Welcome back to my blog! The past few weeks my CAP Global Citizens class has been focused on our final essays. We’ve been constructing them gradually, starting with our essay proposals and our introductions next Tuesday. For this blog entry, I wanted to use this time to do a close reading of a page in Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco, the research site for my essay. My essay topic is whether or not comedy can be used to interpret war. On a previous blog entry, I had wrote about comedy and war, and that topic actually inspired my essay.
From pages 24 to 28, the narrator is at a gathering with his friends. They are drinking, smoking, doing normalized actions that all young people do. It is at this party that the narrator, meets Riki, an enthusiastic soldier, and essentially the life of the party. Whenever Rikki is featured in the panel, Sacco shades in the panel to highlight Rikki in order to depict him as the main source of attention. Perhaps it is Riki’s towering stature or his hunched silhouette, but Sacco portrays him as appearing older than he most likely is. The wrinkles on his face show an exhausted complexion, of a man who has been tirelessly fighting on the battlefield. Yet, his expression seems inconsistent from panel to panel; in one panel Riki looks sullen, reflecting on his memories from the war. Immediately in the next panel, Riki is joyful and youthful, strumming his guitar while singing classic rock songs. Sacco’s handwritten captions are also proportionally different; he uses bold font captions for Riki’s lyrics, but then uses less defined captions when the characters are discussing the war conflict.
Riki is perhaps the most dynamic character in Safe Area Gorazde. To me, he is a metaphor for the war itself, and also the character I hope to target in my essay. He represents the vicious side of war, but also the vulnerable, lighthearted side. In a way, he is both a perpetrator and a victim of violence. Yet, he masks the atrocities he has witnessed in war by entertaining others. There are other characters in Safe Area Gorazde who have contributed to the comedic interludes within the story, however I think Riki is the most blatant example of how Sacco interlinks comedy with war.