Footnotes in Gaza

Joe Sacco. Footnotes in Gaza.
Hardcover: 418 pp. Metropolitan Books, 2009.

"As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, Sacco's unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience.

Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah -- cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake -- reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in the daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheiks, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy." -- Jacket flap

"A timeless portrait of ordinary people caught in desperate circumstances. It's also a work of genius in an unlikely genre: journalism in the comic book form." -- Los Angeles Times on Safe Area Gorazde