Page 45 Review by Stephen
What's the difference between and good reporter and a great reporter? Their absence. I don't know if that's true, but what I like about Joe Sacco is his complete lack of ego. He barely appears in this book, except to worry about the feral, ravenous dogs in the pitch-black ruins of Sarajevo, and make a single faux pas when he calls a waitress "cute". How was he to anticipate Šoba's indignant reaction, when the man's quite blunt about his own sex drive?
This book reprints two tales previously available in STORIES FROM BOSNIA ("Šoba's") and ZERO ZERO #15 ("Christmas With Karadzic"), and they're very different beasts. The first follows artist, guitarist and soldier Šoba as he wanders from bar to cafe, out onto the freezing, shell-struck streets and listens to him talk about surviving the carnage of chaotic battles, deactivating landmines at night with a small stick, and all the attention now focussed on Serbian artists:
"I don't work now, only when I've got some materials... I need to experiment, but when you've got only two tubes of colour you have to think for two days before you know what to do... Before the war there was no future here as an artist. Nobody wanted your work. No one came from the west to see it... For the first time people who are artists here have some attention... Maybe they have a future. Sarajevo is still the focus of the world. If you're an artist in Sarajevo you can't make anything wrong."
Most of this takes place while the war still rages, and Šoba and his mates are constantly being deployed, so his mind is constantly wandering from hunger to the future, to battle.
Sacco's style at that point was heavy on texture, and there's a scene in the trenches where almost everything is torn apart, mud and explosives filling the panel:
"It was really like hell, the longest day of my life.. I was hanging on to the roots of trees because people were flying in the air. I was deaf for 10 days after. People were buried in their trenches. Three hundred people were killed in two days... I knew something about first-aid. The first guy I saw had lost his foot. Someone else had his scalp peeled back. His brain was showing. I replaced the scalp and bandaged him. You see a big pile of human meat. No arms. No legs. I lasted only the first day. I was replaced. I went crazy."
In the second, cleaner half, Joe follows a couple of other reporters from NBC and CBS Radio in their quest to dangle a microphone in front of President Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, in January 1996. This is an angrier Sacco in a more political scenario, but no less fascinating for that, on account of all the practical frustrations thrown in their way - the small politics, the people politics, the sort of office politics that can cripple an entire country's standing in western media - and the requirements for a decent radio broadcast ("I'm really getting into the Orthodox Christmas spirit. It's the AK47s and artillery rounds going off," says Kasey over coffee as they wait for Karadzic to attend a church service). As for the encounter itself? Fascinating.
