An Interview with Joe Sacco

“It’s clawing your way to the truth.”

Joe Sacco by Audra McNamee

Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco is credited as the first artist to practice rigorous, investigative journalism using the comics form. Born in Malta, in 1960, Sacco earned his BA in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981. His groundbreaking work documenting Palestinian life in the Occupied Territories was awarded the National Book Award in 1996 and was compiled in the graphic narrative Palestine (2001). He went on to document the war in Bosnia in The Fixer (2003), War’s End (2005), and Safe Area Goražde (2000). His other notable monographs include Footnotes in Gaza (2009), which won a Ridenhour Book Prize, and his most recent book, Paying the Land (2020). Paying the Land investigates resource extraction, the devastation of residential schooling, and the legacy of colonialism among the Dené First Nations communities. Sacco contributes graphic reportage to magazines and newspapers worldwide, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and XXI. Many of his shorter works are collected in the anthology Journalism (2012). Sacco is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, including a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Time Magazine Best Comic of 2000 award. Residing in Portland, Oregon, Sacco is currently at work on a book about the aftermath of a riot that took place in Uttar Pradesh, among other projects.

Interview with Joe Sacco

By Cyrus Lyday and Audra McNamee

https://jsma.uoregon.edu/JoeSacco

Cyrus Lyday: Thanks for being here, Joe. As you know, in the world of comics journalism, your reputation precedes you. I was wondering what your thoughts are on your figure within the community? And how do you feel knowing that a lot of this world thinks of you as a founder? Joe Sacco: I try not to think about that sort of thing too much. As a founder, I’m doing what I’m doing, but of course there are antecedents to what I’ve been doing. I don’t think I’m the first to have put journalism and comics together. It was happening with the Illustrated London News. Harper’s magazine used to send out illustrators anyway during the civil war. So, there are antecedents. I didn’t know much about that sort of thing when I started. I wasn’t thinking very theoretically about what I was doing when I started. I had a journalism degree. I wanted to be a journalist. That didn’t really work out. So I fell back on comics and was doing autobiographical comics. And eventually, because I am pretty political, I wanted to go see what was going on in the Middle East for various reasons. And so, the two things—journalism and comics—sort of came together and began twining around each other. But before my trip out, I wasn’t really sure of what I was doing or even what my methods were going to be. I couldn’t really explain it to myself. It’s something that developed very organically. So as far as what that means as far as my standing in comics history, I do hope they put me on a pedestal one day. I’d like a statue that no one tears down one day! That’s what I want! (smiles) Audra McNamee: It’s been alleged that you are the person who coined the term “Comics Journalism.” Is that the case? JS: Well, that’s an expression I started to use. Yeah, I mean maybe I’ll say, guilty, because I don’t know anyone else who came up with it before that. But others have pointed out that it’s a bit misleading in some respects. Because when you think of comics journalism, maybe you think it’s journalism about comics. I liked using the word “comics” as opposed to “graphic novel journalism” because I’ve always liked that expression – comics! But yeah, I’ll take credit! Put me on a stamp! I’m ready for all the credit! (laughs)

CL: When you hear the word “journalism,” how do you understand it? And really, what is comics journalism to you? JS: I think of it in terms of going out and reporting, because I’ve learned to separate journalism from reporting. And there’s a lot of “journalism” that goes on that isn’t really reporting. It’s just people pontificating and it’s called journalism because they’re on a news channel or they have a YouTube channel or whatever it is. But to me, reporting is what’s really important. And that basically means going out and finding out what’s going on. I mean it’s actually quite a simple concept—trying to be quite honest about what you see, understanding where you’re coming from, and how that might cloud what you’re looking at. And putting it all together with what you are trying to assess really is the truth. So, putting it all together to get as close to something that you could call the truth as possible. I also separate it from what I studied at the University of Oregon, which was “objective style” reporting. I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as “objectivity” in most reporting. I would rather know what my background is, what prejudices I’m going in with, and make those clear to a reader. So there’s a lot of things that are involved in journalism. It’s not just, “Oh I’m getting both sides of the story,” or some simple formulation that you’re often taught; it’s clawing your way to the truth, basically. And comics journalism—that’s just adding a visual component. Which is also very important because there’s a lot that can be told visually that is difficult to get at with prose. Photographers can do a great job of that. Photojournalism is really premised on the idea that one photograph can sum up something entire with one image. Whereas comics’ multiple images create an atmosphere or give the reader a sense of what it really feels like to be in a place. In a way it’s sort of accidental that I’ve used comics with journalism, because when I got a degree, I wanted just to be a straight-out news reporter. I never would have thought of bringing comics into it. If I’d actually made a career, if I had been able to make a living writing, I would have done that. So I just pulled in what other things I knew somehow. AM: When you’re conducting and creating these works of journalism, you’ve talked a little bit about what you think the goal of journalism is. But do you, yourself, have any kind of specific goal for your journalistic pieces?

JS: I’m only going to look at issues that really matter to me. The goal is to examine those things that troubled me about the world, to try to go to those places I think are underserved, if you can call it that journalistically. Sometimes I’ll see a story where there are hundreds of people with their cameras out, taking pictures. And I think to myself that’s where I don’t want to be. It might be interesting. But I want to go to a place where it’s not even appropriate to carry a camera and not even think about it because things are so ordinary. You know, certain things are so ordinary, why even take a picture of it. You can look at my topics and see what’s interested me. I’ve been interested in what’s happened to the Palestinians, always interested in Bosnia. I was interested in poverty in India. Interested in migrant issues in Europe, interested in Indigenous People and resource extraction and colonialism and Canada. Those are things that have interested me. Troubled me. And a lot of my journeys, I don’t think of them so much as “Oh, I’m going to tell the reader what’s going on.” I’m almost trying to find out myself what’s going on. I’m trying to get to the bottom to satisfy myself—why do things happen?—and the further I go down the journalistic path, it also becomes a matter of psychology. Why do humans do what they do? Not just what happened, where, and when. So, I’ve allowed my journalistic mandate to expand outside of that to some degree. CL: You’ve mentioned a lot of the different complex situations and historical contexts that you have reported on. Knowing these things, why use comic journalism to write about these pieces? Also, do you think that these stories work better in comics journalism, or do you think that there are some stories that lend themselves better to other forms of journalism? JS: I said earlier that if I had been successful as a writer—if I found a job that satisfied that itch—I probably never even would have thought of using comics. Comics was something I was always doing as a kid. So it’s hard to say why comics journalism, because if I were a documentary filmmaker, I might have gone to the same places. I just accidentally am in a cartoonist’s body. I still have the same interests, but now I am going to project myself into those places with the tools of a cartoonist. And what are those tools that make a work? Well, we’re visual. We are visual creatures. We are attracted to visual material. And I think that people are particularly attracted to drawing. And one thing drawing can do is, you can recreate someone else’s experiences if you’ve done a lot of visual research. You can take a reader back into time quite easily. You can draw the present and the past next to each other. Again, the multiplicity of images is the other thing, because you don’t just give one drawing of something. You have many, many drawings providing a lot of background information that seeps into the reader’s subconsciousness, and you have the written element. What’s not to like about that? It’s just got so much going for it. The other thing, especially with hard material, I think what comics and drawing allows you to do is to present really difficult material; you can depict violence in a way that a reader looks at it and knows it’s a drawing. And it has an impact. It has a power. But it allows the reader to look at the violence. Whereas, sometimes I’ll see a photograph that’s really violent, or documentary footage that’s really violent, and I literally just have to turn away because it’s too much for me. It’s too much to see a human being suffering and dying in front of your eyes on film. I think that’s a normal response, and drawing is a filter that allows us to go into some dark places, and I think that has great uses. AM: Based on the interests that you have laid out here, it sounds like you have a lot of things you’re interested in, focused on, and think are worthy of reporting in your comics journalism form. So how do you decide which ones that you’re going to narrow in and create these enormous works on, and also what is your normal turn-around time? JS: Normal turn-around time depends. For a book-length project, it’s generally three to five, six, seven years. Something like that. It takes time, and that will actually help answer the first part of your question, which is why do I choose what I choose. Because I know it’s going to take a lot of time, I need to choose those subjects that I know I’m really committed to, and that will interest me through a very long process. I have to think, “Okay, I’m making a decision now, and five years from now the consequences of this decision will be that I will be sitting at my drawing table day after day working on this very issue.” Am I interested in this enough, or do I think I can do it well enough that it’s worth my time and the reader’s time? Every topic I pick has to hit me in the gut; it just has to pull me in. I have to feel compelled to do it. I felt compelled to do a book about the Palestinians. I had to do it once it dawned on me that I could. At the time I was living in Berlin, which was relatively close. I could fly into the Middle East and go see this place now. Why don’t I do that? Once you pose that question, “Why don’t you do that?” then you’re forever stuck with it, and you have to answer it. And the way I answer is to say, “Well, I will do that.” But obviously there are many different topics, and this is happening the older I get. I’m not 30 years old and looking ahead to a long career ahead of me. I’m now 60 and looking back, and when I look forward I see maybe a decade and a half of intense work if I’m lucky, maybe two at the outside limit. So you’re narrowing things down and you’re saying there’s maybe five or six things that I’m interested in in this world, but now I have to choose. The choices become more stark the older you get. CL: I think you’re pretty familiar with this next question. Readers tend to notice that you portray yourself in a more classic comical style when you’re drawing yourself. How do you think that impacts the way your books are read with your avatar looking slightly different than the rest of the people in your work? JS: It’s not something I gave much thought to, but I have heard others say that the nondescript nature of the character I draw as myself helps the readers put themselves into my shoes. I’m not so defined that the reader can’t see himself, herself, themselves in my position. That said, it wasn’t really well thought out, what I was doing. The truth is, I never studied art. I was always drawing as a kid. I drew in what’s considered the Big Foot style, that Robert Crumb-esque way where things are a little exaggerated. Things are very

caricatured. I watched spaghetti Westerns when I was a kid, so you have these real close-ups; people look kind of ugly and grotesque. That grotesque way of drawing things and thinking about things was really in my hand. As I started doing the journalistic work, you’ll notice a change in my work. You’ll notice a change in my work even in the Palestine book, because it changed from page 1 to the last page. I forced my hand to draw more representationally only because the journalistic approach just seemed to call for it. There were many things about doing journalism that made me pull in some of my tendencies. Palestine, now, I look back on as a charming book in a way. I was trying to keep engaged when I was drawing, so I would change a lot of angles, do these crazy close-ups, worm’s eye view, overhead, it was really fun to draw. That gives it its charm, but over time, for better or worse, and I’m not even saying it’s for better, but journalistically I felt that the approach needs to be toned down. I need everything to drive the narrative without thinking in terms of what’s going to interest me on the drawing table today. The bigger question was: What’s going to make the narrative work? Which makes for sometimes a flatter approach. One that I’m very aware of, and I have to force myself to do because my natural tendency is to let my freak flag fly. I haven’t been able to do that with journalism; I tone that down. It hasn’t been easy. I won’t say it’s painful for me to draw representationally, but it’s simply not easy. It’s difficult. I’m sweating all the time when I’m doing it. I’m not a natural artist. I know people like Craig Thomson, others; I watched them draw the human body or something that they’re looking at. I think they can do that with ink on paper right in front of my eyes and not get anything wrong. And I’m sitting there with a pencil, drawing, erasing, drawing, erasing, because I kind of don’t know how to draw. I bang at it, I bang at it. AM: I, as a reader, almost perceive your comic layout as this very playful, very moving thing, and it definitely always is driving the story forward. But so often what you’re showing breaks out of the traditional paneled boxes. What importance do you place on stylistic choices of the comics journalism author, and how do you weigh the art style of comics classical layout, how do you push the meaning? JS: Despite what I said before about what I said about trying to draw representationally, I mean all that is true. But I’m always glad that I am not the perfect representational drawer, that I come from a cartooning background. Because some of my panels get closer to the truth by being cartoony. Somehow you get that more expressive look: a nun beating a child, you can draw it from a distance and it’s just what you would imagine if you saw a photograph of the same sort of thing. But if I want to get some of the emotional impact, the unfairness of it, you can do a lot of things. You can look at the nun from below to give her more authority. There are things you know how to do that are quite inherent as an artist. They don’t even need to be taught. Once you understand the basics, you know that you can get to the essential truth of something by not drawing realistically at all times. There’s a scene in one of my books, it’s a short story called “Šoba.” It’s in a collection about some stories from Bosnia. It’s a scene in a club in Sarajevo, and you can tell music really matters to them. These are front line soldiers and their girlfriends. In a few hours they are going to have to go to the front line, so they are really engaged in the music that’s playing. How do I show that? I use these cartoony elements: guys’ heads, they’re headbanging, so heavily swoosh marks, and I really tried to give it the power that it has to see it. That you can’t capture with a camera. There’s no way that you can capture certain things with a camera. With cartooning, you capture the intensity of the moment, if you allow yourself to go in that direction, then you pull yourself back and now it’s a bit more staid. I think cartooning, because the same hand is drawing the representational as opposed to the cartooning part of it. It is this elastic nature to cartooning that you can use to your advantage in your journalistic work. AM: You’ve mentioned how your art-style has evolved over the years. It has, however, remained painstakingly crosshatched and nearly always black and white. Are there specific reasons why you have chosen to stick with these elements?

JS: Sometimes you start drawing a certain way at a certain time, and you never lose it. There have been times I’ve wanted to simplify my work, and my hand just goes a different way. There’s a muscle memory in the hand that takes over from the brain in your head, and at some point, you stop arguing with your hand, and you just let your hand do what it wants to do. And what my hand wants to do is crosshatching. I’ve noticed over time that it has its advantages, because it looks like a lot of work, and I don’t do anything on a computer. Sometimes the drawings themselves can be pretty intense: the layouts, getting the figures right, really carefully with ink going over my pencil; that’s really intense, concentrated work. Crosshatching, on the other hand, is almost meditative. I need that workspace to decompress from the intense parts. If I had a computer program where I could just lay the crosshatching on, it would not allow for that meditative space. It takes time but it has tactile value. Just the enjoyment of it, just letting

yourself go. Your mind goes to another place, and you’re just doing this thing. I want to sustain myself at the desk, and the way to do that is to listen to your own artistic body and what it wants to do. I know it would kill me if all I was doing was scanning pages, putting stuff in, whatever. The reason I don’t use color is I don’t know how to use color. It’s less a choice. When I started doing comics, the independent comic scene was mostly black and white. Everyone was working black and white because it was cheaper to produce that way. A lot of my peers went on to do color, and they really knew what they were doing. I, on the other hand, still to this day do not know how to use Photoshop. I wouldn’t say that I have any sense of pride. I would like to learn how to use it. But I also don’t have the time to learn how to use it. I should, but what you end up doing is improving on your limitations until it becomes your style. It’s like black and white is where I trapped myself, and I’ve learned as much as possible to use black and white to get the textual elements that you can add with black and white. You can do a lot as far as texture goes with black and white, and now that’s all I know how to do. When I draw, I think in terms of black and white. AM: As you mentioned, you work entirely in physical mediums; no digital medium whatsoever. I imagine you do some element of editing, so how does that work for you? If you need to change text or change your visuals, or you need to change multiple pages. How does that work with no digital? JS: If I have to change multiple pages, I just put them aside and say, “Okay, I’ve got to start again.” If I make a mistake on a face, and that happens, I will trace the face onto a piece of board. I’ll draw the new face. I’ll cut it out with an X-acto blade and paste it over the face. If it’s a whole panel, I might cut out that panel and put in a new panel. If it’s words, I might use White-Out or I will write out a new word and paste it on. And then, and this is why I should learn how to use Photoshop, I tell the people who are going to go through the art, there might be a shadow under this paste, so make sure there’s no shadow mark, or something like that. But it’s all done very very old school. It’s all old school, but I love that. I love the tactile feeling. And also, comics are about producing pages. I try to work very well. I try to do a very good job. and I’m usually satisfied about 90-95% with my drawings. But then there’s a time I always say, okay, good enough, next page. Good enough, next page. Because you’ve got five years of work. I’m not going to be an absolute perfectionist, and I worry that just like digital cameras or using a computer to correct things, you can really get into this thing of trying to overcorrect and get things so perfect, and you just make yourself miserable. And sometimes you change things that are fine. I’d rather limit my options for corrections. AM: You have stated that you ask a lot of visual questions of the people you are interviewing, along with the traditional journalistic questions and that you take photos. But you never sketch while you’re on location. JS: Very little. When I sketched, I went on tour with a rock band, and I did a comic about being on this tour. And that really involved sketching. In fact, I did not take a camera purposely so I would learn how to sketch right there and then. And that was really useful. I mean, the difference between my early sketches and after some weeks was kind of phenomenal. Part of me wishes I would have gone down that road because it would really have improved my work. But when I’m in the field I’m much more inclined to want to just talk to people and get stories, and sketching takes time. And I know other cartoonists who do journalism and what they tell me is sometimes they’ll still sketch something as a way of starting a conversation with someone. And I can see how that can work, but because I was trained to be a news reporter, I have no trouble imposing myself on people and asking, “Can we talk?” or “Can I come back later and we talk?” So I’m talking; I’m gathering a lot of standard reportorial questions. And other comics journalists will probably do that differently. That’s the great thing: there is no one way of doing any of this. I just tend to spend a lot of time engaging with people, taking photographs, and then relying on the photographs I’ve taken to recapture some things. AM: When you’re out in the field gathering information in most of your work, you work with at least one translator or guide or person in the community. Who introduces you to people? How do you feel this collaboration impacts your work? How does working with that person alter and change what you make? JS: First of all, I should say that in most of the places I’ve gone it would be almost impossible to do the work without a person who knows the community, knows how to navigate that community. Even knows the morals and values of that community, and can say, “Don’t do that.” Without that person it would be impossible. I couldn’t do my work without some of those people. It’s not always the case, but I’d say it’s the case 60-70% of the time. It’s really super important to get someone who is known within the community or trusted within the community. I seldom have worked with a professional fixer. Professional fixers have their value because they usually can speak perfectly good English; they’re good at their jobs and all that. But if they are from, let’s say, Gaza City, and you want to do your work in Khan Younis, they won’t be known in Khan Younis, so they will introduce you and do all that fixer kind of work, but it’s much better to have someone from Khan Younis who’s trusted, who knows really who to go to. And if you’re with that person, if you’re with that guide from Khan Younis, as I was, he’s trusted; he’s respected in the community; his family is respected in the community; that’s going to open doors to me because he’s vetting me; he’s automatically vetting me. The last book I did about Indigenous People in Northwest Territories; it wasn’t an Indigenous person who introduced me to all these people, it was a white person, but she was well-known, and I think relatively well-regarded in those communities. So it was an entrée into them. I could not have driven up to one of these communities and just walked out and said, “Hey, I’m here to do this,” because what does that mean? It’s possible to do your work that way, but it’s going to take a lot longer to build up trust, and in some cases it can be a bit suspicious. Who are you? So those people are really important.

Now all that said, if my emphasis is on a guide who knows a place and is trusted, their English might not be absolutely perfect, but that to me is not as important, so I make certain choices about what I want from someone. There have been times when I’ve had guides who have said things like, “Oh, don’t tell him this.” Sometimes I know enough Arabic because I speak Maltese, which is close to Arabic. I’ll know enough when someone is saying something like that. You know, don’t tell them this sort of stuff. That’s the translator saying that. People have their agendas. Everyone has their agenda. And even a guide can know that, oh, now he’s getting close to something that as a community we don’t want him to know. And I’m just interested, I’d like to get there if I’m trusted enough, but in the end, I don’t need to know who all the fighters are, and guerrillas, and where they live. That’s not for me to know. I don’t want to know that sort of stuff, if you know what I mean. I want to speak to some people who can tell me things that are interesting, but I don’t need to know all the secrets either.

I understand a guide is also from the community and can also protect the community from me, too. So there’s a reciprocal relationship, with any good guide. And in Gaza, for example, I began to use Abed, he became my friend. He began to really get into the story, was really helpful in discerning if someone might not be telling the truth, might be exaggerating or whatever. He would start to judge those things, and I would just trust his judgment because he knew the Arabic and I didn’t, and he could judge tones of voice or whatever it was. So you know you can rely on guides for a lot of stuff. Thank God for them.

AM: Do you think in any way possible that your early reading of underground or independent comics impacted the message of your books at all? JS: I think the underground comics especially had enormous impact. If you look at my work and you look at their work you might not see a lot of overlap in terms of content. There’s an anti-authoritarian aspect to the underground work which I share and which comes out in my work. There’s also a freedom of the way they approached what they were doing. Now younger people would probably judge them for treading on this or treading on that. We always judge the past, but for me personally, those were the comics that made me interested in the sheer possibility of comics. Otherwise, all I would have seen were superhero comics, or war comics, or whatever there were that weren’t giving me anything else. I remember reading Bill Griffith; it was called Griffith Observatory, and it was kind of this guy with a telescope just looking at stuff and looking at these outrageous social things and behaviors that were going on. And he was calling them out in this very funny way. Or [there was] something called Bicentennial Grossouts. It was this underground comic that had a long story about America’s war in the Philippines in the late 1800s. I knew nothing about it. This was the first time I was learning about it. They would get into some heavy political stuff despite all the drug stuff and sexism, and all that sort of stuff. There were things about it that were really useful for someone like me just to help break my mind from the mainstream or to understand there are possibilities of thinking about things and ways of approaching things. So it had enormous impact, and, obviously, on my art style. AM: Your early work was a lot of wartime reporting or conflict journalism. It seems like over the years you’ve transitioned to talking about other kinds of conflict. Do you think you would ever go back to any kind of wartime reporting, and what was it like transitioning out of this kind of wartime reporting to your most recent work? Did it feel different? Did anything surprise you? JS: I wanted to get away from drawing weaponry and drawing violence. But, yeah, you’re right, the topics I chose were heavy, and were violent through other means: poverty, stopping migrants who were absolutely desperate, colonialism in Canada, the residential schools in Canada. I was trying to get away from violence but realizing you can’t get away from forms of violence. You cannot get away from it. The world is full of it. You experience that every day in many different ways. That was not a shock to me, but it made me realize that some of the books I was doing, even if they weren’t drawing war, were just as heavy. When I was drawing them on the table, when I was actually drawing this stuff, it was not pleasant to draw some of that stuff. I’m not really interested in going back to any sort of war zone again. That said, my next journalistic book is about a riot that took place in India, and communal violence. To be honest, I should have probably started it after I finished the book on the Indigenous People in Canada, but I ended up giving myself a two-year break, because I just didn’t want to get into it right away. Now I’m kind of ready to approach it, but at that point it was like, I just don’t want to get into this topic again because it’s back to physical violence. CL: I’m very interested in knowing what you think about your future and the future of comics journalism in general. So, knowing that Paying the Land was released in 2020, and the turn-around time of your pieces does extend into years, what do you think your next project will be? You told us about this India piece. Can you tell us a little bit about your timeline coming up? JS: The timeline ultimately ends in death, so let’s keep that in mind. But between now and then I would like to do this India book. It shouldn’t be a long book. I have already done all the research. I was there. And I’ve already written the script. It’s just now I’m talking to my agent and saying, “Can you get a contract for this book?” If I really work on it straight, it shouldn’t take more than a year and a half, to two years, which for me is a very short book. And I think it’s a much tighter book than a lot of my other ones. After that, if you want to talk about a journalism book that I kind of want to do, it’d be about liberation theology in Latin America. Liberation theology is, in a very simple way, mixing some of the Gospel with Marxism. And that interests me because I’ve met a lot of religious people along the way, a lot of people who derive a lot of strength from their faith, and it’s impressive to me. I’m not a religious person at all, but

I have a lot of liberal friends who will immediately dismiss any theological thought, and I’ve always been very interested in theology. And I’m particularly interested in theology as a source of good in the world, as opposed to the many many instances as a source of ill. We can rattle those off, including in Canada. So that’s kind of the idea. That book is speculative. It depends on what happens with my health and everything. At the same time I want to work on outside projects—stuff that is more cartoony, isn’t strictly journalism, but it’s very funny. I want to get back to how I started doing comics because I like to make people laugh. I want to get back to that. It’s really important to me personally. So I have projects that are ongoing, that allow that, but are also very serious all at the same time. Let’s just say they’re a little more philosophical and get into places where journalism can’t go. They’re more about ideas. So, the timeline, let’s see, I hope I live to 150 and I’m still drawing at 150, but it’s unlikely. CL: You talked a little bit about wanting to foray into a different space than journalism. Have you ever thought about going into a space outside comics for some work? JS: Well, I really don’t want to do film. I think that’s where a lot of cartoonists have these aspirations, to end up in film. And I say, just go straight to film, we don’t need ya. Because ultimately, if that’s what you want to do, do that. Because comics, to me, are a very separate kind of medium. We share some of the same terminology, in fact a lot of our terminology is borrowed from film. But I’m trying very hard to do things that could not possibly be turned into a film. Like no way can this be made into a film; it can only be done in comics. That’s what I’m interested in. I wouldn’t mind getting into writing if for some reason I couldn’t draw any more, but I could still function in other ways. I wouldn’t mind writing, though I do have a fear that my writing wouldn’t be as good as my comics would be. I would never want to be a B+ writer. I think of myself as quite good at what I do as far as comics, but I’m not as confident in prose. I love writing, but I just think there are so many people who can write so incredibly well, that I’m not sure I would have anything to offer. Maybe...but who can say? CL: How do you see the practice of comics journalism changing and hopefully improving in the near future and further?

JS: I think there are a lot of people now that are doing it. I’m certainly not the only one. There are many people who have really put their shoulder into it. What I like about it is that when I see other people’s work it’s quite different from my own. They have a different idea of what should be in comics journalism. They have different approaches, even to the same subject they would have a different approach. Like Sarah Glidden has talked about being a little more uncomfortable with recreating people’s experiences through the comics form. I’m not one to argue with that. I’m thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Then you will find a way to tell the stories in a way you feel comfortable as journalism.

Frankly, I hope there’ll never be any rule set for what we’re doing, except a certain integrity that you’re trying to get towards a truth or an honesty about what you’re examining. That, to me, should be the only rule. Because a lot of people are doing things in different ways. Some people are doing things on the web. Some people go into a demonstration and right away they’re drawing something and posting it. Those kinds of things are really valuable in their own way. I can’t do them. So I admire people who can do them. It’s not the way I do things. I want to sit down with things, ruminate, even tell stories that are quite old that I think still have a bearing on today or tomorrow. So there are many ways of approaching it. I think that the future is sort of good. I think you’ll see a lot of newspapers and magazines and websites looking for that sort of material. It’s quite engaging what people can do with it. One thing I do hope though is that when you’re doing reporting you also have to think in terms of trying to bring a real “A” game as far as making something engaging. Simply presenting facts and not pulling the reader in, you can call it journalism but it’s just not going to interest me necessarily. I always need a human element, a story, a narrative. This is stuff that I’m not inventing. Journalism always works the best when it pulls the reader in. And so any cartoon journalist has to think in those terms, and I think comics allows for that. It’s just the very simple fact that you are drawing something that can make it engaging and, dare I say, entertaining. CL: Do you think that the field of comics journalism has room for expansion, and how can we grow the audience for comics journalism? JS: Well, you grow the audience by just producing good work. This was the big question 20 to 30 years ago with comics in general. There weren’t many people doing independent comics. We all kind of knew each other. We all knew each other’s work. We probably all knew each other personally because we met at these conventions, so at some point not just in journalism, but at some point comics created this critical mass. And suddenly editors, the people who are the tastemakers, looked at it and said, “Oh, this is actually really really good work, and there’s a fair amount of it.” And suddenly the perception of comics as not being for kids any more came into being, and there was a shift. And the same is probably true for comics journalism. If there’s enough of it, and I think there are a lot of good people working in the field of comics journalism now, when there’s enough of it then it’s going to be taken seriously. The quality of the work and the quantity together. And I think we’re on our way to that. Because of social media, the way people can post things, there are people that have way bigger audiences than me, that have been working in the field for a much shorter time just by the nature of the fact that they’re onto the newer technologies. And those are things that people like you have to answer more than me. Look at me: I’m very old school. It’s good if you can listen to me and there’s something to be taken from me, but you’ve also got to propel yourself forward in your own way that I would never think of. AM: What has been the most difficult aspect of your work? JS: I love the drawing. I mean, sometimes the drawing’s difficult when it’s about violence and there are some unpleasant drawings you just stick with them and get them done. Because I trained to be a journalist and to be a hard news writer, the hardest thing to me is to not be out in the field because I love that so much. I love reporting. I love it. But you know reporting is six weeks, two months, two weeks, and the drawing is two years, five years, four years. So I love the drawing, but the hard thing for me is if I was just a prose reporter, I probably would have covered five times the amount of stories in depth. But that just comes with the territory and I’m never going to rush the drawing. I think that helps the work, but I’m always a little jealous when I get together with journalists, and I hear where they’re going, what they’re doing. It’s fine, I’m good. I have one of the best jobs on earth. CL: Is there anything written in your published work that you would do differently now?

JS: I’d probably redraw some of the early pages of Palestine. There was nothing malicious in it, but because all I’d done before was caricature and funny stuff, everyone looks sort of funny. I probably would tone that down to some extent. That’s about it. I forgive myself for that. I’ve got no problems forgiving myself. There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s just that your hand drew a certain way, and over time you sort of shifted it as you saw it was needed. But no, not really, I’m really satisfied with the work I’ve done. I wish I could have done more of it. But yeah, I’m satisfied. AM: Do you have any advice that you give to aspiring comics journalists? JS: You’ve got to want to do it. It’s hard. I’m not going to pretend. It’s hard to make a living at comics. And doing comics journalism right is difficult to make a living at. As long as you know you’ve got it within you to really push yourself and persevere, then you’re on it. There’s no guarantee. That’s the problem. There’s simply no guarantee in the arts in general. But if you’re committed to it, and you do good work, then you’ve got a chance. Let’s just say that. So I hope aspiring artists will decide they are ready to really put their back into it. It’s a great field, and it’s important work...really important.