(From Wikipedia)
Biography
Sacco was born in
Malta on October 2, 1960. His father was an
engineer and his mother was a teacher.
[2] At the age of one, he moved with his family to
Australia,
[3] where he spent his childhood until
1972, when they moved to
Los Angeles.
[1] He began his journalism career working on the
Sunset High School[1] newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.
Sacco earned his
B.A. in
journalism from the
University of Oregon in
1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference."
[3] After being briefly employed by the journal of the
National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring,"
[2] and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the
BBC.
[4]
He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks.
[3] Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese
romance comic named Imħabba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the
Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told
The Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to
Holland for an abortion. Malta is a
Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not."
[5]
Eventually returning to the
United States, by
1985 Sacco had founded a
satirical,
alternative comics magazine called
Portland Permanent Press in
Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at
The Comics Journal as the staff news writer.
[6] This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic
Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy,
[7] a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in
Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World.
But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In
1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across
Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic
Yahoo.
[7] The trip led him towards the ongoing
Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in
Yahoo #2), and in
1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as
Palestine.
The Gulf War segment of
Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to
Israel and the
Palestinian territories to research his first long work.
Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a
comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an
American Book Award in 1996.
Sacco next travelled to
Sarajevo and
Goražde near the end of the
Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as
Palestine: the comics
Safe Area Goražde,
The Fixer, and the stories collected in
War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the
Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001
[7][8].
Safe Area Goražde won the
Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001.
He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to
blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's
American Splendor. In 2005 he wrote and drew two eight-page comics depicting events in Iraq published in
The Guardian, in addition to a 16-page piece in
Harper's Magazine. His most recent major journalistic work is
Footnotes in Gaza.
[9]
Sacco currently lives in
Portland.
[7]
Bibliography
Comics
- 1988-92: Yahoo #1-6. Collected and published in Notes from a Defeatist (2003), Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 1-56097-510-5.
- 1993-5: Palestine #1-9. Collected and published in Palestine (2001), Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 1-56097-432-X.
- 1994: Spotlight on the Genius that is Joe Sacco. Fantagraphics Books.
- 1997: Christmas with Karadzic, published in Zero Zero #15 (Fantagraphics Books) and later in the collection War's End (2005), Drawn and Quarterly, ISBN 1-56097-510-5.
- 1997: War Junkie, Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 1-56097-170-3.
- 1998: Soba, published in Stories from Bosnia #1 and later in the collection War's End (2005), Drawn and Quarterly, ISBN 1-56097-510-5.
- 1998: Stones, published in Zero Zero #25 (Fantagraphics Books).
- 2008: Oregon, published in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, Ecco, ISBN 9780061470905
Comic books and collections