notes from joe sacco at nyu

Joe Sacco is one of my artistic and literary heroes.  Although my work tends more toward historical fiction and his toward journalism, if I had to make a list of influences he would definitely be near the top.  So when I found out that he was speaking at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, I was there.

I hope that excerpts of the conversation between Sacco and NYU professor Zachary Lockman will be up on the Primary Sources website soon.  The interview was fascinating and could have gone on longer, and the questions from the standing-room-only audience were sophisticated and thoughtful.  In the meantime here are some notes I took from the event:

- Sacco considers himself "a cartoonist who works in the medium of journalism"

- He talked a bunch about growing up in Australia (where he lived from age one to age twelve) among a mishmash of European refugees in the '60s.  His parents had lived through the bombing and siege of Malta.  Everyone around him talked about the war.  When friends got together they would tell stories about living through World War II.  "War didn't seem like such a foreign idea; it seemed like something that could happen in people's lives."  He contrasted this to the US, where war is a distant and totally abstract idea to a large percentage of the population.  "The US is fighting two wars right now, but you'd never know it, unless you know someone who is over there."

- Questioning mainstream/corporate journalism and learning about Palestine went hand in hand.  Once Sacco realized the only thing he'd ever heard about Palestinians was "terrorist," he started becoming seriously disillusioned with the US mainstream media.  "This [journalism] was what I had studied, but it didn't give me what I needed" to understand the world.

- He hates the concept of "objectivity" as it's frequently talked about in mainstream journalism and said he prefers to strive for honesty instead.  He talks more about this idea here, and his good friend Chris Hedges elaborates on the theme here.

- He said that he did not always enjoy drawing Footnotes in Gaza.  He found drawing some of the scenes of violence "repellent," and says he may step away from war comics for a while in the future.  At the same time, he discovered that no one had really investigated the massacres described in Footnotes, and felt that if someone didn't record the stories of the now-elderly survivors soon, they were at risk of disappearing from the historical record forever.

- He had a very insightful thing to say about drawing versus photography.  He talked about how the best images from photojournalism are arresting because they capture the action at the exact right moment.  (He mentioned this photo specifically.)  Well, in comics, every image can be at the "exact right moment," because you're drawing it.  He said that this is a powerful tool and that you can overuse it, that you can "bludgeon" the audience with it if you use it too much.

- I asked why he so frequently draws Israeli soldiers from a perspective where we can't see their faces.  I had kind of assumed this was a conscious choice, a la The Battle of Algiers, to tilt our sympathies toward the humanity of the occupied people.  But his answer somehow managed to be both more interesting and more humane.  Referring to Footnotes in Gaza, which depicts two massacres of large numbers of civilians, he said he couldn't actually imagine what was going through the minds of the soldiers at the moment they pulled the trigger.  "I couldn't draw their faces because I didn't know what they were thinking, and I didn't want to assume anything."  Other than "a few sadists, who always come to the fore in situations like this...these were ordinary men."  And, since this was 1956, it's very likely that some of these soldiers were themselves refugees, survivors of occupation and genocide.  He said after drawing Footnotes, he realized this was something he needed to understand, and is "working on a project now" that will help him get more insight into this particular element.

- As you might have guessed from his self-depiction in his comic books, Joe Sacco is really self-deprecating, humble and approachable in person.  He signed and drew something for everyone who brought a book, and when I mentioned I was writing a film about Gaza he asked questions about it and wrote "Good luck with your work" when he signed my copy of Palestine.  Which means he was actually listening to my somewhat nervous babbling instead of just pretending to listen while he drew something.