Footnotes in Gaza

Metropolitan Books; $29.95

The first and only word that comes immediately to mind upon reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza is “Wow!”

“Wow!” as in, this is one seriously impressive piece of work.

“Wow!” as in, this is some amazing and human insight.

“Wow!” as in it says some really depressing things about the human condition.

Sacco, best known for Safe Area Goražde, digs deep into the past of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to find out how a troubling but mostly dismissed incident long ago fuels and in many ways represents a microcosm of the hostilities.

The key to this book is Sacco’s continual efforts to take larger situations and put a human face on them, which actually serves to make the project more staggering. For those interested in how comics can be used for journalistic purposes, it’s hard to think of a more ambitious project than this one.