Four stars, plus an added 1/2 for the tears. Sacco's drawings are dark and real (crosshatching will get you everywhere, my dear), needfully ugly, when the time comes, without being needlessly ugly. He shows his gratitude to the people of Gorazde for embracing him and his sorrow at all the shocking sick sad times they had to go through, and your heart goes out to them - heroes, or if the measure of a hero is that he goes out looking, not heroes but incredibly brave people with good hearts. Like a cross between my Austrian family and my Turkish friends, all of whom you hope will never have to see their homes descend into hell like this and pray will be able to bear up if they do.

And that brings us to the "How could this happen? Why did it happen here?" and the other real strength of this book is how Sacco sets the ground's-eye stories and portraits of friends in larger political context - you feel like you've gotten a really good lecture on the subject as well as yer human interest. And he is damning, especially to the UN and the West generally. And good for him. I think I understand why decisionmakers fumbled the Yugoslav breakup so badly, aside from all the political expediancy reasons - the cold war was over and we all just wanted the world to be better and get nicer than it . . . got and is. Which is understandable, and forgivable in a teenage boy like I was back then, but not so much when innocents start dying of a put-upon people's pique and all you've got is cowards in blue helmets and magnificent statements of concern. ( )

This is great, but the subject is so harrowing I've never been able to finish it

This is the first graphic novel I ever read, and it started me on a long journey. I got it to read on an airplane, and wished I hadnt when tears were falling down my cheeks after reading certain sections. Sacco does an excellent job or portraying the life of people who live in a small pocket of relative safety. He presents the people as they are; sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry. ( )

Joe Sacco has forever changed comics as a medium. Here he tells the story of his visit to Bosnia during the war. Stunning, shocking even, and very educational.
-- Evan

Safe Area Gorazde is a stunning work, combining the best traits of journalism, comics, and historical non-fiction. What really makes this book exceptional is the fact that Joe Sacco has mastered all of the elements of his craft - the writing and the art hold up equally well despite the high standards that Sacco has evidently set for himself.

The tale told herein is alternately thrilling, horrifying, and redeeming, but manages to hit all of those high points without an excess of authorial intervention. Sacco lets the incredible story carry us along with little overt preaching or moralizing. This is not easy to do with material that relates such a powerful tale of the worst shortcomings of the human race.

I think that until I read Safe Area Gorazde, I didn't really grasp just what the hell had gone wrong in Bosnia in the early nineties. This book cleared a lot of things up for me, and did so with an incredibly compelling narrative and graphic style. ( )