Graphic Content: Stripped Bare

If you had to, you could recognise Joe Sacco from his cartoon self-portrait. True, in the real world his glasses aren't quite so milk bottle thick as in his comic books, nor do his lips have the same rubbery, Jaggerish quality he gives himself in his sketches. But if his drawing was all you had to go on you wouldn't be too hard pushed to recognise him. Well I do anyway when a slight, dark man with something of the eternal backpacker about him pushes open the front door of a hotel in Bern and starts asking in an American accent after the journalist who has travelled from Scotland to meet him. (Not too difficult a quest since I'm the only soul in sight.) Joe Sacco is the first to admit his chosen art form is largely unrecognised. It is, in his words, "under the radar" for most of us, and still pretty much seen as kids' stuff. Not that you would want to give his work to your children to read. Let's just say it's not quite The Beano, not unless DC Thomson has injected a bit of political repression and ethnic cleansing into Dennis the Menace lately.

Although Sacco prefers to call himself simply a cartoonist, comic journalist would make more sense. Next month sees the British publication of Palestine, a collection of his comic strips from the mid-90s that catalogue his experiences in the occupied territories, complete with an introduction from no less than Edward Said. His other book, Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95, as yet only published in America, boasts a foreword by Christopher Hitchens.

The names of Said and Hitchens give some idea of what to expect in the pages that follow. Sacco is a political fellow traveller, some way to the left of the US body politic. Thankfully he's no Dave Spart type (ask that Private Eye-reading uncle). In person, he's amiable and happy to listen to other people's political opinions without jumping all over them. Make a glib assertion though and he'll pick it up and shake it. In his work he comes across as an impassioned commentator, not scared of lambasting those he feels deserve his criticism or contempt - whether that be the Israeli secret police, the Shin Bet, the murderous tendencies of the Chetniks during the war in Bosnia or the inadequacies of the UN forces and western politicians during the same conflict.

What marks him out is that he does all this in comic form. The result is remarkably effective; in his combination of words and pictures Sacco brings a real immediacy and humanity to his accounts of the experiences of Palestinians living in the Gaza strip, or Muslims under fire in the town of Gorazde despite the fact it was a UN-designated safe area. Anyone who begins reading Palestine, wondering why anyone would think comics would be a suitable form for journalism, will finish it wondering why it isn't used more.

"I can take a reader and just shove him or her into a place," Sacco says over a coffee in Bern's city centre. "I can sort of shove a reader into the mud of Gaza immediately and I think that's difficult to do in prose writing. The other thing is it's such a pop medium. It's such an accessible art form. Pictures are accessible. They pull you in and I find a lot of people who wouldn't normally read a thing about Bosnia or Palestine will read these comic books."

Switzerland is a useful base for Sacco. It's just a few hours' flight from Tel Aviv or anywhere his journalistic instincts might take him. He's staying in a little village outside the Swiss capital with an old friend, trying to parlay isolation into a reason to work.

It is just the latest in a long line of places he's called home. Born in Malta and raised in Australia and America, there is something of the professional itinerant about him. "I don't have a home really. I still have to decide where I'm going to settle down, but that's been a question for 20 years."

It's a question he's beginning to ask himself more and more these days. He's 42 now, and worrying about the appearance of grey hairs, though he could still pass as an exchange student brushing up on his shaky German at the heart of Europe. The notion of settling down might be dominating his thoughts since he is finally beginning to make some money from his chosen profession. When we first meet he takes a childish pleasure in paying for my tram fare. There was a time, he admits, when he couldn't have afforded to. "When Palestine was coming out as comic books (in the 1990s) they did poorly. I mean, they started at a poor level and sales got worse. Commercially it was a failure."

You wonder how anyone makes any money out of comics, I say. "This is the question I've asked myself for ten years. I was spending ten years working on a couple of books and not seeing any rewards. And I mean very specifically material rewards because I have to eat. If you're not making any money and you're working seven days a week and you're scraping by and you don't know how to pay the rent it gets old. I was ready to give it in, not because I didn't think my work was worthwhile - I love what I do - but it was sort of out of despair. But I've got to say in the last two years things have changed for me."

It helps, of course, that the mainstream American press has discovered him. In recent years he has received commissions from the likes of Time, Details and Harper's, though these remain the exception rather than the rule. More importantly, his books are finding an audience. People, he says, are beginning to take comics seriously. Mention Dan Clowes (Ghost World) or Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan) and people now might have some idea of who you are talking about. "That's a good sign for me," he says.

Sacco didn't start out wanting to be a cartoonist. In the beginning, he says, was the word. His goal was to be a reporter. To that end he studied journalism at university. "I really wanted to write hard news." Instead, he ended up writing about notaries for the National Notary Association. Not quite what he had envisioned. At the time cartooning was just something he did in his spare time. The idea of using it to pursue his journalistic dreams was still the best part of a decade away.

With his dreams of being the next Bob Woodward dying on the vine, Sacco decamped to Berlin in the late 1980s, travelling around Europe with his friends who were in a band called the Miracle Workers (not one of America's more successful exports). He earned a living drawing posters and album covers. Somewhere along the way he started creating an indie comic called Yahoo, crammed mostly with autobiographical material. His wild times with the band and all that. There was no money in it, but he persevered.

And then he had this idea of going to the Middle East. It seems to have come to him rather out of the blue, though he'd been reading up on the subject for some time. "I didn't tell my publisher I was going," he says. He assumed they wouldn't be interested in a series of comics about the Palestinian situation. "The issue was really loaded and in some ways I thought I'd be cutting my throat commercially ... which almost happened."

He'd originally intended to just go there and continue turning out stories in the same autobiographical vein as Yahoo. But once he'd arrived to spend a couple of months in the occupied territories, "I just started interviewing people," he says. "It became journalistic. I did not go there with any grand theory. I just wanted to portray my own experiences and it became something else while I was there."

That something else was an inspired mix and meld of influences - underground comics crossed with the new journalism of Michael Herr and Hunter S Thompson. It was also something American print journalism could rarely be accused of. It was pro-Palestinian.

Growing up in America he says his idea of the Palestinians had been blurred to say the least. "You almost always associate them with terrorists. And when they are shot on the street it's 'Oh, it was a mistake'. Or 'maybe they were carrying guns, maybe they weren't'. The issue's sort of muddied."

It was only when he read around the subject, prompted by the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, that he began having doubts about the American journalistic notion of objectivity. "I felt like American journalists hadn't served me well. I don't think they did a good job on letting me in on the truth of the matter. And it just really upset me."

As a result Palestine explores the world of the intifada, a world of curfews, riots and military brutality. Sacco wears his sympathies on his sleeve. "My feeling is the Palestinians have been historically wronged. It doesn't mean their tactics now are good or right or moral. I can't defend Hamas's suicide bombing. But I am interested in why people defend it and I am interested in that view. You have to be fair and let people say what they want to say."

I ask him if he thinks there's a reason for what he sees as a pro- Israeli stance in US journalism and he pauses. I fill the space. Should we be looking for conspiracies? "I don't know if there are conspiracies, but from an US standpoint if you're looking at real politick, Israel represents a strategic asset and it is easier for the average American to relate to Israel in that it created a modern state in a short time and for - and I will say this clearly - its Jewish citizens it's a democracy. For its Arab citizens it's a little problematic. I think they would think of themselves as second- class citizens."

Sacco's book on Gorazde is equally subjective. His sympathies are with the Muslims who came under attack from the Chetniks. His account of their suffering makes for grim reading. Does he need to feel empathy for the people he's writing about, I wonder. Could he, for example, spend some time with the Israeli settlers? "I could do a book about the settlers, but I also know enough about it to know what sort of book it would be. I don't think it would be particularly advantageous to them to have me do a book about them." Anyway, he says, he did spend time on the Serb side of the lines in Bosnia, so he did talk to the "other side". "I can't say a lot of the things I heard were appealing. Some of what they said was appalling but I also got to see them as human beings."

I'm surprised when he tells me print journalists like what he is doing. I assume they might look down their noses at it, but he assures me that's not the case. More importantly, neither do the people he meets and whose stories he recounts. He admits he was a little shy about showing people his comics when he first went to the occupied territories. "But I found out that it's all very well and good to go with a prose book and say 'This is what I wrote about you, open up your hearts to me'. But they look at this English- language text and it's gobbledygook. On the other hand they just look at my comic and they see themselves."

Christopher Hitchens has called Sacco a "moral draughtsman". It's not a badge he's that keen to wear. "If you saw some of my other work you'd think 'what has that got to do with morality?'" he says, referring to his Yahoo years. Actually, he's working on a graphic novel about the Rolling Stones. He's been practising the lips for years now, I suppose. No need to worry too much about morality there. He'd also like to do something about his hero George Orwell.

But for the moment he's working on another book about the Middle East and he still has 20 pages to go in a book about Sarajevo. That's what he's going back to when we part. He guides me to the railway station, our breath pluming in the cold morning air. He lingers long enough to make sure I know what platform I'm looking for. Around us the citizens of Bern are intent on Christmas shopping, thoughts of the Middle East and Bosnia no doubt far from their minds. It strikes me that Switzerland must be the most incongruous place to meet this particular cartoonist. This is a country that's proud of its history of neutrality. Neutral is the last thing Joe Sacco is.

Palestine is published on January 2 by Jonathan Cape at £12.99. Safe Area Gorazde is available from www.fantagraphics.com