The detail is scary good.

In Safe Area Gorazde Sacco manages to illustrate the wartorn Bosnian city of Gorazde with such mystifying detail that a reader--any reader--could point to his inky pages and find a reason to call bull. No doubt, the illustration in this masterpiece (there! I said it) of American journalism lends the whole experience of reading a whole other gravity. Sacco's ink, which hovers somewhere between photorealism and woodcut, made me continually wary of the threat that one of his subjects might jump out of the page matter-of-factly and into my lap with a good-natured wink. What about the work gives me the creeps? Am I nervous about the stability of my world? Am I afraid that Sacco's interviewees are actually real people?

Of course I am. And of course they are. So far, we've covered a lot of comics ground. We've done historical graphic non-fiction, graphic novels, graphic allegory, and other graphic works, and yet this is the only one we've covered that has made me really question the stability of the world around me. I think this is precisely because of the way in which Sacco manages the visual. That comment about one of his refugees jumping out into my lap? I meant it. They're so scary real that they seem more believable--they seem somehow more voluminous, more flesh-and-blood than all of the other people we've had the opportunity to meet so far.

I think that Sacco's realism is tied deeply and dispassionately to the incredibly difficult demand for objectivity under which the journalist works. During the first world war, there arose this really interesting segment of poets whose work--much like Sacco's--was an artistic attempt to capture the reality of trench warfare for the eager, house arrested general population. In England, this poetry was so prolifically produced that publisher began to call the young soldier poets "Trench Poets" and their poetry "Trench Poetry." These young men had grown up in a period in which they were all given a good, humanist education, and so many were well read and most could express themselves through poetry with relative ease. I am not suggesting that these poets had it "easy," but they certainly knew how to write and write they did.

I bring the Trench Poets up because I think they function as an interesting analogue to the ways in which media evolves to meet the needs of the hungry public. Poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen made poetry into reportage: they were able to capture something about the war that "journalism" or "reportage" of the traditional variety could't. Sacco's Safe Area marks an 80 year gap between the Great War of the 1910s and the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. His work, however, has the potential to be more dynamic in a couple of very interesting ways.

The capacity of visual grammar to express with relative ease ideas with which poetry or prose struggle signals the ever-growing need for the medium in areas traditionally belonging to the journalist, the scholar, the average global citizen. That Sacco's work comes entirely from taped conversations he had with people actually living in the devastated region lends the pictorial element of the work more authority. That we are almost certain he works from photographs heightens our esteem for the project he undertook.

I think people will look back and see that this medium shook the shit out of people, changed the ways people thought about reportage, and redefined an entire profession.

-Kyle O