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This introduction presents a brief biography of Joe Sacco and survey of his work as a comics artist. It also evaluates Sacco’s contribution to alternative comics, the New Journalism, comics journalism, and war literature. It concludes with a summary of the essays contained in the book.

Edward C. Holland’s essay reads Sacco’s maps and mappings of the Bosnian War as interventions in the traditional roles ascribed to cartography, bringing to bear the analytical tools of the discipline of geography to the study of comics.

Looking at Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, Lan Dong analyzes Sacco’s complicated negotiation of history and witness testimony, finding in Sacco’s treatment of the Bosnian War a case study of how Sacco represents the stories of others in relation to his own presence as a reporter.

Focusing on Sacco’s Palestine, Safe Area Goražde, and The Fixer, Brigid Maher analyzes the role that translating and language play in Sacco’s work. In his comics journalism, Sacco foregrounds translation as a process, producing a more nuanced relation of journalist to subject than one often finds in mainstream journalism.

Rebecca Scherr draws on theories of performance and performativity to produce an account of both Sacco’s performances on the page as an artist--the drawing of a line and how that line functions as a trace of the artist’s presence--and his representations of himself as a “character” in his works.

This chapter analyzes how Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza highlights the stakes of the politics of remembering and forgetting by investigating what happened in Gaza in November 1956 and discerning its relevance in the midst of an ongoing conflict and occupation. In this work, Sacco examines the interrelationship between memory and identity in situations of ongoing injustice by focusing on ways that memory is blocked, distorted, and prevented, on the one hand, and, on the other, how remembering can occur as a shared experience with one's contemporaries. This work of graphic journalism, then, shows why the history of injustice matters, and shows that in order to address the current situation between Palestinians and Israelis, there needs to be confrontation with a legacy of injustice.

Placing comics journalism in relation to other media such as film, music, and magazines, Jared Gardner analyzes how Sacco manipulates time as both a thematic and a formal device that can pose alternatives to our Western notions of history and synchronicity.

Marc Singer demonstrates how Sacco, often interpreted by scholars and critics as critical of the standard of objectivity, also employs the tactics of objective news reporting in his first long-form work, Palestine.

Alexander Dunst draws on the philosophy of Alain Badiou to chart an important shift from Sacco’s first long-form works of comics journalism--namely, Palestine and Safe Area Goražde--to the more recent Footnotes in Gaza. In Footnotes in Gaza, Dunst finds a shift away from ethics and toward a political aesthetic.

In the early 1990s, Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his Holocaust memoir in comic book form. Since then, comics creators have been producing comics about contemporary events, resulting in the emergence of comics journalism in newspapers. No one captures the potential—as well as the challenges—of comics journalism more fully than Joe Sacco, who gained fame with his comics about Palestine and the former Yugoslavia. Sacco uses comics not only to create a new kind of journalism, but also to challenge the orthodoxies of more traditional reporting. His work might also be compared to photojournalism, although his priority is to look for opportunities available to the cartoonist alone. This chapter examines the extent to which Sacco challenges the conventions of journalism and photojournalism as well as his contributions to both. It analyzes three of his comics, Palestine, Safe Area Goražde, and The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, to discuss his critique of journalism, his use of caricature, and his compulsion.

Richard Todd Stafford also analyzes Sacco’s representations of the Appalachian coalfields in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, finding in Sacco’s landscapes and portraits a complex process of identification, spatialization, and ethical imbrication.

Using Bill Brown’s “thing theory” and Jane Bennett’s materialist theory, Ann D’Orazio analyzes how objects such as tea, tomatoes, trees, and the hijab function as nonhuman agents in Sacco’s Palestine, endowing the text with a powerful depth and resonance.

Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza as an entry in the tradition of book-length comics, a tradition about which comics artists, including Sacco, often express some ambivalence, Ben Owen argues that Sacco’s representation of the 1956 Rafah Massacre produces an alternative sense of historical time in both its content and its form.

In her reading of a 4-page story originally published in The New York Times Magazine, Isabel Macdonald finds in Sacco a critique of the standard of objectivity, a critique that is shared by many journalists today and that Sacco is uniquely situated to visually articulate on the comics page.

Georgiana Banita reads Sacco’s contribution to his book with Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, as partaking in the traditions of muckraking journalism and environmentalist documentary and photography, situating Sacco’s landscapes of mountaintop removal mining firmly in the tradition of environmental art and activism.

This essay considers the classroom, and in his essay, Kevin C. Dunn elaborates how he has taught Safe Area Goražde in an introductory International Relations course. This essay should be of interest not just for its pedagogical argument, but also for its demonstration of how Sacco’s work resonates beyond discourses more familiar to scholars in the humanities.

Returning to “The Unwanted,” a work of reportage that is also one of Sacco’s most autobiographical works in recent years, Maureen Shay argues that Sacco stages and then complicates the binary oppositions that structure the status and treatment of refugees to Malta.

This chapter focuses on one of the comics' most prevalent masks—the child, considered the default face of American comics. The child or youth is an emblem of the comics and an archetype of its mediation. The child I-cons of autography romanticize youth's vistas and vicissitudes to affirm the enduring appeal of the “romantic, Western vision of the sentimental child.” The chapter historicizes a range of comics children by analyzing Richard Outcault's early twentieth-century strip Yellow Kid, Joe Sacco's Palestine (1993), Kyle Baker's Nat Turner (2008), Ariel Schrag's Awkward (1995), and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan. It argues that the child is not simply a recurring subject of the comics but also a formal correlative that fosters philosophical reflection on the complicated nature of temporality.

ØyvindVågnes’s essay is the first in the book to focus on Sacco’s story “The Unwanted,” and Vâgnes demonstrates how one of Sacco’s central devices--the portrait of an interview subject--functions as a means to represent the harms of “bare life” and to imagine an ethics of hospitality.