The mark of the Sarajevan, Neven says, is 'a mixture of so many things: a love of art a love of other people and an amount of sarcasm and irony.' Sacco, in counterpoint, accompanies this mythic passage with a full-page image of a dark, lifeless, abandoned space between blasted out buildings. Neven, a native Sarajevan born to a Muslim mother and raised by a Serbian father, constitutes the traditional cosmopolitaness of that once most tolerant city. Unlike Sacco's previous books, where he illustrates the stories of various people he interviews, 'The Fixer' uses one individual who personifies a particular place.

Neven needs Sacco because the foreign press has mostly abandoned Sarajevo now that the major fighting is over. Don't ever walk here.' Sacco needs Neven to introduce him to people with a story to tell. Sacco's greeting at the reception desk was to be shown a map and told, 'This is the hotel. At the time the Serb nationalist siege of the city was slowly lifting but sniping remained a terrifying constant. Sacco's fixer is Neven, who he meets in a hotel lobby in 1995. 'The Fixer' focuses on a foreign war correspondent necessity the shady local who takes you to the hot spots, translates, and generally greases the wheels. $24.95), his most refined work of reportorial art yet. Now at last Sacco has come out with a new hardcover book, 'The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo' (Drawn & Quarterly 108 pp. His next project, the graphic novel 'Safe Area Gorazde,' (2000) gave vision to otherwise unrecorded atrocities of the Balkans war of the early nineties. His first important series, 'Palestine,' (1995) about life in the holy land during the first Intefada, gave us something radically new: a comic book that was immediately relevant to the real world. Joe Sacco, intrepid cartoonist, has been snooping around the borderlands between these disciplines for several years. Concurrently any work of art worthy of the name will report something new (either in content or form) to the audience. Any nonfiction report on the world around us needs some art, in the form of narrative or metaphor or linguistics, to bring life to mere facts. Follow best journalism contains some art and the best art contains some journalism.

The fixer by joe sacco