Daily Inspiration Quote by Joe Sacco

Sacco’s line is baited with a deliberate discomfort: “drawn” suggests curiosity, even desire, in the same breath as Iraq, a place most Western readers encounter as trauma on a screen. He’s admitting the magnetic pull of catastrophe, then forcing you to sit with what that means for a journalist whose currency is other people’s danger. The “of course” does extra work here, naturalizing the impulse and quietly indicting anyone who pretends they wouldn’t feel it too.

Calling Iraq “the biggest story of our generation” isn’t just scale-making; it’s a critique of the way generations are branded by wars they mostly witness at a distance. Post-9/11 Iraq became a defining narrative engine for American and European politics: preemptive war, propaganda, civilian casualties, the rise of insurgency, the long tail of veteran trauma, the destabilization that rippled outward. Sacco’s choice of “story” both elevates and cheapens it. He’s acknowledging the newsroom logic that turns invasions into assignments, while also insisting that the stakes demand attention beyond official briefings and embedded sound bites.

Context matters because Sacco isn’t a parachute reporter chasing adrenaline; he’s a comics journalist obsessed with the granular, the interview, the long look. The subtext is ambition with a conscience: he wants to be where history is being manufactured, but on terms that expose how the “biggest story” is built from hundreds of smaller, often erased lives. In that tension - attraction versus responsibility - the sentence becomes a compact manifesto for his whole project.