ABSTRACT
The reader’s experience of Joe Sacco’s “comics journalism,” a label he prefers to “graphic novel,” results in a challenge to the institution of journalism and an altered state of news readership through contextualization. Sacco achieves this through his stance as a comics journalist, and he applies his training as a journalist and the techniques of journalism to push for an altered state of journalism consumption through the technological form of comics. His comics art and his journalism remain in constant tension. Using Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, Palestine is analyzed for evidence of contextualization. Much like any journalist, Sacco begins with the act of witnessing, but then as a matter of his profession, ethics, and form, he decontextualizes his reporting, or pulls out from what is experienced, and recontextualizes it, or renders it for a new presentation. In Sacco’s work, the experience of the witness is fixed in his comics text- artifact. While both process and text stand in contrast with other forms of news and the norms of depiction in journalism, Sacco is both striving for the higher ideals of journalism while reaching them through a different means.
