Joe Sacco emerges in the pages of Safe Area Gorazde as himself, but he isn’t. He draws himself like Robert Crumb (minus the sexual reference): nebbish, impotent, and anxiety ridden in the environment around him. His eyes are hidden behind glasses and are pupiless to anyone looking. His hands are almost always in his pockets. His bottom lip is usually uncolored, and made to always look bigger. He’s the American in Gorazde. “I was a guest of the Bosnian War,” he says. “I could get out of Gorazde gratis.”

It’s the outsider’s role that gives Sacco the proper voice to frame Bosnia for outsiders: He is full of observation and empathy. He portrays the war environment in the undisciplined fashion of random photographs, but also with the restrained sensationalism like that of Spielberg in Schindler’s List. And in doing so, he adds truth to the hype: Gorazde may very well be the most involving portrayal of war in comics since Maus. It’s tragic, solemn, funny, expressive, and essentially everything Will Eisner aspired to do in Last Day in Vietnam, but failed miserably at.

Gorazde was one of the U.N. designated “safe area” zones in Serbian territory, just like the city Sarajevo. Invariably, the safe areas became the most dangerous places. “Dubrovnik and Sarajevo endured their maulings in the living rooms of all those with a T.V. set. But Gorazde had been cut off from cameras. Its suffering was the sole property of those who had experienced it.” Sacco originally came down to Gorazde as for the hell of it in late 1995, and came back for four weeks in 1996. And for several years, Gorazde was bombarded by the Bosnian Serbs and was to be used as a possible trading position whenever peace talks were to come about. And as this was going on, the international community had little less and less to help.

For the first few pages, the style seems disjointed and offsetting. It at first seems like Sacco’s too good a writer to let his images merge with the words. But eventually everything in Gorazde develops the ring of reality to it, no matter how stylish it gets. Gorazde’s more focused than Palestine (Sacco’s other celebrated work) and despite the book being a series of vignettes, it accomplishes what Palestine didn’t fully: Safe Area Gorazde may go down as the first work of comic new journalism. It’s through his eye that we see: a community bewildered as to why their former neighbors could spring from friendly behavior one moment to genocide the next, the roots from which this conflict sprang, and the meandering and mundane tragedy that comes to these people during and after the war. During the war, constant shelling became the norm, and all they look forward to are items of Western pop culture (501 Originals, Pulp Fiction, the NBA). When the peace finally arrives, it seems as if the carpet’s been pulled out from their purpose in life. “It’s peace and I don't know how to behave,” cries one character. And as for the Serbs, with few exceptions, Sacco never frames them as Nazis. Whenever an atrocious act is depicted, Sacco immediately shows the person telling us of the act, as if to remind it’s an interviewee’s testimony. Instead, he focuses more on faceless violence; bombs and shell explosions, and their aftermath. He rarely falls into the trap of painting a villain’s face on his characters.

It’s hard to write this without my lack of knowledge about the Bosnian conflict becoming glaringly apparent. My knowledge of Bosnia is actually limited to what Sacco has reported. (As unbiased as Sacco’s reporting was, I still never saw an account of the Serb’s motives.) And I know very little. The people I know know little. “‘Do they know about Gorazde in America?’ ‘Yes,’ I lied,” says Sacco. The amazing thing about Safe Area Gorazde is that I think he’s written an exhaustive and compassionate comic only to say that, in the end, he doesn’t really know about it either. But it doesn’t diminish the fact that Joe Sacco has become a voice in journalism as strong and insightful as Tom Wolfe ever was.