kind of organic,” he said.
During a question-and-answer session, Sacco was asked if he was bothered by the term comic book journalism.
“I actually prefer the term comic book,” Sacco said.
“I do not like the term graphic novel, but I know we’re stuck with it.
“To me, graphic novel is a marketing term to make adults feel like it’s not a comic book,” Sacco added.
“It’s a comic book.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56450, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
