NEGOTIATING GRAPHIC GEOGRAPHIES: ARCHITECTURE, VIOLENCE AND MEMORY IN JOE SACCO’S COMICS JOURNALISM
SAGAR TARANGA MANDAL

Ph.D. Supervisor: PROFESSOR ABHIJIT GUPTA, DEPT. OF ENGLISH
JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

Synopsis:
My thesis examines the documentary practice of Joe Sacco, the Maltese-born American comics artist, to reveal how a combination of infrastructural and affective designs within Sacco’s story-worlds comes to shape and potentially re-define the ethics of global conflict reportage. Hailed as the contemporary force behind comics journalism, Sacco’s major works in the past decades include Palestine (1993–1995; issued as a single volume in 2001), Safe Area Goražde (2007), The Fixer and the Other Stories (2009; “The Fixer” was originally published as a self-titled separate edition in 2003), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), and The Great War: An Illustrated Panorama (2013).
In my investigation, I have primarily chosen to concentrate on Sacco’s graphic treatment of large-scale armed conflicts. The defined aesthetics of these works significantly suggest two distinct patterns of artistic and journalistic engagement, namely, conceptualizing the comics grid as a haptic environment, and configuring reportage as ludic play, the latter remaining crucially invested in all of Sacco’s drawn subjects but none more than through his own self-image.
In Sacco’s work, the graphiation of the politically embroiled body is largely contingent on a two-fold ludic exposition that moves from a staged, if necessary, mediatized simulation of real events to a representational mode embodying the testimonial nature of the comics correspondent’s deep and circuitous sojourn amidst foreign cultures. Again, this visual movement evidencing Sacco’s increasing spatial in-dwelling gets comprehensively served by a thorough scopic determination of the surface of the comics page. In other words, within Sacco’s story-world, the notion of journalism as a relational ludic practice is effectively reliant on the creation of a three-dimensional scopic ecology. For this, Sacco evolves a gridding mechanism that re-creates the visceral experience of three-dimensionality of the field on the page. As such, the grid while holding documented reality in tension unfolds into a sophisticated visual aperture according both an ethical and spatial entrenchment to Sacco’s representations of everyday instances of civilian resilience and dissent against necropolitical technologies.
In line with this evolution, Sacco’s self-figuration can also be found to traverse a distinct ludic trajectory. The ensuing transformation is one from a playful, touristy, manipulative media practice located deep in the hubris of exercising power over precarious subjects to admitting journalistic practice as relational and fraught with the ruptures of regional political games. Here, the idea of the ludic and the comics space become intricately entwined. Flippant and commercial ludic correspondence are put up only to expose their ineffectuality when it comes to uncovering ground-zero events. Also, apart from providing a contrast to the logic of a deterrent simulation affecting global media representation of conflicts, it underscores playful, “risk-taking” explorations of urban spaces, or more particularly, of cartographies that have suffered the ravages of both military and planning-based urbicide. The result is a prolific graphic assemblage braiding the public and private displays of playful solidarities and defiance by aggrieved citizens with Sacco’s very own evolving ludic topology. Accordingly, my thesis argues that the forms of graphic embodiment we come across the diegetic play of Sacco’s works can potentially suggest a course of action enriching what many journalism organizations like the NPPA, or the National Press Photographers Association of America, maintain as codes of ethics to deter media personnel from pandering to lurid curiosity, or stereotyping, and guide them in distinguishing news from advertising.