The Fixer and Other Stories

"The author masterfully details the minor indinities and wholesale horrors experienced by Sarajevo's citizens and soldiers. A-."—The Washington Post

"A searing and amusign look at the motley collection of reporters, war profiteers, criminals, soldiers and hapless civilians trapped in a war zone."—The New York Times

"A bit of unorthodox war reportage that uses comics to explore both sides of the Balkan conflict. Sacco . . . consistently pushes the boundaries of the form."—Los Angeles Times

"[Sacco] specializes in training a journalist's eye on the day-to-day lives of people caught up in ethnic violence in far-flung locales, bringing empathy and a sense of the absurd."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This foes beyond 'official' reports of ethnic cleansing that kept Bosnia on the front pages for the first half of the 1990s and rendered it old news after the NATO bombing of 1995. Remarkable art, remarkable journalism—this is a remarkable work of conscience."—The Boston Globe


"Sacco always offers readers a complex and intimate portrayal of everyday experience."—The Village Voice

"Sacco is a master cartoonist, possessing a documentarian's eye."—The Toronto Star


"The best journalism contains some art and the best art contains some journalism. Any nonfiction report on the world around us needs some art, in the form of narrative or metaphor or linguistics, to bring life to mere facts. Concurrently any work of art worthy of the name will report something new (either in content or form) to the audience. Joe Sacco, intrepid cartoonist, has been snooping around the borderlands between these disciplines for several years. His first important series, Palestine, (1995) about life in the holy land during the first Intefada, gave us something radically new: a comic book that was immediately relevant to the real world. His next project, the graphic novel Safe Area Gorazde, (2000) gave vision to otherwise unrecorded atrocities of the Balkans war of the early nineties. Now at last Sacco has come out with a new hardcover book, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, his most refined work of reportorial art yet . . . Joe Sacco's increasing skills as a shaper of non-fiction narrative have their equal in his skills as a shaper of images. He works in a realistic style closer to the lithographs of pre-photography newspapers: finely detailed, textured black and white images that mimic the look of the real world. The beauty of Sacco's work is that he gets to have it both ways. He combines the verisimilitude of documentary imagery with the arrangement of the most carefully scripted fiction. One panel, of a bunch of jovial paramilitaries enjoying their booty, laughing, sprawled on couches, seems lifted from Hogarth in its formal arrangement of bodies. Other, subtler uses of imagery seem at play too . . . Sacco's panels in The Fixer will reveal more each time you examine them . . . The Fixer continues one of the most creative and unique visions in the arts today. Joe Sacco has single-handedly created a media sub-genre: comix journalism. He brings alive the life and world of a funny, friendly, dangerous, mysterious person who seems a pure product of his place. He's a perfect comicbook character . . . but he's real."—Andrew D. Arnold, Time