Thursday, December 16, 2004

This Comic Is Good - Safe Area Gorazde

Cool! Paul is playing the recommendation game as well! Woohoo!

Now, on to my older comic recommendation...Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995.

One of the less well-known areas of comic work is the area of comic journalism.

This is what Joe Sacco does, and he does it amazingly.

Sacco went to Bosnia during the war, and spent four months speaking to the people there.

He then came back and gave us this remarkable depiction of what life was like for the people of Gorazde at the time, cut off from the rest of the world, yet firmly entrenched in the 90s.

Sacco also works in some history for the area, and how it came to this point...and he couldn't pick a more poignant place.

Safe Areas were places the UN put in the country where people could not be attacked. This Safe Area (Gorazde) was about to be dissolved...leaving the people with no safe haven. Can you imagine that horror? That unsettledness?

Well, with Sacco's help, we can. But we can also see how modern people (this is only a DECADE ago!) handle such a horrendous situation. Watch as the youth converse about Madonna and Levi's.

The coping mechanism of the human spirit is astonishing.

The art by Sacco is decent. He gives us a realistic, if over-the-top, presentation of what people look like. Very caricature-like.

Anyone read this?

Anyone read Sacco's previous work, Palenstine?

What do y'all think?

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