I’m a newcomer to graphic novels. Before three months ago, the closest I had come to reading a graphic novel was reading “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” while on vacation at my aunt’s house when I was 9. Sad, huh?

I associated graphic novels with my goth friends who had fixations on Trent Reznor and painted their fingernails black. I know. It was really snotty of me. It wasn’t Neil Gaiman’s fault that they wore too much eyeliner; they made those fashion choices on their own.

The watershed moment for me came after reading a free PDF of Bill Willingham’s series “Fables,” which I now love and adore and recommend highly. Amazon.com’s Recommended for You feature - with which I have a tempestuous relationship - then pointed me to Joe Sacco’s work.

Sacco is a journalist whose medium is comics. He has covered the Palestinian conflict and the Bosnian War, in drawings reminiscent of R. Crumb. ”Safe Area Gorazde” chronicles the time he spent in a beseiged Bosnian village, Gorazde (gor-AHJZ-duh).

There’s something very poignant about Sacco’s combination of story and artwork. I loved details like the clothing they were wearing, the ugly patterned sweaters native to the Eastern Bloc (and appropriated by Bill Cosby). Most importantly, he was able to coherently explain the major events that tore Yugoslavia apart - in a comic, no less.

The Serbians suffered horribly during WWII, and you’ll never hear me say different. But they committed terrible atrocities against the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. Sacco’s book reminds me why I found it so trying to copy-edit stories from the Balkans. The more you learn, the more you detest everything about the situation and everyone involved in it. The human misery is bottomless.

I still think that I could offer a pretty solid solution to the Balkan Problem, but I’ll need some nuclear weapons, the Ebola virus and a lot of salt. Carthago delenda est!

Verdict: 8 out of 10. It’s an important work of journalism and pretty heart-rending stuff. I recommend it, but it’s not a light read.