Joe Sacco has been covering the Israel-Palestine conflict in varying forms since 1991: first in Palestine, then in Footnotes in Gaza, and most recently in War on Gaza. It’s too much for Kumar and Dana to contain in their heads all at once, both in terms of information and emotion, especially for poor Kumar, who struggles to form complete sentences through the entire episode. And it was a herculean task for Joe Sacco, too, as he confesses right on the page, but the end result is monumental.
by Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, from The New York Review (Feb 27, 2025)
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Joe Sacco is surely THE trailblazer in the area of using comics as a medium for journalism; his work reads like a documentary film, or a remote report on the evening news. At his best, such as in Safe Area Gorazde, he not only gets you much more emotionally involved than the evening news ever could, he takes advantage of the medium to communicate in ways that video can’t. At the same time, he pulls back the curtain on how the presence of a journalist affects the actions of those around him.