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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/02/paying-the-land-by-joe-sacco-review- The painful history of the Northwestern Territory’s indigenous people takes the celebrated cartoonist away from AK47s and mortar shells, and into a different kind of war There is a moment, in his 2003 collection Notes from a Defeatist, when you can see Joe Sacco finding out exactly what he was meant to do. The pieces have been competent enough so far – satires of office grunts and nerdy librarians, of a “cartoon genius” trying not very hard not to sell out; exercises in a familiar kind of knowing autobiographical bathos. And then he interviews his mother. Carmen Sacco grew up in Malta, and was a child when Mussolini went to war in Abyssinia, bombing the highlands and gassing civilians; the Maltese, fully expecting to be next, bought gas masks and drilled for raids. In the event, bombing began five years later; Joe, who was born in Malta but grew up in Australia, tells his mother’s story from her point of view. In one series of drawings, Carmen, walking home from school, is caught alone on a country road, and strafed by a Messerschmitt; the reader is down on the ground with her, next to the sole of her shoe, looking past her torso, past her head, up to the empty sky above the empty road – empty, that is, except for the plane, turning to come back. It is a triumph of empathy, of detail, of perspective. Continue reading...
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