PUBLIC MARKS with tags "current affairs" & comics

where you can download Joe Sacco's "Complacency kills", an account of 3 weeks spent with the US troops in Irak.

"The Fixer, examines life in the battered city of Sarajevo following the brutal Balkan war. The book was three years in the writing and drawing and Sacco based his reportage around Neven, a hardened former sniper turned “fixer”, a man paid by foreign journalists to arrange whatever they need in order to file their daily copy. Sacco befriended Neven and was soon building a profile of the conflict and of the shadowy warlords pulling the strings behind it. “[Neven] was an intimidating character to me, but I was drawn to him because he seemed to know so much and was so strong,” says Sacco. “As someone says in the comic, he was a tower of information. One of themes of the book is how hard it is for a journalist to tell what’s true and what isn’t. Sometimes people will steer journalists in a certain direction. They might not translate all that’s being told, for political or personal reasons. This is what goes on for foreign correspondents.”

Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism