Joe Sacco admits that he began to clash with many of the existing principles of journalism early in his career. He had graduated with a degree in journalism from a university in the US and had begun following the coverage of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
As news of the massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps reached him, he had an epiphany: “I remember seeing the photographs and looking at all this, and the thought that came to my mind is, ‘Wait a minute, I thought the Palestinians were the terrorists.’” Surprised by his own realization, Sacco resolved to interrogate this assumption about Palestinians that seemed to always hang in the air. He found himself in the West Bank, and eventually in Gaza, and his experiences became the foundation for a longstanding relationship with the region.
Along the way, Sacco blazed a trail with a new style of journalism: fusing cartoons with in-depth reportage and historical research. His first book Palestine: A Nation Occupied was published by Fantagraphic Books in 1993. Visually stunning, witty and incredibly moving, it was a groundbreaking for its commitment to detailed, on-the-ground reporting while offering a glimpse into a besieged community.
Sacco continued to report from war zones, and books on Palestine and Bosnia followed. He had grown up with parents who lived through heavy bombings during World War II in Malta, and their experiences of war and displacement have remained at the core of his work: “They lived under very desperate conditions, very little food. Malta was basically surrounded by German and Italian forces. They saw a lot and lived through a lot, and those are the stories I heard around the dinner table.” Perhaps this is also why engaging with history came naturally to Sacco.
He produced works on the 1956 massacres in Gaza (Footnotes in Gaza, 2009); a powerful book on poverty in the US co-authored with Chris Hedges (Days of Destructions, Days of Revolt, 2012); an account of the Dene community living in the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories (Paying the Land, 2020); and a controversial work on the deadly sectarian violence in northern India in 2013 (Once and Future Riot, 2026).
This month, Sacco will publish his third long work on Palestine, titled Requiem for Gaza and co-authored again with Chris Hedges. Distraught about the last two years of genocide, and with no real possibility of entering Gaza, Sacco and Hedges spoke with 29 families who had escaped to Egypt. In Gaza, “all means of life have been extinguished,” he said. “I mean, purposefully destroyed, not accidentally destroyed, but in many, many cases dynamited.”
In this Radical Futures conversation, Sacco opens up about a range of topics: his journey as a self-taught cartoonist; his long historical works that take years to complete; his first brush with censorship in India; and his disappointment with what journalism has become today.
Further reading:
Requiem for Gaza by Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges, Fantagraphics, 2026.
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/requiem-for-gaza
Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari
Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes
Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat
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