Yet Sacco is wise enough to see through the self-mythologising that keeps mavericks like Neven from admitting their own role in a national disaster. There is a fraternal, even homoerotic charge to Sacco's friendship with the man who 'knows about muzzle velocity, rate of fire, the effect of over-water air currents on the trajectory of a bullet'. Sacco (always a character in his own comics) plays the impressionable, weedy westerner, while Neven boozes, chain-smokes and reminisces about battles and betrayals. The Fixer chronicles the rise of the paramilitary warlords whose fanatical courage was harnessed to defend Bosnia against ethnic cleansing, but who inevitably became corrupted by power, bloodlust and factionalist delusions. They also won him full-page reviews in the New York Times and forewords by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens. The resulting comic books, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, exhibited a more sober style and a scrupulous concern for factual accuracy. Sacco's earliest works, in the 1980s, were acerbic satires and autobiographical exposés reminiscent of Crumb, but his desire to see the hidden realities behind newspaper headlines, and his shame at being a mere spectator in the first Gulf war (evident in 1991's War Junkie) led him to investigate combat zones in person. The Fixer is more morally complex and more artistically ambitious than many well-reviewed novels. Although the current glut of movies deriving from that ethos might tempt us to look down on comics, in truth the puerility of Spider-Man or The Incredible Hulk doesn't define the form any more than Mills & Boon defines literature. (Sacco, in common with most other outstanding comics artists, from Robert Crumb to Peter Pontiac, prefers that term to the over-dignified 'graphic novel'.) Sacco's drawings are monochrome, intricately cross-hatched and shaded, very much a product of the American underground scene that rejected the superhero ethos.

The fixer by joe sacco