Joe Sacco believes that more is more; his large-scale panels teem with detail, visual and verbal ... What begins as an exploration of the effects of fracking on Native lands sprawls into a haunted history of an entire civilization ... Sacco takes pains to convey texture — I’m tempted to say the way he draws trees is worth the price of admission alone ... Eschewing panels in favor of a more organic flow of images from top to bottom, Sacco captures the essence of life lived as part of the land. Narrative time melts away ... luminous.
It has been more than 10 years since Joe Sacco has produced a full-length work. Not to suggest that one of our greatest living graphic journalists should make a habit of taking that much time off (he should not), but the wait has been worth it. Paying the Land is an immersive exploration of the Northwest Territories’ native Dene people that casts its net across a broad panoply of topics while still hewing to the granular detail (maps, diagrams, footnotes) that make Sacco’s work so rewarding ... sympathetic without depriving the Dene of agency ... Drawing himself as somewhat more grizzled than in previous works, Sacco continues to use his flustered presence for self-deprecating jabs of humor. Rather than just trying to lighten a dark subject, though, he also does so to undercut the idea that he is an expert. One of Sacco’s greatest gifts is bringing readers into his learning, making us feel that we are somehow part of it rather than passive observers.
That trajectory alone says a lot about the significance of his subject matter. Sacco goes where important conflicts rage, and where the muddy politics of identity exacerbate the conflicting intersections of politics, cultures, and ideologies. We are lucky he ventures into these spaces, because the insights he shares in his books offer important lessons in understanding and compassion to readers around the world. They also offer an important model of good journalism for reporters. It's common for reporters covering struggles in colonized spaces – from the Middle East to North America – to retrench colonial perspectives and attitudes in their work. Sacco offers a superb model of how journalism ought to be done in the modern era ... One of the immediate benefits of a work like Sacco's Paying the Land is that it renders its subject matter deeply engaging for settler audiences that have probably never been exposed to an authentic and compelling version of Indigenous history (especially if they were educated in the past decade or earlier). It's a history that not only disentangles the complex politics of treaty negotiations and land claims, but conveys a sense of the urgency underlying the fraught political present. It's that sense of urgency that's often lacking in settler coverage of Indigenous issues ... Sacco, as a world-renowned journalist and comics author, brings a unique range of insight to his topic, along with a broad international following ... More than just a comics artist, Sacco is among an emerging movement of comics reporters whose methodology and techniques are reinventing journalism, for the better ... the comics format allows for a more complex introduction to a character. When an informant is given a full page or two-page spread to start telling their story, the reader is able to take in with a single glance more of the complex and intersecting elements that make up that person, all visually presented on the page ... In television or film it takes time to construct such a complex and well-rounded image of an individual; Sacco achieves a similar effect in just a few pages. Of course, it's perhaps not as thorough as the effect that can ultimately be achieved through other media such as film, but its value lies in anchoring this multi-dimensional portrayal of an individual in the reader's head before proceeding with their story. And where a documentary might only be able to present two or three individuals in such depth, Sacco's use of the technique enables him to inject literally dozens of informants in one book ... superbly translates the politics and history of the North into real human terms ... readers and conscientious journalists alike will find an outstanding example of how good journalism can, and should, be done.
It seems appropriate, then, that Sacco draws this opening section without frames, blending personal narrative, history and mythology ... His intensely detailed pages – a characteristic of his oeuvre – remind us that he is as much a representational artist as a cartoonist. Here he pays meticulous attention to the details of dress, the camp, the animals ... Initially, Paying the Land was intended to focus on the contentious issue of resource extraction and fracking, examining the pressures on First Nations people in their negotiations with oil companies and the Canadian government. It became a much broader story about the particular challenges facing one specific group, the Dene people, and the legacies of colonialism ... Having trained as a journalist, Sacco conducts intensive research for all his books ... This different interview process behind Paying the Land is reflected in the quieter role played by Joe compared to much of his earlier work ... Sacco’s measured, predominantly realist artwork throughout reflects this attempt to let the Dene people speak for themselves, working in tandem with the historical and sociopolitical context that he deftly interweaves ... Sacco’s depiction of resource extraction, especially fracking, is nuanced, highly sensitive journalism, demonstrating the ambiguities of this destructive but lucrative business ... His combination of authorial and narrative skill and artistic talent still marks him out from many of the cartoonists who have followed in his footsteps ... It is a tribute to Sacco’s artistic skill and narrative organization that a section on the complex legal history of land ownership in the Northwest Territories is entirely engrossing.
Sacco, who pays attention to every face, every squelch of mud or crumpled cigarette packet, has always had the most astonishing sense of place. You can smell rock and pine and snow, feel it in your bones ... Sacco might have left AK47s and mortar shells behind him, but this is war nonetheless; an internal war, where the invisible threads that hold a human together – self-worth, community, language, even the ability to love – are deliberately cut away ... There isn’t quite the level of immersion here as there has been in previous books, when Sacco lived with ordinary Bosnians and Palestinians; he doesn’t manage to stay with any Dene, and his interviewees are mostly leaders of one stripe or another, which sometimes lends a talking-heads, outside-in quality to the oral history. It isn’t always easy to keep track of who’s who, which I suspect, given the odd prod – 'you remember him' – is a problem he’s aware of. Previous books made me uncomfortable about his portrayal of women; there are more women here than usual, and he is alert to the ways in which Dene gender politics (now interestingly at odds with their own history, when everyone was required to be equally capable, at everything) gets in the way of their female leaders. But I think he could have gone further, and talked to more women, especially about their day to day challenges; done what he did with his mother, perhaps, and in so doing made the experience more immediate ... still a powerful piece of work, and in this time of pandemic and race protests Sacco’s concern with the decimation caused by injustice and internalised ideas of inferiority; with how the system is 'built for capitalism to succeed, not humans', resonates even more than it already would have. And over it all, of course, is the issue of our relationship to nature.
Unlike the structure of Sacco’s previous books, in which the core conflict is woven throughout the story, the narrative of the residential schools is concentrated in one section in Paying the Land, and it doesn’t appear until halfway through the text. That decision reflects a crucial difference in this new work: Although, like other Sacco titles, it involves him visiting and reporting on an oppressed community as an outsider, the subject isn’t war or an uprising. There are fewer specific events to chronicle and more sentiments and arguments to convey, which at times makes for a less cohesive story. But the shift allows him to move away from mostly depicting misery to rendering a more complex, affirmative world. This comes through in the richly detailed art and the formal experiments that open up new depths in his work ... Sacco fills the pages with a proliferation of images. Scenes of bush life flow into one another without panels or borders, creating the feeling of a dreamscape informed by the aesthetic of a scrapbook. The effect is immersive ... Sacco went to the Northwest Territories in search of stories about what’s buried underground. He returned with something deeper.
To say that Joe Sacco is the greatest practitioner of comics journalism working today is an understatement ... Paying the Land may well represent the greatest work he has ever done, and much of its greatness comes from the fact that it accomplishes what only the best journalism can do: it manages to be both timely and timeless at the same moment, telling a story that is acute in its immediacy while also portraying conflicts, struggles, and situations that—as is made clear as it reaches its powerful ending—have the familiarity of the eternal ... it very quickly becomes an even wider and more complicated story, and it is the strength of both this uncommon tragedy and Sacco’s skills as an observer and reporter that make it transcendent in both its sense of loss and its testament to human dignity and determination. Sacco does not shirk from placing clear blame where it needs to be placed, but he also clarifies that while there are easy villains and obvious wrongs, there are no simple remedies and no obvious way out ... Paying the Land is a masterpiece of reporting; it is a brilliant success in putting names and faces on those our system of living has tried to dehumanize, and in remembering what so many would like us to forget.
Fracking, forced separation of aboriginal children from their families, mining for diamonds and oil, alcohol, debt, and the freight of those wounds serve to cripple the landscape and the people who live on it. Deeply observed and masterfully drawn, Sacco (John McPhee–like, always in the background) brings light to dark corners of the world and to the human condition.
In this exhaustive study of the Dene Nation’s history and current way of life, Sacco...asks, 'Why do the indigenous people of the Northwest Territories seem adrift, unmoored from the culture that once anchored them?' A partial answer is provided via firsthand accounts of the Canadian government’s deeply shameful attempt to assimilate Dene children by forcing them to attend schools where they experienced emotional and physical abuse, and the legacy of abuse and addiction attributed to this experience. Sacco also explores the ramifications of oil, gas, and diamond mining in the area, which some Dene embrace as an economic opportunity, and others find exploitative and ecologically disastrous...acco’s reporting, accompanied by impressively drawn black-and-white illustrations, is occasionally overwhelmingly detailed, but with good reason: this is a vitally important story about an underrepresented people.
...[an] arresting exploration of a community on the brink ... The powerful middle chapters collect first-person stories of the atrocity haunting Sacco’s investigation ... Separating young people from their communities, Sacco argues, robbed generations of identity and direction, as Sacco learns from the testimonies of Dene people from all walks of life ... Sacco’s densely composed, meticulous black-and-white art has grown even more realistic and carefully observed in this work, though he still presents himself as a caricature with buckteeth and Coke-bottle glasses. He wisely withdraws his presence to the background, allowing the Dene and other locals he interviews to take the spotlight, interspersing close-ups of faces with images of the breathtaking northern vistas. Sacco again proves himself a master of comics journalism.
An epic graphic study of an Indigenous people trying to survive between tradition and so-called progress ... well worth the wait ... Partly oral history and partly a compassionate portrait, the narrative recounts the people’s transition from a culture that respected and lived off the land to one faced with challenges that threaten to erase the fundamentals of their culture. Sacco portrays the Dene’s old ways with his extraordinary illustrations, vividly showing how they once lived. The title comes from citizen Frederick Andrew’s memories from his youth ... Sacco also portrays in stark relief the pervasiveness of problems stemming from substance abuse ... Part of what makes Sacco’s portrayal so masterful is his proficiency as a journalist; he uses the real words of Dene citizens to tell their stories, augmenting them with his extraordinary artistic insight ... A startling depiction of an Indigenous people struggling to remain true to their traditions. Yet another triumph for Sacco.
