22 May / Paying the Land by Joe Sacco [in Booklist]
Best known for his Palestine books – most notably, Footnotes in Gaza (2010) – frequent Eisner Award-winner Joe Sacco’s nonfiction titles share essential overlapping features: talking heads given agency to speak their truths, exquisitely detailed artwork, meticulously revealed events.
Here Sacco heads to Canada’s Northwest Territories, home to Dené people since “time immemorial.” Accompanied by a Yellowknife (the Northwest Territories’ only city) local in a borrowed truck, Sacco visits remote communities to learn about Indigenous history and colonization, government-admitted “cultural genocide” through 150 years of residential schools, the legacies of abuse and addiction, the battles over extraction of natural resources, and the ongoing quest for autonomy. Sacco records elders and activists, those who stayed, others who escaped yet returned, young adults desperate for connection with their vanishing heritage.
Amidst the arduous journeys of survival (and not), Sacco’s occasional godfather-of-manga-Tezukaesque self-parodies – for example, as “Joe of the North” with a netted trout, announcing, “He has engaged with the fauna and redeemed himself in the eyes of his readers” – provide welcome, momentary (can’t resist) comic relief. Harrowing and enlightening, Sacco presents another solemn, resonating dispatch.
Review: “Graphic Novels,” Booklist, May 15, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020