"One set of scenes in his 2009 book, Footnotes in Gaza, exemplifies this, revealing how testimony about painful events can diverge among witnesses, even within a family. Sacco speaks with an elderly woman named Omm Nafez, illustrating her story: She says that her husband and two of his brothers were shot by Israeli soldiers while walking out of the family home; a third brother, Khamis, jumped over a courtyard wall and survived."
"He recalls that his brothers were lined up in the courtyard and shot, killed not in a surprise scuffle but by premeditated execution. Khamis remembers visiting one of these brothers on his deathbed, but Nafez and another source say that Khamis was not there. So Sacco depicts both variations, while drawing out their disjunctions through commentary and supplementary reporting."
"Sacco reported Footnotes in Gaza from Khan Younis and Rafah, two cities at the south end of the Gaza Strip, over multiple trips in the aughts, and ultimately told a larger story-which stretches over decades of displacement and violence-in comic-strip panels. In this format, he is a character too, his round glasses and rabbit teeth peeking out amid the clustered limbs and busy tableaus."
Graphic reportage reconstructs contested history by juxtaposing conflicting eyewitness accounts, testimony, and field reporting. Testimony from Omm Nafez and her relative Khamis offers divergent versions of a killing: Nafez says soldiers shot three men as they left the home while Khamis recalls a lined-up, premeditated execution and remembers visiting a brother on his deathbed; other sources dispute his presence. The contrasting memories are presented side-by-side and interrogated through commentary and supplementary reporting. Reporting from Khan Younis and Rafah is assembled into comic-strip panels that combine on-the-ground reportage with historical reconstruction drawn from oral recollections.
Read at The Atlantic
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