Weird Melvin, Volume II: The Comic Strip Book

I think this may be one of the most moving and gut-wrenching books about war that I've ever read. I'm not sure why it made so much more of an impact on me than all of the other books of war journalism I've read over the years. There's something about it that just really gets under your skin. Maybe it's that Sacco can show us these people -- not just tell us what they looked like, but actually draw them as they look when they are most vulnerable or most ugly and violent. The plight of the denizens of Gorazde really got to me; I found myself walking home from work turning the story over in my mind. I think what hit me, which had never hit me before so much, was the realization that these were people who lived lives very much like mine: they went to school, they came home and watched TV and hung out with their neighbors and went to clubs. And then, in a matter of months, people from the city were freezing to death trying to walk to find food. The neighbors that they shared food with were killing each other. It really shook me up, the idea that life could go so quickly from peace and normality to something so horrific.