Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco is a premier cartoonist of the modern world who has been equally known for his journalistic abilities. He is also known across the world for his innovative comic journalistic books. Born on 2nd October 1960 in the Malta in a family of engineer father and a teacher mother, he very early in his life moved to the Australian mainland. At the age of 13 he had already spent 12 years in the country after which their family decided to shift to Los Angeles.

When he graduated from Sunset high he was already honing his skills about satire and humor. This was way back in 1978. He maintained his interest in journalismat those days which were a build-up to what he was going to achieve later on in his career, In his early days after graduation he did a bit of journalism which appeared pretty boring for him as he wanted to contribute in bigger ways to the society so to make a difference. He had graduated in journalism from University of Oregon in 1981. As the regular journalism and a job at a publishing company bore him down he decided to make a switch to his hobby which was cartooning.

His first work in this field came in in Maltese and the comic was named Imhabba Vera. For a country for comics were not really a rage this was pretty unusual for him. he returned back to US in 1985 and started a magazine called Portland Permanent Press which used satire as a narrative tool. this couldn’t work for long so he took a job at the The Comics Journal. Here he did some wonderful work and created a comic called Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy inspired from Brave New World.

However the best part of his career was yet to come. This happened when he responded to his desire for travel in 1988 for Europe. There he began working an autobiographical comics Yahoo. The same time around Gulf War was raging in the continent and he made inquires about the wars through travels to Israel and Palestine, From incidents over there he made few comic strips with taking dramatic liberties to the happening incidents. This brought him international fame and he was now truly recognized as a cartoonist force.

Some other books that he wrote are Footnotes in Gaza, Safe Area Gorazde which is again a Palestine like comic about Bosnia war and another book called The Fixer. Now he had found a location in Oregon to go on with his work.