Drawing the Line of Fire: Joe Sacco, Cartoon Journalism, and the Unyielding Pull of Gaza

By Amos Barshad

For years, Joe Sacco—widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost practitioners of cartoon journalism—has desperately wanted to put down his pen regarding human conflict, bloodshed, and geopolitical trauma. In late 2023, as the Israeli military launched a devastating post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Sacco had been gearing up to finally—finally—abandon the battlefields of the Middle East and embark on a long-gestating passion project: a graphic book about the Rolling Stones. He envisioned the project as a welcome diversion, a creative vehicle to purge his mind of the heavy, philosophical riffs developed over decades of rigorous international reporting. It was meant to be his excuse to truly let loose.

Instead, as the death toll in Gaza mounted, pushing past seventy-four thousand reported Palestinian casualties, an old friend from the now-devastated city of Khan Younis sent Sacco a direct and haunting plea: "Please raise up your voice."

The Rolling Stones manuscript went straight back into the desk drawer.

"I have an attachment to Gaza," Sacco, now sixty-six, reflected over breakfast at a well-worn diner near New York’s Penn Station, his fedora resting rakishly on the table between us. "I know the people there. I know the streets."

In the early 1990s, Sacco spent months reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, groundwork that culminated in Palestine, his seminal 2001 graphic novel. "I expect something from myself. I think other people expect something from me too. And that’s all legitimate. I couldn’t live with it myself if I just went on my merry way." He offered a weary, self-aware smile. "I have wanted to move away from conflicts for a while. It just doesn’t seem to happen."

Main Facts: Chronicling the Unseen Through Art and Empathy

Sacco’s trademark works are wonderfully, jarringly unique: illustrated, deeply researched conflict-zone travelogues that weave together personal misadventures, casual conversations, and harrowing historical root causes to reveal the daily lived realities behind major massacres. (They are also, frequently, imbued with a sharp, dark humor.)

When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) instituted an embargo on foreign press entering Gaza following the events of October 7—an embargo that remains unlifted—direct on-the-ground reporting became nearly impossible for international journalists. Rather than abandoning the story, Sacco adapted. In late 2024, he published War on Gaza, a short book leaning heavily into "dark satire." In one surreal sequence, he imagines mailing his tax check to the IRS, only for those funds to be funneled directly into the final components of a missile bound for the enclave.

This was quickly followed by Requiem for Gaza, a collaborative work co-authored with Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times*. For this project, Sacco and Hedges traveled to Cairo to interview nearly thirty families who managed to escape the blockade.

Sacco’s enduring appeal lies in his ability to capture a scene in its messy, visceral entirety. In the finale of his 2020 book Paying the Land, which investigated the lives of Indigenous Canadians, he transports readers into a stuffy community gym where members of the Dene tribe play a raucous round of handgame. You can practically feel the sweat on the napes of necks and taste the stale air of the room. In Palestine, the sensory details are inescapable: the sloppy mud, the heavy rain, the abysmal roads. Across all his global travels—from Uttar Pradesh to Sarajevo—there is always the upward curl of cigarette smoke.

"It’s all color," Sacco says of his comprehensive approach to reportage.

Chronology: From Malta to Oregon, and the Awakening of 1982

Sacco’s path to becoming a pioneering voice in graphic journalism was circuitous. Born in Kirkop, a small village in Malta, his family emigrated shortly after his birth, partly because the local Catholic Church, in Sacco’s words, "held more sway over people’s lives than my parents were comfortable with."

After spending about a decade in Australia, the family relocated to Los Angeles before ultimately settling outside of Portland in Beaverton, Oregon. While working on the Sunset Scroll, his high school newspaper, "the light bulb went off," prompting him to study journalism at the University of Oregon. However, higher education brought disillusionment. When he pitched zany, unconventional ideas to professors who responded by asking which specific news outlet he planned to pitch, a nineteen-year-old Sacco recoiled. He didn’t want pragmatism; he wanted encouragement to "just launch yourself." He graduated, he admits, without "really knowing how journalism works," clinging tightly to the standard doctrines of American objective journalism.

That worldview was shattered in 1982. Following skirmishes with the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon, Israel invaded the country, overseeing a series of massacres of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps. When Sacco saw photographs of the thousands of victims, his perspective shifted entirely. Mainstream television and newspaper coverage had conditioned him to view Palestinians solely as violent aggressors.

"I felt like the wool had been pulled over my eyes," he recalled. "I got furious. I was pissed off at the idea of journalism."

That righteous anger planted the seed for everything that followed. "The books I’ve done about the Palestinians are a form of penance for my misconceptions beforehand."

Before his Palestine breakthrough, Sacco drifted through a series of mundane jobs: threading wires through load coils in a factory, working as a library page, and serving as a legal proofreader. He returned briefly to Malta to help launch a short-lived line of romance comics, then lived in Berlin, drawing tour posters and album covers for rock bands. "Little by little you develop something of your own," he noted. "But it’s not like you come up with the whole plan."

Supporting Data: The Mechanics of Method Journalism

Sacco’s production process stands in stark contrast to the rapid-fire, algorithmic workflows of modern digital media. He adamantly transcribes all his own interviews.

"Now people let AI do it, or they hire someone. No. I want to hear the inflection in people’s voices. I want to remember when the person gasped."

For his monumental 2009 book Footnotes in Gaza—which investigated two mass killings by Israeli forces in 1956—Sacco relied on roughly seventy recorded interviews alongside nearly four hundred pages of personal journal entries. Once his reporting is complete, he compiles a comprehensive, custom index, a grueling process taking several weeks. He eschews computers, storyboards, and digital art tools. Every single panel is hand-drawn. For any military hardware or historical settings he has not personally witnessed, he gathers exhaustive physical reference material, frequently riding the bus to local libraries to comb through encyclopedic military guides like Jane’s World Armoured Fighting Vehicles.

When drawing in his studio, Sacco utilizes a form of Method acting. "I let it all out," he explained. "I need to feel something." He frequently checks his reflection in a mirror to realistically render physical reactions, such as bracing against the blow of a club: "How would someone wince if this was happening?"

Self-taught apart from high school drafting classes, Sacco drew heavy early inspiration from the underground "comix" movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists like R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and Spain Rodriguez "could be offensive, even to me," Sacco acknowledged. "But they were pushing boundaries in a way that you could not do now without people just banging you over the head."

Initially drawing characters with grotesque exaggeration, Sacco’s style has evolved toward greater realism over the decades—though he steadfastly continues to depict himself as a self-deprecating caricature. "I can never really draw myself realistically," he shrugs. In Requiem for Gaza, that familiar avatar is rendered with subtle, aging gentleness.

Official Responses and the Information Blackout

The challenges facing conflict journalists today extend far beyond artistic style. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that nearly two hundred journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7, making the territory one of the most lethal assignments in the history of modern media. Combined with the IDF’s sweeping ban on foreign press entry, these conditions represent an intentional state-sponsored effort to render present-day Gaza an unknowable, unmonitored zone.

In Requiem for Gaza, Sacco combats this information blackout by zeroing in on deeply personal human narratives. One central figure is Osama Abdou, a clinical psychologist forced to evacuate his Gaza City home due to heavy bombardment, and subsequently driven south to Rafah by Israeli forces. When Abdou’s elderly mother became too exhausted to walk further, he was forced to physically drag her across the sand of a Mediterranean beach.

Sacco renders this agonizing ordeal with unflinching empathy. "I think: Imagine if I was in this situation with my parents. Imagine if I couldn’t help them."

Later in the book, Sacco depicts a follow-up video call with Abdou, who is now safe in Portland. True to his commitment to the visceral details of human life, Sacco pauses the panel to show Abdou enjoying a quiet, smooth cigarette through the glowing laptop screen.

Implications: The Tension Between Objectivity and Truth

Sacco has long argued that traditional journalistic conventions of "objectivity" often strip away the very humanity of a crisis. In the early 2000s, while sitting with mainstream newspaper correspondents in Jerusalem after long days in the field, Sacco would listen to incredible, harrowing accounts of reporters being confronted or caught directly in the crossfire—stories that were systematically excised from the next day’s published articles in the name of neutral, third-person reporting.

"Because a lot of the stories involve them," Sacco observed. "In the objective style, you never really feel the dust. But the world is very visceral. I don’t want to hammer down the flesh and blood in the name of objectivity—for journalism’s godly rule. I want to feel something. The atmosphere. The nastiness of it. The strangeness."

This philosophy frequently leads Sacco to inject himself into the narrative not as an omniscient observer, but as an active, flawed participant. In Palestine, he depicts himself scrambling for cover as Israeli forces throw percussion grenades, adding a candid speech bubble expressing both gratitude for the high-stakes friction and a secret, darker desire: "A comic needs some bangbang and I’m praying Ramallah delivers." It is a moment of pure journalistic sacrilege, laying bare the forbidden, universal impulse shared by frontline reporters: of course you want something catastrophic to happen so you have a story.

What Lies Ahead: The Eternal Return

Since 2012, Sacco has quietly carved out weekend hours to work on his long-awaited Rolling Stones passion project. "Saturday, that’s Stones day," he said. "That’s what helped me along the way of doing these harder books." When we spoke, he had amassed roughly 160 pages.

With Requiem for Gaza now published, the natural assumption was that every day would finally become Stones day.

"Now I’m back to it. Well, actually…" Sacco paused, smiling.

Actually, he had just agreed to work on a short comic adaptation of an interview with Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. She had reached out via Zoom and successfully persuaded him to illustrate a four-page piece.

"It’s four pages," Sacco sighed with a wry smile. "And I’ll get them done and I’ll move on. I do want to move on. What can you do?"