Joe Sacco is best known for his unusual, illustrated war reportage: from Gaza and Gorazde Bosnia. I ran across something different, an earlier collection of Sacco cartoons that records the summer he was hired to be The Band Cartoonist for an LA band called the Miracle Workers on their European tour. The strips and sketches are anthologized along with some cartoons about what the Rolling Stones mean to him as "But I LIke It" (Fantagraphics Books).
But I Like It was compulsive reading for me for a week. Here are a few highlights.
Sacco contrasts what it's like to be the band on stage:
Versus being the guy manning the merchandise table:
He contrasts his music taste when young:
To his music taste now:
The shot that most strongly evoked being part of a band tour was this easily overlooked sketch of the back of the Miracle Workers tour bus.
The saddest part of the book was that Fantagraphics included a CD of the now-forgotten band's music and, being a library book, the CD was long gone, underscoring poignantly the deep turnaround in fortune: the chick magnet band is gone like dust in the wind but their scrawny cartoonist's reputation only gets greater as time goes on (deservedly -- Sacco has great ideas , humor, a story to tell, and appealing self-deprecation that reminds me of Eminem ). Truly a tale of the ant and the grasshopper.
Comments