Time & Perspective Quote by Joe Sacco

Sacco slips a quiet provocation into an almost throwaway line: the real story, he suggests, might be the one readers didn’t notice he had the access to tell. In a region where moral clarity is often marketed as the only ethical stance, he’s signaling something riskier and more journalistically honest: proximity to the “wrong” side isn’t endorsement, it’s information. The phrase “isn’t apparent in the other books” reads like an admission of narrative triage. Even when you’ve been there, even when you’ve listened, what makes it into print is shaped by form, focus, and the gravitational pull of audience expectation.

The specific intent is practical - he’s floating a future project - but the subtext is about credibility and imbalance. Bosnia reporting, especially for Western readers, has a well-worn frame: aggressor and victim, siege and suffering, righteous outrage. Sacco’s work is famous for refusing clean hero-villain arcs, yet he also knows how easily nuance gets mistaken for “both-sides-ing.” By mentioning time “on the Serb side of the lines,” he’s pointing to the missing negative space in his own archive: voices, rationalizations, fears, propaganda, banal routines of power. That’s where complicity often lives.

Context matters: Sacco’s comics journalism runs on immersion and uncomfortable intimacy. This line is him reminding us that empathy is a reporting tool, not a moral verdict - and that a conflict’s hardest truths are often located exactly where a reader least wants to follow.