Graphic Novel: Footnotes in Gaza

Overview
"Footnotes in Gaza" is a long-form piece of comics journalism by Joe Sacco that reconstructs two mass killings that occurred in Rafah in late 1956 during the Suez Crisis. Through extended interviews with Palestinian survivors, visits to sites in Gaza and Egypt, and examination of archival documents including United Nations records, Sacco pieces together how dozens of civilians, many of them children, were killed and how those events have been remembered, disputed, and largely omitted from dominant histories. The narrative alternates between close, scene-driven testimony and the broader archival and legal materials that illuminate gaps and contradictions in the official record.

Reporting and Structure
The book is organized as a careful mosaic of eyewitness accounts, corroborating documents, and Sacco's on-the-ground reporting. He travels repeatedly to Rafah and other locales, conducting lengthy, sometimes halting interviews that preserve the texture of speech and memory. Interspersed with these conversations are reproductions and summaries of UN reports, military communications, and contemporary press coverage; these serve as counterpoints that both support and complicate survivors' recollections. Rather than presenting a single definitive reconstruction, the book foregrounds the investigative process, showing how facts emerge, slip apart, and are contested.

Narrative Voice and Ethics
Sacco places himself in the narrative as an interlocutor, recording the hesitations, pauses, and doubts that shape oral testimony. That presence raises persistent ethical questions about representation, authority, and the limits of journalistic intervention. The book is careful to name individuals and dates where possible, insisting on acknowledging victims by name while also being candid about uncertainty and the slipperiness of memory over decades. Sacco repeatedly frames the moral urgency of listening to survivors and of pushing official institutions to account for past violence, while remaining reflective about his role as a mediator between testimony and public record.

Visual Style
Rendered in intricate black-and-white drawings, the visual style is both documentary and expressive. Panels are dense with detail: faces, interiors, landscapes, and documents are drawn with a mix of realism and graphic emphasis that foregrounds emotion without sensationalizing it. Sacco uses layout, recurring visual motifs, and careful pacing to slow the reader into the rhythms of testimony, allowing moments of silence, repetition, and interruption to carry weight. Maps, facsimiles of reports, and labeled timelines are integrated into the art, reinforcing the book's hybrid identity as both reportage and visual history.

Themes and Impact
At its core, "Footnotes in Gaza" probes issues of memory, accountability, and historical erasure. It asks how states, institutions, and communities remember or suppress episodes of mass violence, and how survivors live with the long-term consequences of trauma and displacement. The title gestures toward the status of Palestinian suffering within many mainstream historical narratives: treated as marginal detail, a footnote to larger geopolitical events. Sacco's thoroughness transforms those marginal notes into sustained attention, making absence visible and demanding ethical engagement.

Reception
The book received acclaim as a landmark of comics journalism and an innovative model of investigative reporting through sequential art, praised for its rigor, empathy, and formal ambition. It also provoked debate about balance and perspective, with some critics questioning whether the book adequately situates its findings within broader military and political contexts. Regardless of contested readings, the work has had a lasting influence on how journalists and cartoonists think about chronicling human rights abuses, and it remains a widely cited example of how graphic narrative can perform deep archival and oral-history work.