I’m currently reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza, which has just been published in the UK by Cape. I’m taking it slowly, partly because it is a large graphic novel, partly because its the sort of material you shouldn’t rush through; its been a while since I read Sacco and I’m being reminded that among the discussions of the importance of the subject matter he covers and how well he turned the medium into ‘cartoon reportage’ (which he has) sometimes we forget that in addition to those qualities he is also, simply, a damned good cartoonist. Footnotes so far has had an intoxicating mixture of small, intimate panels, putting us face to face with the actual people who have had to live through the events described and large splash pages, lush with details from the large scale, like buildings and streets, to the small, like breeze blocks and assorted junk on corrugated roofs to hold them down, that make the eye linger on a single, large page image. Reading further over lunch today though I was stopped dead by the panels towards the end of one chapter, where one mother in Gaza told him that the dead were honoured as ‘martyrs’ but what of those maimed and crippled? What of children who shake through the night or have been physically harmed?
It hits you in the face. Regardless of taking sides, who is right, who is wrong, who committed what atrocity on which side (and sadly there are enough of those to go around all sides), regardless of creed, colour or any other supposed differences, a mother’s pain over the harm to her child is universal and its impossible not to feel some of it. I had to stop reading it for today at that point. I’ve often thought Sacco quite brave for putting himself into areas where most of us wouldn’t dare to tread even with an SAS bodyguard, yet he goes and stays in them and talks to the people there; it reminds me a little of the legendary photojournalists I’ve admired like Robert Capa who knew there was a story there that had to be told. But reading that chapter my estimation of him rose, not for the bravery of going to a land where death is so very easy but for being able to face the emotional cost like this too. That chapter’s bloody hard to read; I can only imagine how much harder it was for the artist to be there, talking to that mother in a rubble strewn street, looking into her eyes and having no answers for her. Parts of it can be very hard to read, but it deserves to be read.
More on Footnotes as I go along.
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