The new slow journalism of the moral draughtsman: Joe Sacco’s coverage of state sanctioned sexual violence

Abstract

This article considers documentation of sexual violence as a war crime as exemplified by two pieces of nonfiction comics by Joe Sacco. In his introduction to Safe Area Goražde, Christopher Hitchens describes Sacco as ‘the moral draughtsman’ (Hitchens 2001, ii). Sacco’s comics journalism is built upon a testimonial impulse that Hitchens’ description captures. Readers of the comics are called to bear witness to many atrocities, including acts of sexual violence against Muslim women by Chetnik soldiers in Safe Area Goražde, and against Muslim men by American soldiers in ‘Iraq: Trauma on Loan.’ In both comics, the cartoonist visually and textually renders testimony of victims of sexual violence for forensic and epideictic testimonial purposes. However, Sacco’s representations of these scenes implicitly begs questions of ethics. Using theoretical insights borrowed from literature on comics journalism and testimonial non-fiction, this article examines the formal choices Sacco makes and considers critical contexts for the ethical implications of those choices.

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