Word: fixer
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...Fixer" focuses on a foreign war correspondent necessity - the shady local who takes you to the hot spots, translates, and generally greases the wheels. Sacco's fixer is Neven, who he meets in a hotel lobby in 1995. At the time the Serb nationalist siege of the city was slowly lifting but sniping remained a terrifying constant. Sacco's greeting at the reception desk was to be shown a map and told, "This is the hotel. This is the front line. Don't ever walk here." Sacco needs Neven to introduce him to people with a story to tell. Neven...
Unlike Sacco's previous books, where he illustrates the stories of various people he interviews, "The Fixer" uses one individual who personifies a particular place. Neven, a native Sarajevan born to a Muslim mother and raised by a Serbian father, constitutes the traditional cosmopolitaness of that once most tolerant city. The mark of the Sarajevan, Neven says, is "a mixture of so many things: a love of art; a love of other people; and an amount of sarcasm and irony." Sacco, in counterpoint, accompanies this mythic passage with a full-page image of a dark, lifeless, abandoned space between blasted...
...cleansing." Neven adds his own story to these, like the time he shot an enemy through his gun holster while falling backwards. Or did he? Sacco parallels his increasing doubts about the authenticity of Neven's tales while getting deeper into the warlord's atrocities. By the end, "The Fixer" becomes as much about the haziness and relative importance of the truth as about the history of the Sarajevo siege...
...Neven and Joe Sacco in "The Fixer...
...sprawled on couches, seems lifted from Hogarth in its formal arrangement of bodies. Other, subtler uses of imagery seem at play too. One panel has the na?ve Sacco reaching for his wallet as the waitress' round serving tray forms a halo around his head. Sacco's panels in "The Fixer" will reveal more each time you examine them...