Sacco uses words and illustrations to document stories: He’s a self-described comics journalist. He has combined both forms to great effect in numerous works of graphic nonfiction, including Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, that tell of overseas conflicts. One monumental wordless work, The Great War, depicts the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Sacco returns to the subject of the Mideast in his latest book, a slim overview of Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza. The urgency of the project is evident in a short introduction in which he writes of beginning it after a friend in Gaza pleaded with him to “plz raise the voice up against these crimes.” Sacco’s answer: “So here, my friend, for whatever it’s worth, I ‘raise the voice up.’” That he does. The book is an impassioned polemic against Israel’s devastating response to the raid of Oct. 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas fighters. “The scale of the deaths of Israeli civilians left me horrified,” Sacco writes. So, too, did Israel’s retaliation, which has killed tens of thousands of people. “I was only theoretically prepared for the worst,” he continues. “The reality of the assault on Gaza…was almost beyond my comprehension.” Unlike Sacco’s earlier works that feature on-the-ground reporting—the testimony of ordinary citizens imbuing the pages with power—this book is more of a visual op-ed, his scathing critique of the U.S. and Israel accompanied by caricatures of President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and biblical-style language: “The way was greased for the Righteous Rampage that smote the People of Darkness.” Elsewhere, he writes, “America had just invented Kinder, Gentler Genocide. The patent is pending.”
