Joe Sacco: Embedded cartoonist By Jeet Heer Boston Globe Ideas (November 16, 2003) ONLY THE JOURNALIST'S lens can capture the visual truth of modern war, art critic Robert Hughes told the Globe and Mail recently. "Modern art has practically nothing, or nothing of any value to say about war," he said, "because it doesn't record the horrors of it, and it just hasn't been able to deal with it." Perhaps Hughes should have added some praise for the cartoonist's pen. For the last dozen years, Joe Sacco has traveled to some of the most dismal spots in the world, from makeshift Palestinian settlements in the West Bank to besieged Bosnian villages to Chechen refugee camps on the fringes of the former Soviet Union. Based on these travels, Sacco has produced a series of extraordinary long-form comic books that convey, with unusual attentiveness to the details of everyday life, the impact that war has on civilians. Sacco, who studied journalism at the University of Oregon, works like an embedded reporter -- except that he doesn't live among the regular army troops but with the ordinary people who endure the brunt of guerilla warfare and military occupation. While sipping tea in bare Palestinian living rooms or quaffing beers in smoky Sarajevo bars, Sacco listens to stories about war. He pays attention not only to what people say, but also to their silences or hesitations as they glide over moments too painful to talk about. Unlike journalists who parachute in and out of hot spots, Sacco takes the time to weave himself into the fabric of ordinary life. "One of the advantages of what I do is that I'm not filing a daily story or a weekly story," Sacco said in a recent interview. "I'm sinking into people's lives a little more." His most powerful images are not spectacular shots of atrocities, but detailed drawings of faces creased with worry lines and eyes haunted by images they can't forget. Sacco has the caricaturist's gift of sketching a distinct face with a few quick lines. Sacco himself appears in these stories, but always as a nebbishy figure in Coke-bottle glasses, the trembling opposite of the stereotypical heroic war reporter. In his new book, "The Fixer" (Drawn and Quarterly), Sacco shows how his method can help get at truths that conventional journalism, photo or otherwise, tends to miss. "The Fixer" tells the story of Neven, a roughneck gallant from Sarajevo whose checkered past illuminates some of the murkier corners of recent history. In the early 1990s, the multiethnic Bosnian government, caught off-guard by the Serbian response to its secession from Yugoslavia and lacking a strong professional army, found itself relying on ad hoc paramilitary groups to defend the besieged capital of Sarajevo. These groups tended to be run by gangster types, men who in normal times made money running protection rackets or serving as bodyguards to mobsters. Although the paramilitary groups saved the city, in time they also began running loose, stealing wealth for themselves while harassing (and sometimes killing) local citizens, especially Bosnian Serbs. As a half-Serb, half-Bosnian local tough guy, Neven was a member of one of these paramilitary groups and saw both their heroism and criminality. Because of his Serb heritage, Neven is particularly touchy about reports that the paramilitary groups engaged in ethnic harassment. After being wounded, he becomes a "fixer," a freelance gofer who helps foreign journalists get their bearings. As both a soldier and fixer, Neven straddles a shifting border between lowlife sleaziness and brave public service. Sacco's unwaveringly honest book provides a complex and nuanced portrayal of both Neven and the larger Bosnian conflict. Too many news accounts are content to chalk up the killings in the former Yugoslavia to "ethnic violence." Because of the time and effort he puts into knowing the people in a war zone, Sacco manages to show the individual allegiances and ambivalences behind that shorthand. Sacco demonstrates that the narrative arts, including comics, can gather up complicated social truths with a gradual patience that often eludes the camera.