Some of those comics featured Sacco as a character, experiencing and reacting to the events at hand. What was a natural narrative element in the underground comix that inspired him made Sacco not only a comics journalist, but also one of America's leading practitioners of subjective, first-person, New Journalism. Sacco achieves a sense of continuity through his own constant presence and the humanizing, painstaking care with which he renders faces and figures. In fact, Sacco's 240-page book is a model of visual intimation. Repetitive background images of woodcutting subliminally reinforce the reader's sense of Gorazde's decay and resiliency.
Human figures walk amidst meticulously-rendered buildings in a way that heightens their loneliness.
When Sacco leaps back in time to show the village's initial dissolution, the effect is devastating. Sacco masterfully reminds us that war is about constant change and unexpected loss. In doing so, he achieves effects with mood that would be lost to anyone except the finest prose novelist. Even then, it would be almost impossible to match Sacco's economy. But forgetting the form, and leaving behind the pop sensibility which will no doubt drive the majority of attention this book receives, Safe Area Gorazde impresses because of the delicate, tragicomic sensibility of its author.