The Fixer

What does a nightly news segment actually cost? Perhaps a few packs of cigarettes or a pair of jeans. Where Western reporters are the only outsiders still working amid artillery fire, fixers are the locals who lead them to the suffering that editors want on the front page. The work is risky, morally murky and driven by need.

Joe Sacco, a cartoonist known for comics reportage, turns his attention to the machinery behind frontline news. The story opens near the end of the Balkan war, where Sacco meets a man intent on wringing out the last profits from Bosnia before rebuilding begins. Through his tangled dealings with this fixer, Sacco uncovers how warlords and gangsters who opportunistically controlled the countryside during the fighting operated.

Nearly seven years later, Sacco returns to find the same fixer and learns how the Bosnian government handled those same criminals. The book is a nonfiction graphic novel for adult readers.