Cartooning as a vocation came late to Joe Sacco, but in this instance at least, the cliché is true: better late than never. Although he was always drawing as a kid, he hadn't, even by the time he"d reached the University of Oregon, considered "becoming a cartoonist," as he put it in his earlier Journal interview (March 1995). He graduated in 1981 with a journalism degree, but unable to find "a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference," he drifted for awhile and eventually drifted into making comics where he found the freedom he needed to combine his lifelong practice of drawing with the kind of independent-minded journalism he admired and wanted to practice. He founded a local alternative magazine in Portland, Oregon called The Permanent Press, in 1985, but this only lasted 15 months. The financial debacle was so devastating and demoralizing that he was willing to accept a position at The Comics Journal in 1986 as the staff news writer, where he proceeded to write hard-hitting, interesting pieces that made a difference. In 1987, he started editing six issues of a comics anthology by the unlikely title of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy (unashamedly stolen from Aldous Huxley), and published six issues of his own comic, Yahoo, from 1988 to 1992. It was in Yahoo that he found his voice as a cartoonist and learned to juggle autobiography, journalism and documentary realism, gaining greater control and confidence over his chosen medium with each issue. He went to Israel and visited the Gaza strip in 1992, after which he started work on his nine-issue series Palestine, the first issue of which came out in January 1993. Palestine chronicled the private lives of, and public policies affecting, the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

This interview is exclusively about Sacco's big post-Palestine project: Safe Area Gorazde. Sacco wanted to document the lives of people suffering in, as well as the politics behind, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, during which, it is estimated, between 100,000 and more than 300,000 people died. To that end, he visited Bosnia three times, and concentrated his attention on Gorazde where he established intimate ties and close friendships that continue to this day. The Yugoslav wars are complex and this interview can't -- no single interview could -- do justice to their complexity. The ethnic hatred that boiled over in the late '80s and early '90s was not, as myth would have it, a centuries-old conflict, but a carefully massaged bit of political opportunism, aided by a Serbian media offensive, based on a highly-charged and partisan interpretation of 20th century history. Yugoslavia -- or The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it was initially called -- was the artificial byproduct of World War I and it was here that the Croats' and Serbs' troubles began. The First World War left the Serbs in a dominant position, which they took advantage of when they set up the government to the discomfort of the Croats. Relations between the two were exacerbated in World War II when Hitler, who was not prepared to occupy Yugoslavia, employed the Ustasas, the party that had most recently come to power, to govern Croatia. Unfortunately, the Ustasas proved to be insane and genocidal and proceeded to treat the Serb population as the Germans treated the Jews, with a cycle of massacres and concentration camps. The brutality was fierce and unrelenting. After World War II, Yugoslavia was eventually split into states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia Montenegro and Kosovo. Josep Broz Tito, a professional revolutionary and committed communist, who fought against the Germans, ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to his death in 1980 and, through the adroit use of carrots and sticks -- "brotherhood and unity" was the ubiquitous slogan -- maintained the ethnicities in relative -- but fragile -- harmony. On April 27, 1986, in the village of Kosovo Polje, a party hack by the name of Slobodan Milosevic (who had achieved the Presidency of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists) essentially installed himself at the head of the Serbian government by giving a rabble-rousing speech, exploiting the aberrant policies of the Croatian Ustasas 40 years earlier, preaching hatred and violence toward Croats to an audience of eager Serbs. This is, effectively, where the war began, and it was the subsequent eight years that Joe Sacco tried to make some sense of in Gorazde.

I have had the privilege of publishing most of Joe's work. This is both disclaimer and source of pride.

This interview was conducted October 4, 2001 in Seattle, Washington.

GARY GROTH: After you finished Palestine, were you casting about for something else to do -- some major project?

JOE SACCO: No. For a year I'd been thinking of going to Bosnia. I was actually preparing to go to Bosnia. I finished Palestine in Berlin on my way to Bosnia. Two weeks after I sent off the last issue of Palestine, I took a train and started my journey down there.

GROTH: Why Bosnia? Why did you choose that particular hot spot to do a book about?

SACCO: Specifically with the intent of doing the book. I mean, when I went to Palestine, I went with the intent of doing a book or a series of comics. But I didn't tell any publisher about it at the time. And I think I didn't even mention to you that I was going to Bosnia because I just didn't want to be dissuaded. People dissuaded me when I told them.

GROTH: Really? I wouldn't have dissuaded you.

SACCO: [Jocularly.] Well, you wanted to make big money.

GROTH: There was that. Why Bosnia as opposed to any other hot spot in the world, of which there are so many?

SACCO: It just compelled me. For the longest time I wasn't paying attention to what was going on there. Or I was paying attention, but only in that way that it seemed that a war in Europe was a novelty. At a certain point, if you're reading the paper -- and I was reading the paper -- some writers made it clear what was going on and were able to make very human what was going on; bring out the humanity of what was going on.

GROTH: So you were following it closely?

SACCO: I was following it insofar as I was reading the New York Times and thinking, "Bosnia, boy, I remember doing some project about this in 1980 when I was in college and so what's going on in Bosnia now?" I really didn't know the ins and outs of Yugoslavia.

GROTH: You did not know the ins and outs before you went there?

SACCO: Before I went -- I mean, I started doing research then. I remember reading an article by John Burns, for example -- John Burns, the New York Times correspondent. It was actually about Gorazde. He had slipped into Gorazde through Serb lines. He trekked with the columns that were going back to Gorazde with food. I detailed those columns in my book. He was there for a week, a week and a half, basically to cover the airdrops on Gorazde, the food being sent by the Americans and NATO and all of that. These were really moving, moving stories. I was just captivated by some of the writing, but beyond that I started reading about it. I started getting books about it and trying to figure out what was going on. Then when it became clear to me that there was this ethnic cleansing, and what that meant, what the implications of that were, alternatively, what the stated purpose of the Bosnian government was, which was to keep a multiethnic society together (which I'm a little more suspicious of now than I was at the time). The sorts of things that were going on there just seemed like very big and important issues. I was particularly reminded of the statement, "Never again."

GROTH: Referring to the Holocaust.

SACCO: Referring to the Holocaust. Never again would something like this happen. And obviously it happens all of the time. I mean, it happened in Cambodia. It happened in Rwanda in '94. It's happened since World War II three or four times probably on some large scale. It just seemed that the international community was sort of sidestepping the issue as much as possible. And then I realized -- the American government -- you could sort of see President Clinton straining for a policy that kept him out of it, but where he could keep the moral high ground somehow. He could show his concern without doing a damn thing.

GROTH: Without risking anything.

SACCO: Without risking anything. At a certain point, I was so -- my stomach was in knots, basically, about it.

GROTH: Tell me what political preconceptions you held by the time you got to Bosnia.

SACCO: My political preconceptions were that a war was being fought against a people that were trying to keep a multiethnic society together. It was simplified in a lot of ways. I had really demonized the Serbs. That's the long and the short of it. Now, things changed when I got there. Some things were made clearer. Some of the preconceived notions I had were confirmed and some began to be dissipated.

GROTH: So your perception of the Serbs was somewhat mitigated by the experience but not entirely transformed?

SACCO: Well, my perception of who the Serbs were was mitigated by actually crossing the lines and meeting them. I must say that I still feel that they were very heavily propagandized. I still heard hateful things coming out of their mouths that I didn't hear on the other side of the lines. Things that were kind of startling. I mean, it seemed even educated people had swallowed the propaganda of the state. It was very distressing. On the other hand, when you're in contact with people on a day-to-day basis, you make friends. And you realize that they like you and you like them and you sort of wish you could like them more if they wouldn't believe this stuff. It completely put a human face on the Serbs I met.

GROTH: Did it underscore how susceptible people are to media propaganda?

SACCO: It's amazing. Obviously, in America, we're susceptible to media propaganda. But they were susceptible to media propaganda that seemed laughable. And I began to try to untangle why this was so. The only thing I could come up with was that they were actually aware of the culpability of their side, but the brain cannot accept that your brothers and your fathers and your sons are slaughtering people, or that you are firing artillery into a town and killing civilians. The brain doesn't want to accept that, so it -- [pauses.]

GROTH: It rationalizes it?

SACCO: It rationalizes it, or any explanation of it, or any lie about it will be embraced. It's easier to believe a lie than to look at the truth. Even if the truth is in front of your eyes. I have many examples of that. Many examples.

GROTH: My impression is that the media, which was essentially under the control of Milosevic, played an essential role in propagating the attitudes that allowed ethnic cleansing to happen.

SACCO: In Serbia, that's true. The Serbs in Bosnia had their own media that was also propagating lies. A lot of people through Serb society bear some responsibility. Academics also bear some responsibility. Intellectuals. One thing that I found a little offensive on both sides of the war was that they always said, "Well, it's the peasants. It's the peasants that have been doing this." And I thought, "Actually, it's intellectuals and politicians. Those aren't peasants, really. Maybe some of them come from that stock at some point, but --"

GROTH: Well, [Croatian President] Tudjman was an historian who became wilder and wilder in his denial of past Croatian atrocities.

SACCO: I think Jasenovac was the name of the camp in World War II in which they were killing Serbs.

GROTH: He kept reducing the numbers that they had killed.

SACCO: Yeah. The Serb number is, like 700,000, something like this.

GROTH: Or more. He finagled it down to 40,000 or so, I think.

SACCO: Yeah. He whittled it down. And people wanted to believe that. I mean, look: Americans want to believe that their side is good. In fact, they do believe that their side is good. They don't like to look at the evil that America does around the world. You'd rather not hear about it. You might even know what's going on, but you don't want to hear about it. I saw many instances of this among the Serbs; many instances of it. I'll give you one example. I met a guy, a Serb, whose grandfather was a Serb but living on the Bosnian government side of the lines. His grandfather was killed by a mortar shell, one of the mortar shells that hit one of the marketplaces, one of the big massacres in the war, one of the ones that got a lot of attention. He was convinced because of his side's propaganda, that all of the bodies out there were Serbs who had been executed and stored in a morgue and then brought out and blown up. He was convinced because he was sure that he could see ice in the ears of the bodies on television, which convinced him that they were packed in ice, because that's what his propaganda had told him. His own grandfather was killed in one of these shells fired by his side, but he was convinced it was something else entirely. He didn't want to blame his own side. Maybe it was too much for him to comprehend. He didn't want to rethink things. People don't like to rethink anything.

GROTH: It's a frightening realization that people can rationalize to that extent. That includes Americans, of course. Is nationalism the most potent villain, do you think? Without a vehement sense of nationalism, it doesn't seem as though these attitudes could've concretized as they did.

SACCO: It becomes a potent villain, but it seemed so dormant there. I don't know if it's the most potent villain. It was dormant. People weren't frothing at the mouth, I think, beforehand. Maybe some people were strong nationalists, and maybe there were others who realized they could take advantage of it, Milosevic being the prime example of that. He was a communist, a good communist boy for the longest time. He changed to a nationalist when he saw the effect he had on Serb crowds when he began to exploit their fears of the Albanians. They were his first target. People really responded and he, like any good politician, thought, "This is the future."

GROTH: A good entertainer.

SACCO: [Laughs.] The future is in looking for scapegoats and talking about how righteous your own side is.

GROTH: He really grasped that opportunity. Made the most of it, as it were. Let me get some facts down. You went to Bosnia in '95?

SACCO: That's right.

GROTH: Now I think you went to Bosnia three or four times?

SACCO: I"ve been there three times, total.

GROTH: Can you explain a little bit about the logistics of getting in there? What kind of credentials you had to have, what kind of arrangements you had to make? To what extent you felt that your life was in any danger?

SACCO: I remember I was living in Portland, in Oregon, and I met a guy who had been to Bosnia as a freelance journalist. I met him at a party. And Bosnia had been at the forefront of my mind for the longest time already. I just basically grilled him. How did you get there as a freelancer? How did you do that? I mean, to me, I had no clue about some of these things. He explained to me it's a matter of just jumping through certain hoops. You need a letter from a publisher stating they'll buy your work. You need to show up with a passport. You need to answer a few questions on a letter. In other words, I saw that it was just a matter of taking certain steps. Once he told me that, that was the moment I knew I have to go. I can go, so I have to go. It was as clear to me as day. Then it was a very long process. I had to finish the Palestine book. I couldn't just abandon that, of course. So I finished that. That took a year. In the meantime, I was just reading a hell of a lot. Just reading everything I could. Books. Not just the newspapers and magazines; trying to get a background on what was going on. I moved to Berlin to be closer, just to get that step closer. And when the time came, I called up the U.N. in Zagreb.

I should backtrack. I went to New York for a couple of months to find a publisher who would be willing to just write a letter saying, "Yes, he's a freelancer. We accept his work and we take responsibility for his actions while he's there." Something like this. I managed to find a publisher who was willing to do this, but basically as a favor to me. They didn't have me sign a contract. I would have been sunk if they made me sign the contract they wanted me to sign. Basically, an editor said, "I'll do this for you." So I had this letter, and when I was in Berlin I called up the U.N. in Zagreb, just to make sure that I had everything in order. The press officer said, "Sure, you have everything in order. Just bring in copies of your previous work so I can make sure you're a freelancer."

GROTH: Uh-oh.

SACCO: I'm thinking, "Uh-oh. Well, you know, I could bring in Palestine, which I stand behind 100%." But I thought, "This guy is going to look at this thing and say, 'Get out of here. What's this? These are drawings. You're a cartoonist. These are comics.'" I thought I was going to be defeated. But I knew --

GROTH: The old comics ghetto rearing its head.

SACCO: That's right. And I didn"t know how he would respond to this. He's a press officer, used to dealing with the regular press. So I decided, "I've come this far. I've put too many eggs in this basket," and I took the train, went to Zagreb and I found out where the U.N. had its headquarters, went to the press officer in this little container. It was basically one of these containers that are made into offices. And it was full of other journalists, like I think a Spanish crew and a Canadian TV crew, about eight or nine people just demanding to get back into Sarajevo. Their credentials had expired. They wanted their papers now. They had to get there tonight. They were just banging on the table making a noise. I just gave a press officer my application, gave him my photographs, gave him my passport and didn't say a word. They didn't say a word to me. They just wanted a body out of there. Within ten minutes I had the press card. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't show my book to anyone. I thought, "Thank god. God is with me on this."

GROTH: To what do you ascribe the ease with which you got your credentials? Just your good manners?

SACCO: It's just being very mousy and quiet. You have to learn to be mousy and quiet at the right times. Everyone else was loud and they just wanted one of the bodies out of there. I was the nicest body and the one that was demanding the least, so I got the most. That"s basically how I got a U.N. press card. Then there was a problem because I didn't know how to get into Sarajevo. I had no clue. I mean, the planes were not landing because they were being fired upon. There were only overland routes. I was told, just find another journalist and go with that journalist. I was a little shy about walking up to some journalist in a hotel lobby and saying, "Hey, would you give me a ride?" Then I found out that the U.N. was allowing the press to drive with them. There was like a two-week period where you could ride with them. It was a very small window and I scheduled to go on one of these convoys in and then they told me you need a flak-jacket, which I didn"t have. They would cost about a thousand bucks in Split, which was where I was, which is in Croatia. I didn't have the money. I had very little money when I was going. I went all the way back to Munich, specially ordered it from London on someone else's credit card, got it and then went back. And then got on this convoy, and none of the civilians on it were wearing flak-jackets. It was all for nothing. [Both laugh.] So I got there about two weeks later than -- I started out and it took me two weeks to get there, basically.