Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 18, 2011.
Joe Sacco is one of the world’s foremost cartoonists and is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area Goražde, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. After completing a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, Sacco set out to crisscross the globe, producing comics along the way. In the early 1990s he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories, traveling and taking notes. When he returned to the U.S. he recorded what he had witnessed and heard during his Middle Eastern travels, combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation. Palestine, the resulting book, set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first nonfiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. In 2000, Sacco finished Safe Area Goražde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995: a 240-page exploration of a small Muslim enclave in Bosnia called Goražde. Sacco’s most recent major work is a book about the southern Gaza Strip, called Footnotes in Gaza, published by Metropolitan Books in early 2010. Joe Sacco is a citizen of Malta and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
In this episode he is introduced by Chris Hedges and then speaks about his work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.
Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.
You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.
Pingback: Lannan Podcasts » Joe Sacco with Chris Hedges, Reading, 18 May 2011 – Video
In the early part of the conversation Joe Sacco talks about going out in Sarajevo with two stringer radio journalists hoping to interview Radovan Karadži?, and expressed surprise that he was pretty easy to locate. Of course he was easy to locate. He had made an agreement with US diplomat Richard Holbrooke to absolve him from all liability to prosecution related to his leadership of the Serb opposition to the illegal declaration of an independent state by Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, and his subsequent presidency of Republika Srpska. This was to be in return for Karadži?’s reclusion from subsequent political activity. But this is all well known. All this is just to point out that people like Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges learn highly selective things from their journalistic experiences in other countries.
Radovan Karadži? is not a war criminal, nor is he criminal of any kind. Perhaps Mr. Hedges is living in a social bubble with an illusory reality of some sort.