Acclaimed cartoonist Joe Sacco publishes his graphic novel on immigration to Malta

Today his new work features in the Guardian, with the familiar faces of Home Affairs Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici, his spokesman Darrell Pace, Marsa’s mayor and the far-rightist Norman Lowell, elucidating his graphic novel on Maltese migration to Australia and African immigration to Malta.

Sacco – who was born in Hal Kirkop in 1960, but emigrated to Australia (and later the USA) as a child – is the author of a number of critically acclaimed political comic-books, of which Palestine (1996) is arguably the most successful.

Described by leading orientalist Edward Said as “a political and aesthetic work of extraordinary originality”, Palestine is a collection of strips depicting Sacco’s travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis) in Gaza and the West Bank in the mid-1990s. It was serialised as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996.

More recently, Sacco won international critical acclaim with his Safe Area Goražde, a similarly pictorial account his experiences in the troubled Balkans during the Bosnian conflict.

Safe Area Goražde won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001, and earned Joe Sacco a Guggenheim fellowship, which helped him finance future projects – including his ongoing work on immigration through Malta, as well as a simultaneous project depicting life in Camden, New Jersey – America’s poorest town.