Word: sacco
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...Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza is a comic book like no other. It has no super-heroes, and not many laughs, but few would expect much levity in a story set in a territory under constant siege and bombardment by the Israelis. But Gaza's present plight simply forms the backdrop against which the book's main character, the cartoonist himself, wanders through 388 finely-crafted pages, dodging Israeli missiles and sniper fire as he tries to re-construct events surrounding two massacres of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli soldiers...
...Sacco's project leaves many Gazans dumbfounded, sometimes even angry: 1956 was a long time ago, they keep telling the American author, as Israeli choppers fire cannons at fleeing militants and bulldozers tear down Palestinian homes deemed too close to Israeli positions. Why not write about the here and now? But Sacco is as dogged as a noir detective; he never gives up after being told by an Islamic militant that one of the massacres, in Khan Younis, had "left a wound in my heart that can never heal... (They) planted hatred in our hearts." (See pictures of heartbreak...
This explanation has a certain weight, coming from Abed El-Aziz el-Rantisi, who, as Sacco explains in the prologue, is a senior figure in Hamas later assassinated by an Israeli rocket. And in the course of his investigation, award-winning cartoonist-reporter Sacco, who has published works on Bosnia and the Palestinian territories, makes a convincing case that these two mass killings - "foot notes" which rated only a few sketchy lines in UN dispatches and press reports of the day - are key to understanding the despair and rage of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside Gaza today...
...early scenes, at a boozy Jerusalem party of jaded journos, Sacco muses that "They could file last month's story today - or last year's, for that matter - and who'd know the difference?" That's sadly true; a British colleague of mine once accidentally sent the wrong computer file to his editors in London, who dutifully ran his stale Gaza story without noticing that they'd run the same piece a week before. There is a numbing sameness to stories about Gaza, but Sacco's illustrations, backed by his methodical research, bring the Gaza of 1956 bleakly to life...
...past and present cannot be so easily disentangled; they are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur." It's a fitting thought for cartoonist Joe Sacco to include at the outset of his latest piece of visual journalism. The unique form in which he operates--reportage translated into comic-book panels--is perfect for conflating time: then, now, it's all the same. Especially in the Gaza Strip, a land haunted by decades of bloodshed and oppression. Sacco, whose previous works include Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, investigates a pair of events, from November 1956, in which Israeli soldiers...