Fax from Sarajevo

I became interested in "Fax" while speaking with a friend who spent a year in Kosovo and witnessed many of the same atrocities shown in "Fax." So I finally picked up a copy and read it.

My difficulty is not with the story so much as the art. Joe Kubert does have a knack for showing war, but his artwork is very inconsistent, particularly in his drawings of people. Throughout the book I had difficulty distinguishing some of the characters from one another. Kubert has a scratchy art style that just did not necessarily lend itself well to this story.

And because of the artistic inconsistencies, it made it difficult to follow the story in places. I'm considering re-reading it and perhaps the second time through, with a bit more familiarity with all that is going on, I'll be able to better appreciate it.

Its' clear Kubert poured himself into this book, the problem is his artistic style may not have the best one for relating this story.

Still, I do recommend it. It tells a frightening tale of a war that we in America still seem largely ignorant of, and it also functions as a cautionary tale against the atrocities precipitated by hate and violence.


Kubert's most relevant (anti-)war book yet.   July 22, 2002
Joseph D Baptist (SF Bay Area, CA United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

Unlike Safe Area Goradze, this story isn't drawn by someone who was there. This book is Kubert's gift to a friend and colleague - yes it's done in the same artistic style as Kubert used in his superhero and war books, but this isn't Sgt Rock, or even Enemy Ace.
Unlike some of the others who have reviewed this book, I found that the story works well as told in an American comic style. This is the story of the Rustemagic family, but it's also the story of the horror felt by their friends around the world once they realized what was happening.
This is a book about Americans awakening to a horror happening halfway around the world, as well as a book about the horrors of ethnic cleansing and civil war.


a flawed novel...   February 14, 2002
3 out of 8 found this review helpful

I mistakenly picked this book up, thinking it was "Safe Area". I had heard about a graphic novel about the atrocities in Sarajevo, but wasn't sure of the title. The story is amazing, but many times I feel like I'm seeing the Hulk or Captain America in the role of the protagonist. There is a gaping lack of realism to the book, primarily in the way the characters are drawn. The subject is dark, but the characters look like they popped out of a Disney film. One reviewer compared this to Maus. This doesn't even come close. Maus is a masterpiece, while this book almost seems like hardly any work or research went into it.

First of all, Maus is in black and white, almost drawn in a woodcut style, to deepen the impact of the story. Art Spiegelman really researched the project, and it shows. He interwove his complicated relationship with his parents and mother's suicide with the Holocaust. He made us see how he was affected by the Holocaust. Kubert is in the States the whole time, reading faxes. He really didn't have any significant role in the story. So, what does this have to do with what happened in Sarajevo?

Then he admittedly took liberties with the dialogue and obviously embellished parts of the story. The admission by the author of improvised dialogue automatically lessens the impact of the story...This project should have been left to its protagonist, Mr. Rustemagic to write and realize. I will be checking out "Safe Area" instead.

I do give the book 2 stars because it, despite its flaws, serves as testimony to a horrifying chapter in world history. For that, the author definitely deserves kudos.


Society Unraveled   January 6, 2002
N. Smith (Baltimore, MD)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

I heard about this book when it first came out and I simply had to check it out.

Why would a well-known artist like Joe Kubert abandon the hum-drum of fictional comics to produce a full-length journalistic book...? How could he expect it to even sell?

When the Cranberries wrote a song about Sarajevo, comparing the hatred there to that of Northern Ireland, the topic of Joe's book made me sit up and listen. And I am so glad I did. Joe's connection to the subject matter is personal, and I think that this one fact makes this book a classic work of literature in its own time. Despite his bias because of his closeness to the situation, Joe takes the time to present the complexity of the situation in Bosnia with his art and editorial commentary. And for this I am very thankful.

When I traveled to Croatia in 1997, this book gave me an emotional "frame of reference" from which to speak to the people I met, and I was met with passionate affirmations of the fear, frustration, and outrage that the people there were feeling, being threatened by people who hated them, not for political reasons, but for their ancestry or religion.

Imagine: You walk outside one day and suddenly people on the street are drawing lines between people where they never drew them before. They taunt, persecute, even shoot at people who look just like them, went to school with them, and live across the street from them. This is not a phenomenon limited to Bosnians. It's a human phenomenon, and it's happening right now, in the U.S. between narrow-minded Americans and people who they fear for illegitimate reasons.

Kubert succeeds in framing, accurately, how, given the right chain of events, the seeming tight knot of trust and brotherhood in society can quickly unravel.