Before Joe Sacco crafted his two major works of "cartoon journalism," Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, he created a number of shorter pieces, ranging from one-page gags to 30-page "graphic novelettes." This massive book finally collects the entirety of Sacco's earlier journalistic and autobiographical work, plus a sizable serving of his satirical strips, many of them never before collected in book form. The centerpieces in Notes from a Defeatist are a triptych of war stories: "When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People," a history of aerial bombing that specifically targets civilian populations; "More Women, More Children, More Quickly," in which Sacco relates his mother's harrowing experiences during World War II in Malta; and, most personally (and closest to Sacco's later work), "How I Loved the War," Sacco's impassioned but sardonic reflection on the Gulf War, the surrounding propaganda and media circus, and his own ambivalent feelings as both a spectator and commentator: The book derives its title from this sequence, which has acquired a painful new relevance in the past half-year. Notes from a Defeatist also includes a roadie's-eye view of an American punk band's eventful European tour, a reminiscence of an awful season spent in his native Malta, and much more. Notes from a Defeatist is a fantastic primer to Sacco's work.

Award-winning comix-journalist Joe Sacco goes behind the scene of war correspondence to reveal the anatomy of the big scoop. He begins by returning us to the dying days of Balkan conflict and introduces us to his own fixer; a man looking to squeeze the last bit of profit from Bosnia before the reconstruction begins. Thanks to a complex relationship with the fixer Joe discovers the crimes of opportunistic warlords and gangsters who run the countryside in times of war. But the west is interested in a different spin on the stories coming out of Bosnia. Almost ten years later, Joe meets up with his fixer and sees how the new Bosnian government has "dealt" with these criminals and Joe ponders who is holding the reins of power these days…

Author Joe Sacco promises that, in the vein of underground comix like ZAP or Weirdo, "Bumf will go where it needs to go, and do what it needs to do." Though Sacco is world-famous for his serious, journalistic books like Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza, Bumf promises to echo back to his earlier days as a satirist and underground cartoonist. Bumf is a project that Sacco has been working on in between larger projects like Footnotes in Gaza, indulging his love of satire and cartooning. Often puerile, disgusting, and beyond redemption, Sacco apologizes in advance, saying he couldn't help himself. "They expect better things from me. They’ll never put me on a stamp now."

Praised by The New York Times, Brill's Content and Publisher's Weekly, Safe Area Gorazde is the long-awaited and highly sought after 240-page look at war in the former Yugoslavia. Sacco (the critically-acclaimed author of Palestine) spent five months in Bosnia in 1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories that are rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim-held enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco lived for a month in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water. Safe Area Gorazde is Sacco's magnum opus and with it he is poised too become one of America's most noted journalists. The book features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, political columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair.

Over the past decade, Joe Sacco has increasingly turned to short-form comics journalism to report from the sidelines of wars around the world. Collected here for the first time, Sacco's darkly funny, revealing reportage confirms his standing as one of the foremost war correspondents working today. In 'The Unwanted,' Sacco chronicles the detention of Saharan refugees who have washed up on the shores of Malta; 'Chechen War, Chechen Women' documents the trial without end of widows in the Caucasus. Other pieces take Sacco to the smuggling tunnels of Gaza; the trial of Milan Kovacevic, Bosnian warlord, in The Hague; and the darkest chapter in recent American history, Abu Ghraib.

Joe Sacco's most recently published work - which story revolves around the same themes that defined his "Palestine" book as a landmark release for the universe of journalism in comic books.

Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews),Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. LikeSafe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter within the confines of the comic book medium.