Author of the week: Joe Sacco

last updated 8 January 2015

Joe Sacco keeps pushing the boundaries of what a nonfiction comic book can do, said Rachel Cooke in the London Observer. Almost two decades ago, Sacco began collecting on-the-ground material about the plight of the Palestinian people that became the basis of the award-winning 1996 book Palestine. Now the American-raised, Maltese-born artist has published a 400-pager whose subject is even grimmer. Footnotes in Gaza deals almost exclusively with a pair of 1956 incidents in which Israeli soldiers reportedly massacred hundreds of residents in two neighboring Gaza towns. Sacco first heard whispers about one of the incidents while on assignment for Harper’s in 2001. Memorializing the 1956 violence in a book, he says, became a way to highlight “all those things that are more widely left out of history.”

Sacco “makes no apologies” for telling a story in which Israelis come across so strongly as villains, said Steve Duin in the Portland Oregonian. He says the truth is what interests him. “It’s up to us,” he writes in Footnotes, “to fill history’s glass with as much truthful, cogent testimony as we can.” When one Palestinian after another told him that they could remember the day their fathers were pulled from their homes, lined up against a wall, and executed, Sacco put those scenes in his drawings. Much of the world might not want to hear about such events, he says, but they need to. The Israeli soldiers “did terrorize people,” he says. “Who knows what that spawned?”