What makes Sacco’s work so powerful is its self-awareness, its lack of self-righteousness, its attention to odd, humanising detail – Cairo hotel clerks discussing the merits of Pink Floyd and Barclay James Harvest, for instance – so that readers feel they are discovering things at the same speed as Sacco. He feels that the form he has chosen gives him a freedom that perhaps most contemporary journalism does not have and is happy that his work should be described as a comic.
“I have no problem with the term ‘comics’, but now we’re saddled with the term ‘graphic novel’ and what I do I don’t see as a novel,” says Sacco, in a conversation that started over a couple of Jamesons in a downtown Portland bar and resumed at his home the following morning.
“The main benefit is that you can make your subject very accessible,” he says. “You open the book and suddenly you’re in the place. Maybe there’s also a guilty pleasure as people think back to their childhood days reading comics and they think, ‘This might be fun, it might be an easy way to learn something about this.’ It’s a very subversive medium, it’s appealing but what’s in the comic itself could be very hard, even difficult, material.”
Entrevista a Joe Sacco, autor de algunos de los comics documentales (que no novelas gr