The plentitude of comics scholarship concerning the medium’s gutter illustrates the importance of the structural device; however, the foundational explanations of the gutter rarely define the ...structural element’s more specific capabilities. This article endeavors to expand understanding of the gutter as a mechanism to increase knowledge of traumatic and non-traumatic nonfiction narratives. Analyzing key testimonies in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 , this article explores and demonstrates how Sacco, and the comics medium at large, employs the gutter to create forged memories —memories unique yet also false—of traumatic events to engage witnesses more fully. Through these memories, the reader-witness comes closer to understanding the surreal nature of the survivor’s trauma. As a result, comics provides for greater traumatic understanding through the devices inherent to the medium.
Since the early 1990s, when Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir in comic book form,Maus, won a Pulitzer Prize, comics creators have gained increasing attention for producing comics about contemporary ...events. Joe Sacco’s comics about Palestine and the former Yugoslavia, Ted Rall’s “graphic travelogue”To Afghanistan and Back, a comic book adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report, and Seth Tobocman’sPortraits of Israelis and Palestinians: For my ParentsandWar in the Neighborhoodall represent the growing interest in using properties of word and image specific to comics to capture “the news.” As a result, comics journalism has begun to pop
This essay reads the works of war journalists Michael Herr and Joe Sacco alongside Emmanuel Levinas's concepts of substitution, responsibility, and the "hatefulness" of the self in order to draw out ...the political possibilities of Levinas's thought. Where Herr and Sacco posit responsibility and hatefulness as pre-existing, they grapple with the political practice of substitution. Most importantly, their writings draw out the limit case of the practice of substitution. The marking of their inevitable failure to substitute, however, poses a necessary critique of political, economic, and social structures that privilege some lives over others.
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