Discordant discourses: history and journalism in the graphic novels of Joe Sacco. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kavaloski, Joshua
• Is Part Of: Journal of graphic novels & comics. Volume 10:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 122
• Page End: 139
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Graphic novel -- Joe Sacco -- discourse -- history -- journalism; Graphic novels -- Periodicals; Comic books, strips, etc -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Periodicals; Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Periodicals; Art, Modern; Comic books, strips, etc; Graphic novels; Popular culture; Comicroman; Comic; Periodicals; 741.5
• DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2018.1431801
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2150-4857

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Joe Sacco's graphic novels are often described as comics journalism, even though many of them evidence a distinctly historical method. This essay discusses the development of an engagement with the past in Sacco's oeuvre and asserts that Safe Area Gorazde is the first long-form work where he fully deploys journalism and history together. A close reading of that work demonstrates that these two approaches are not combined into a synthesis as many scholars often assume. Instead, journalism and history largely unfold as separate modes of discourse alongside one another and as such are doubly performative: they transform our awareness of the present as well as our understanding of the past. Sacco was born on Malta but his family soon moved to Australia and then to the United States, where he studied journalism in college. He became involved with alternative comics in the 1980s. While travelling during the early 1990s, he visited the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and his experience there led to the work Palestine, which gained him critical attention. That work and the others that followed established him as a "comics journalist."