When cartoon journalist Joe Sacco travelled to Sarajevo, Bosnia at the end of the Bosnian War, he was well aware that he was entering a war zone, he said to a group of students, faculty and local comic book fans crowded in Kemeny Hall on Thursday.
The hotel at which Sacco stayed in Bosnia a Holiday Inn frequented by many foreign reporters was "right on sniper alley," he said. Hoping to reproduce the feeling of emptiness and silence he felt while in Bosnia, Sacco drew a cartoon using no written words of the hotel and its surrounding vacant areas.
"The idea of having words in it would ruin the whole effect," Sacco said. "What I want is the reader to feel [the silence]."
Once a single word is added to the image, "the silence is broken," Sacco explained.
Sacco spoke about his work as a cartoonist, which has taken him to locations across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Sacco explained the power of cartoons and other images in portraying the effects of war on ordinary citizens.
Although Sacco said he is committed to depicting the truth, he also acknowledges his independent viewpoint through his cartoons.
"I'm not pretending to be a completely neutral observer," he said.
Despite his inherent biases, Sacco said he tries to ensure that his comics remain true to the environment they portray, and that his quotes and drawings are accurate. He said he keeps a journal in which he records numerous pages of details indicating where buildings were and who was present at a given moment, including even the children in the background.
For many of his historical cartoons, depicting past political conflicts, Sacco conducts meticulous research to ensure that details are correct. For one panel depicting Chechnya during World War II, Sacco said he interviewed individuals who were alive at the time, found photos to recreate the scene and researched Soviet Union soldiers' uniforms in order to draw them accurately.
"There is always going to be, when you're doing comics as journalism, this inherent tension between the accuracy of what you're reporting the quotes and the interpretive nature of the drawing," Sacco said.
Sacco said he always strives for "some level of truth" in his cartoons.
"It's more an essential truth than a literal truth," Sacco said. "Is that journalism? I think it is."
Sacco also showed two iconic images from the Vietnam War and the Napoleonic Wars a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by Eddie Adams of a Vietnamese police chief executing a Vietcong prisoner, and a painting by Francisco Goya of French soldiers executing Spanish revolutionaries. Each of these images used their artistic juxtapositions to invoke strong emotions in viewers, according to Sacco.
"Any sort of narrative art form is really deliberate and has intent," Sacco said. "My work is pretty deliberate, and it's especially deliberate in the sense of where I choose to go and what I choose to report on."
Sacco's most recent journalistic piece, which he is producing with journalist and TruthDig blogger Chris Hedges, focuses on post-industrial America. His recent research has brought him to places like Camden, N.J., and southern West Virginia, he said.
Sacco said he hopes to move away from journalistic work in the future to focus on cartoons that confront human nature from a psychological perspective.
Sacco's presentation, "Comics as Journalism," was sponsored by the Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation, and was co-presented by the Center for Cartoon Studies and the Leslie Center for the Humanities.