PALESTINE

Sacco's remarkable, controversial work reprinted in a single volume is a worthwhile addition to post-9/11 dialogue

By Mike Whybark     September 07, 2002

In the dark mists of antiquity - 1993, to be exact - the surprising, ambitious PALESTINE emerged from the pen of cartoonist Joe Sacco. Prior to the publication of this work, Sacco had edited the engaging, always surprising, and virtually unsaleable omnibus comics title, CENTRIFUGAL BUMBLEPUPPY, for Fantagraphics, following this with a run of a bio-comic called YAHOO. Central to the development of the personal comics genre at the turn of the nineties, and in YAHOO displaying passages of undisguised virtuosity, Sacco remained one of a crowd of promising cartoonists diligently seeking their voices.
If anything distinguished him at the time, it was his diligence and his pivotal role in encouraging creators such as Joe Matt. It's my understanding that I was one of two people who bought every issue of BUMBLEPUPPY, but for whatever reason, I only sporadically picked YAHOO up.

PALESTINE is both a compelling personal record of a semi-journalistic visit to the Palestinian refugee camps, circa 1992, just as peace appeared to have some slight possibility of taking hold in Israel and Palestine, and Joe Sacco's passionate statement of ambition for his art as a cartoonist. In this work he grittily declares the scope of his ambition to be one of the all-time greats, simply by dint of the scope of the work itself. Read simply as a personal narrative of the disheartening experience of viewing life from the short end of the global stick, PALESTINE succeeds admirably. Indeed, the introduction by Edward Said contains a note of that familiar puzzled revelation we hear when western intellectuals suddenly realize, again, that comics are not inherently restricted to tales of fantasy and to an audience of children.

It's no less successful technically, with Sacco possibly inventing some entirely new comics techniques. His liberal use of full-page panels to present an accumulation of detailed information and his inventive placement of narrative and caption boxes in the context of his overall page design has only one recent predecessor - S. Clay Wilson. It also looks almost directly back to English satirical prints by artists of the 1700s such as Hogarth.

It must be mentioned in passing, however, that the meaning of the book has shifted in the wake of both 9/11 and the subsequent resumption of wholesale violence by both sides in the conflict. The recent violence has taken place on a scale far surpassing that which occurred in the early '90s; therefore PALESTINE's depictions and discussions of violence have a strange unreality to them which they lacked prior to this past year's tragedies.

The personalization that Sacco uses in depicting his experiences includes a trick of the trade to increase reader identification with his self-portrait: he's depicted with exaggeratedly cartoony, yet emotionally blank features, and Sacco wastes no opportunity to demonstrate what an average, weak-willed person this character is. This provides both comic relief and a sense of direct honesty in the portrayal. However, that sense of honesty is somewhat undermined by the recognition that the real Joe Sacco is the creator of the monumental work in which this mildly maladroit character appears.

Sacco went on to produce another work of comics journalism in the same vein, SAFE AREA GORAZDE, concerning the breakup of Yugoslavia, and recently contributed artwork and reporting to a controversial article in HARPER'S alleging severe human rights abuses by Israeli military units or their allies. Your personal reactions to the events in the Mideast will inevitably color your experience of reading PALESTINE. Love it or hate it, it really is, as the cover blurb states, a "landmark work of comics journalism," and may be even more important to read today than when it was first published.

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