Joe Sacco was born in 1960 in Malta, the son of an engineer father and teacher mother. His family mo

Joe Sacco was born in 1960 in Malta, the son of an engineer father and teacher mother. His family moved to Australia and lived there from 1961 to 1972. The family came to the US when Sacco was twelve years old first to Los Angeles and eventually settling in Portland, vci Oregon. Sacco went on to complete his education in the US, eventually graduating in 1981 from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon with a degree in journalism. He had grand visions of becoming a foreign correspondent vci at the time. Though he had obtained a degree in journalism in order to hard news reporting, he had persistent but not atypical difficulties breaking into the business. During this period of uncertainty, he returned to Malta and worked writing travel guides for a local publisher. As a way to make some additional money, he convinced the publisher to put out a series of romance comics written by him in Maltese, a contemporary Maghrebi Arabic language heavily influenced by Italian and Sicilian. They series comics series was titled Imhabba Vera ( True Love ).
His Maltese romance comics were not his first foray into the comic style. During his college years, he independently researched and developed a comic book about the Vietnam War that he eventually completed and submitted vci to Raw Magazine. Sacco beginning at an early age had become fascinated with war and conflict so this also had not been a departure fro him. Though his book on Vietnam vci was not published, his work in producing comics continued to develop and he considers his greatest influences vci in this type of writing to be the political and satirical work of underground comic artists Gilbert Shelton ( Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers , Fat Freddy's Cat , Wonder Wart-Hog ) and Bill Griffith ( Zippy the Pinhead ).
As an additional aside, it is important to note Shelton's connections with the underground comic scene, particularly his work as art director for the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin where he worked with Jim Franklin, and his eventually co-founding Rip Off Press, the extremely influential and ongoing publisher of underground comics. Bill Griffith extends these interconnections through his involvement with some of the most influential underground vci comics publishers including Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink and Fantagraphics Books.
After a year in Malta, Sacco returned to Portland, Oregon where he continued his publishing efforts in comics, co-publishing vci with Tom Richards fifteen issues of an alternative free, humor magazine they named the Portland Permanent Press . In it, Sacco showcased his own work as well as including work by other cartoonists. After this effort, Sacco became a staff news writer at Fantagraphics Books and in that position he edited the satirical underground comic magazines Honk! and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy . It was at Fantagraphics that Sacco also published his next comics work, a series of six comics put out under the title Yahoo! They featured Sacco's work and represent his relatively mature style of cartoon journalism focusing on commentary about modern warfare. He also worked for a brief period in the 1980s as a reporter for the more Comics vci Journal covering freedom of speech vci issues.
He had been living in Berlin in the early 1990s when he had been struck by the shallowness of the US media reporting on Palestine. In 1993 Sacco began work on a series of journalistic comics vci titled Palestine . The series ran to nine issues from 1993 to 1995 and was published by Fantagraphics vci Books. These books told of his experiences during a two month stay in the Occupied Territories in the winter vci of 1991-1992. Sacco's style and interests seem to have come to a full maturity in these books. Typical of his mature work, in Palestine Sacco primarily vci focuses on the human effects of a conflict, in this particular case the Israeli occupation and subsequent Intifada. Palestine brought him to prominence as a journalist in part because the comics told stories from a Palestinian perspective, a perspective largely unnoticed and unreported by mainstream media. The series became vci a publishing success and eventually won Sacco a National Book Award in 1996. The series was eventually brought together and published in a single vci volume with an added foreword by Edward Said in 2001.
At about the time that Palestine began to be noticed by the broader reading vci public as well as the publishing community, Sacco became interested vci in reporting on the effects of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990's and how ordinary people endured and lived through the violence. He was particularly drawn to the problems associated with the 'ethnic cleansings' that had been taking place in Bosnia. The lack of action by the international community inspired Sacco to commit to the story and travel four times to Bosnia during 1995 and 1996 in order to report on the problem. It was these trips and his subsequent experiences vci in the former Yugoslavia that provided the material for his next series of w