In Development

I regard Joe Sacco's graphic novel/comic book Palestine as one of the great revelatory texts of our time, in a two-fold sense. In the first place if you don't know that much about life in the Occupied Territories (and when I first read it, I didn't) it supplies an extraordinary sense of the texture of that life, despite being somewhat dated. (Basically it deals with the period 1991 - 92.) Secondly it shows beyond any reasonable doubt that comics can function as high journalism if not high art.

When I first read it I was astonished at how assured it was, in terms of both brilliant draftsmanship and, perhaps even more impressively, its maintenance of a humanely balanced point of view regarding the unfolding of events. The writer functioned as a kind of Chaucerian everyman figure, engaged with and noticing everything with a kind of beguiling innocence belying the sharpness of vision underpinning the book as a whole.

Today I've been reading the much less impressive Notes From A Defeatist, a collection of Mr Sacco's earlier comics which I've dipped into previously but never with great enthusiasm. The origins of his style in the underground comics of the late-sixties, early-seventies are obvious, especially the influence of the work of Robert Crumb. There's an abundance of gratuitous profanity and an adolescent obsession with the physically grotesque that makes for tiresome reading at times. Also a kind of awkwardly heightened self-consciousness haunts the autobiographical material making it a matter of some astonishment that this came to be so utterly transcended in the later work. There are signs of this starting to happen, especially in More Women, More Children, More Quickly, a piece about Sacco's mother's experiences in the bombing of Malta, but little to suggest the confident mixture of distance and involvement achieved in Palestine. This piece also marks the adoption of a certain restraint in the depiction of human figures that blossoms into the tenderness of observation in the later comics.

I suppose the obvious point here is that great work does not usually come automatically, but is the fruit of talent (and how wonderful all the drawings are, from the very earliest) allied to sheer determination. And when that determination meshes with a concern for what is overwhelmingly important to others rather being narrowly focussed on oneself you get something very special.