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This essay examines Joe Sacco's graphic strategies for representing the pain of others in his first collected work, Palestine. In particular, I argue that Sacco draws on a kind of "haptic visuality" when representing pain and suffering and, in doing so, reformulates standard forms of looking at "the other."
In the very beginning of the graphic novel Palestine, Joe Sacco recounts his own ignorance and prejudice when it came to thinking about Palestinians. Growing up mostly in the U.S., he did not question the picture of Palestinians as terrorists: "Terrorism is the bread Palestinians get buttered on, I'd swallowed that ever since airliners went sky high in the desert, do you remember that, do you remember Munich and the blown up athletes, the bus and airport massacres?" (7). Yet in the present of the text, which takes place over two months in the winter of 1991-92 as the first intifada begins to run out of steam, Sacco finds himself in Israel and Palestine seeking to give voice and face to these "terrorists," to rethink his own notions of prejudice and pain, and to convince others to do the same. As Sacco's first sustained graphic work, Palestine represents the beginning of his career drawing in the realm of atrocity. Two later texts dealing with atrocity have received wide recognition: Safe Area Gorazde, which documents a phase in the Bosnian war, and his follow-up to Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza; yet both of these display a hard-boiled perspective toward the cost of war. It is the author's naïve, eager attitude toward documenting the pain of others that marks Palestine as unique in Sacco's body of work, as a sense of discovery permeates all nine collected comic books that comprise the volume.
In Palestine, Sacco also lays out the stylistic and formal foundations that characterize all his later works. In Sacco's basic format, the reader follows the character of "Joe Sacco" as he enters a war zone and encounters various people deeply affected by war and atrocity. In terms of the graphic sequences, Sacco moves between his present encounters and others' past experiences. Hillary Chute says of Sacco's work that "it strives to materialize visually an archive of oral testimony [. . .] reconstructing the bodies of others,...