http://nhw.livejournal.com/1141540.ht...

This is, in a sense, a sequel to Sacco's brilliant Safe Area Gorazde, but following just one person, Neven, a Sarajevo Serb, a former fighter on the Bosnian side in the war who Sacco got to know as his "fixer" when he first visited Sarajevo just after the war ended in 1995. (I first went there myself in early 1997, and the city of Sacco's book is definitely the one I knew.)

Anyone who has worked in that sort of environment knows the essential nature of the fixer. Sacco captures it well: but it's not just about Neven's murky past and dubious present, it's also about the dodgy wartime goings on between the "legitimate" government and its bully-boys (and one of the personalities featured in the book was in the news again recently, having apparently committed suicide earlier this month) and the inevitable resulting questions about who is right and who is wrong; and it's also about the effect that Sacco's observation has, not only on the people and situations he is observing, but on Sacco himself.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is perhaps that the casual reader might take Neven's experiences as in some way typical of the Bosnian (or any) war. Neven is a somewhat unusual character. But then again, we are all of us unusual characters, and perhaps Sacco is right to just take a single personality and follow him through the conflict, in his own words and as others reported him. Anyway, well worth reading. ( )

One of the best Sacco comics, partially because of its strong internal structure. This is an example of a book leaving you with a profound ambivalence, and that being a good thing. ( )

The Fixer is another great entry in Joe Sacco's series of comics reportage from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Although it is clearly not a major work on the level of Safe Area Gorazde, the present volume is nonetheless an important addendum to the larger narrative that Sacco brought home from his trips to the former Yugoslavia.

This time around, the author focuses on his own frustrations in gathering information in post-combat Sarajevo, and his desparate reliance on the unreliable Neven, a colorful if thoroughly shady figure of considerable mystery. While some of Sacco's renderings of human faces can feel stiff and wooden, his meticulous depiction of physical surroundings is breathtaking, and does a remarkable job of bringing the shattered city of Sarajevo to life.

Safe Area Gorazde is still the place to start if you are new to Sacco's work, but The Fixer is a worthy contender if you hunger for more after reading that cornerstone volume. ( )

I wrote my honours thesis on Women in Black, which included a heap of research on the awful things that happened to women during the Yugoslavion conflict, as well as lots on women's activism. It was odd reading this, then, where women are always in the background.

Good art, a sad story, personal touches. Hopefully I'll get around to checking out more of Sacco's work. ( )

Still a good read, but not as good as ‘Palestine’. Maybe because he tells someone elses story, maybe because the story is more superficial, maybe because you never know what is true because it is told from the viewpoint of someone who is not entirely trustworthy. His drawings are still very recognizable, bet I found this book slightly less gripping.