Clarity in Comics

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.  Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.

It's an interesting format.  You've got Hedges telling the story and offering his opinion in text and Sacco providing related short stories in comic format.

It left me wanting more Sacco and less Hedges.  This may be my short attention span/craving for comics but it felt more like my boredom of Hedge's soap box.  To my dismay, as the book went on, the soap box increased and the comics decreased.

Ah well.  It made me appreciate Sacco's style of journalism more than ever.  He certainly has an opinion that he puts in his pieces - this is obvious by the stories and the subjects that he chooses.  He even appears in his own pieces - you can flip through any Sacco comic and find images of Sacco strewn throughout.  His avatar in the comics even speaks, offers opinions and becomes part of the narrative.

What is so cool about this (at least for me) is that keeps Sacco's opinions very separate from the story itself.  You see the word and thought balloons that belong to all the characters and it is obvious who owns what opinion.  In text, especially when opinion and story are mixed, as Hedges does in this book, it is less clear what is opinion and what is story.  It's not that it is difficult to sort through it but I simply don't want to after seeing the clarity of Sacco's comic style.

Check out the book here.