Documentary comics: "Joe Sacco’s comics breathe lived reality"

Thirty years after publication, Joe Sacco's Palestine, a masterpiece of the comics medium, is experiencing a resurgence.

For the most hideous of reasons. Hamas’ attack on Israel a year ago and Israel’s subsequent relentless campaign of total destruction in Gaza have made demand for the book soar. Sacco himself calls that lasting popularity “a sorry testament to the enduring tragedy of the Palestinians.” But it could also be seen as a token of appreciation for a book that Sacco really was making up as he was going along. At the time, the Maltese-American journalist and cartoonist was looking for a way to report on his two-month trip to the West Bank and Gaza during the first Intifada. He found no better way than to combine his two passions.

Drawing the times

That hybrid creation turned into a pioneering work that gave birth to the medium of comics journalism – a medium that the Comics Art Museum is now honouring with an exhibition. What makes Palestine – and Sacco’s entire oeuvre, for that matter – so special are the details, the unaccustomedness and small edges of the observer, the ironic gaze, the heart-felt empathy, the outrage. The dull, everyday misery, the unbearable everyday violence. The time too. The time to show all those aspects of all those lives, and to pay attention to it truly, actually seeing it. In Sacco’s hands, comics journalism is the best of both worlds: images that vividly reveal what lies behind the one-minute snippets in television news, and stories that can only be recorded from mouths that are screaming, starving, protesting, or sometimes just running out of words. What you see is a lived reality. Now tell me that comics are for kids again.

Documentary comics 20/12 > 6/4,
Comics Art Museum, stripmuseum.be