Hello readers,

Over the past week in ASTU, as a class we read Joe Sacco’s critically acclaimed graphic novel Safe Area Gorazde. One of several things that I found intriguing about Safe Area Gorazde was Joe Sacco’s illustration style as well as the way in which he combines illustrations with gonzo journalism in a truly unique fashion. After reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis a few weeks ago in class, I felt as if I had a bit more of a firm understanding of the graphic novel genre, something that I had never really spent a significant time considering. However, as soon as I saw the first illustration in Safe Area Gorazde I knew the two graphic novels were about as different as they could possibly be.

Firstly, Joe Sacco and Marjane Satrapi have polar opposite illustration styles. in Persepolis , Marjane Satrapi sticks with an iconographic style that emphasizes the conformity that was brought to Iranian society during it’s revolution. She depicts countless crowds of girls in hijab throughout the book. Sacco, by comparison encompasses graphic detail in to his illustration in order to further emphasize the dramatic violence that occurred during the Bosnian genocide that occurred in the 1990s.

Furthermore, it is the contrasting illustration styles of these two authors that serves as a manifestation of their two different approaches to the graphic novel. Satrapi is of course writing from a purely personal perspective where as Sacco is producing this graphic novel as a journalist although he himself becomes embedded in the narrative. Sacco’s style of gonzo journalism (minus the illustrations of course) is quite comparable to that of Hunter S. Thompson’s. However, Thompson himself is credited with inventing the genre of gonzo journalism and of course making the style popular with works such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.