The Fixer, A Story from Sarajevo

By Joe Sacco. Published by Pantheon. 

Softcover, 112 pages, B&W, 2004

In The Fixer Joe Sacco returns to Bosnia, the setting for his first masterpiece, Safe Area Gorazde. In 2001 he went back to Sarajevo to meet up with his old 'fixer', an army veteran called Neven who, for the right price, could arrange anything for the visiting journalist. Sacco gradually realized that Neven's own story - a microcosm of the Balkan conflict itself - might be the most compelling of all. Through Neven, Sacco tells the story of the warlords and gangsters who ran the country during the war, but all the time he - and the reader - never know whether Neven is telling the truth.

This tightly wound, humane and suspenseful non-fiction graphic novella employs visual devices from the best traditions of film noir. Sacco's finely wrought, expressively rendered black and white drawings perfectly capture the emotional character of Sarajevo and the people who struggle to live there. This superlative and important story is easily one of the best comics non-fiction works of the year
Publishers Weekly

Sacco is formidably talented. A meticulous reporter...and a gifted artist whose richly nuanced drawings tread a delicate path between cartoonishness and naturalism
Charles Shaar Murray, Independent

Sacco's greatest achievement is to have so poignantly depicted oppression and horror in a form that manages to be both disarming and disquieting
David Thompson, Observer

One of the most original cartoonists of the past two decades
Duncan Campbell, Guardian