Thursday, March 4, 2010
Joe Sacco. Writer. Cartoonist. Activist. Portland.
Joe Sacco has spent his career covering war zones-Palestine, Bosnia, Iraq through comics... the dialogue in his work is based on the real interviews he's had with people. In his latest graphic-novel, Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco investigates two incidents that took place during the Suez Crisis of 1956. The first incident is a massacre of 275 Palestinian men by Israeli forces at Khan Younis. The second story is about an anti-guerilla operation, where the Israeli military entered Rafah, rounded up all the (Palestinian) men, questioned them all day, hoping to identify militants hiding among the population, and eventually executed more than 100 of them. Joe also includes modern-day Gazan events in his book...including Israeli attacks on Palestinian funerals; suicide bombings in Tel Aviv; and a long series of Palestinian home demolitions by Israeli soldiers. The 400-page book of hand-drawn comics is not only informative, but visually impressive. I highly recommend his work to anyone interested in the Middle-East.