Safe Area Gorzde Blog

I like that even though the story was about very sad events, there was also some humour in it. The novel gives a good feeling about what it must be like to be in a war where the enemy could be your neighbor. One thing I did not like about the novel is that I found the story a bit hard to follow. I did not know enough history about Yugoslavia to easily figure out the story’s background. The author does describe the historical background, but it was a bit tricky for me to follow. This is the first adult graphic novel that I read and it was a nice change from reading regular novels. I plan to read more graphic novels in the future.

There does not appear to be a traditional hero, but to me the main hero is the journalist. He is drawn to look kind of geeky and dorky with glasses and an odd smile. He goes to Gorzde which is a Muslim area surrounded by Serbs. The narrator can travel on the Blue Road. The narrator becomes a delivery system and brings back goods from Sarajevo to the people of Gorazde. The reader can tell that the journalist is sympathetic toward the townspeople in the way that he describes what is happening to them. He seems to like the townspeople as individuals, not just because they make interesting news stories.

The three panels on pages 92-93 were very interesting. They show seven mutilated corpses lying in the cemetery about to be buried. The narrator names the corpses and describes their decay in detail (they had been killed some months back and left in their houses). The artistic style used by the author in these panels is the same as he has drawn throughout the novel. The drawings are more realistic than cartoons and comics. The panels are in black and white, which gives the story a very dark mood. The corpses have a creepy look to them. Even though they are drawings, they make the reader squirm, and feel sad and disturbed.