Joe Sacco was born in Malta on October 2, 1960. At the age of one, he moved with his family to Australia, where he spent his childhood until 1972, when they moved to Los Angeles. He began his journalism career working on the Sunset High School newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.

Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, [I couldnt find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference. After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found exceedingly, exceedingly boring, and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. ...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that, he later told the BBC.

He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Imħabba Vera (True Love), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. Because Malta has no history of comics, comics werent considered something for kids, he told Village Voice. In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but its not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not.

Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded