Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joe Sacco

Sacco is drawing a bright ethical line: yes to Crumb's draftsmanship, no to Crumb's worldview. Robert Crumb represents a particular strain of underground comics - formally inventive, culturally diagnostic, and often steeped in a gaze that can feel smug, horny, or cruel. Sacco, a journalist who uses comics as reportage, can't afford that kind of distance. His work depends on trust: with sources, with readers, with the historical record. So he claims influence in the safest place - the hand, not the head.

The key phrase is "chronicled his age". Sacco is praising Crumb less as a provocateur than as an archivist of atmosphere, someone who turned private neuroses and public weirdness into a time capsule. It's also a subtle rebuke to artists who treat style as an identity and subject matter as optional. For Sacco, the point of drawing isn't self-expression in the abstract; it's witness. Comics become a tool for recording what cameras miss or what institutions prefer not to document: the textures of power, boredom, fear, and coercion.

There's a defensive professionalism in "but not on the subject matter...or my approach". Sacco knows the comparison is inevitable - cross-hatched realism, dense pages, bodies rendered with uncomfortable specificity. He preempts the assumption that formal similarity equals ideological kinship. The subtext: you can borrow a visual language without inheriting its politics, and you can admire an artist's historical acuity without endorsing their impulses. In an era of hot takes and ahistorical aesthetics, Sacco is arguing for art as accountability.