Palestine

by Joe Sacco

At this point in my life, after spending just about all of it reading comics, I'm always a little surprised when I realized what some of my gaps are.  For example, I've never read a complete Joe Sacco book before now.  Palestine collects his individual comic books from the mid-90s, recounting his visit to that unfortunate place.

I don't know what kind of response this book got when it came out, but it clearly wasn't strong or outraged enough.  In this book, Sacco walks around the towns and refugee camps of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, going into peoples' homes, hearing their stories, and observing their living conditions.  He gives a very honest portrayal of Palestinian life as it was twenty years ago.

That things have only gotten worse in this occupied land is unbelievable to me.  I don't want to get into my political thinking here, but as someone who likes to see himself as a humanist, this book made me angry and sad.  Knowing that, were Sacco to find these same people and talk to them again, their lives are not likely improved, is a tragedy.

I think the main reason why I never read a Sacco book is because his art kind of turns me off.  His people are strange looking, and their teeth disturb me.  That said, his draftsmanship is great, and his establishing shots, or his panoramas of Palestinian life, really impress.

It took me a little while to adjust to his use of cascading text boxes, and the overall wordiness of this book, but by the time I had read the first three issues collected here, I was hooked.  Sacco should be admired for the bravery and sensitivity he brought to this comic, and I liked the way he kept himself front and centre, providing us a perspective to react through.  This is a classic piece of graphic literature.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

It shouldn't come as news to anyone that America is in trouble these days, but I've read few explanations of just how varied and deep the trouble lies than Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco's book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.  The two men, one a print journalist and the other a comics journalist, traveled the country and found four regions where inequality is having a devastating affect on locals.

The book begins in Pine Ridge South Dakota, a reservation with almost complete unemployment.  By beginning the book here, the authors are reminding us that disenfranchisement, disregard for human rights, and blind obedience to capitalism are some of the central tenets of the American experience, and they always have been.  And the consequences of that are clear to any who would care to look.

From there, Hedges and Sacco take us to Camden New Jersey, a post-urban wasteland drowning in drugs and poverty, to Welch West Virginia, where the environment is being destroyed in the quest for coal, and to Immokalee Florida, where people, mostly migrants from Mexico and places to the south, are being exploited in the interest of keeping the price of growing food low (even as financial speculators keep the cost of buying food in markets unnecessarily high).  Over and over again, Hedges and Sacco show us examples of devastation and disregard.

The thing is, they also show us dignity and hope.  Again and again we meet people who have stood up to big business, local and state government, and sometimes their neighbours, in often vain attempts to protect their homes, their environment, and their way of life.

The final chapter of the book didn't sit as well with me as did the rest of the book.  In it, Hedges writes about the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, and in it, he saw the beginning of the end of Western Capitalism.  It seems to me that his hopes for this movement were unrealistic, and with the book having been out more than a year, events seem to have not supported his viewpoint.

Ignoring that last chapter, this book is an excellent portrait of a country that is entering its decline at the hands of the elite few.  Joe Sacco's portraits and illustrations add weight and veracity to the text, and his comics, which usually take the form of biography, are fantastic.  Both Hedges and Sacco incorporate oral history into their writing, letting the people in these little-known and much-ignored places speak for themselves, giving their stories greater weight.

I enjoyed this book, and would love to share in Hedge's optimism that the solution to many of these problems lie in the collective voices of regular citizens.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13

Edited by Chris Ware

This is the comics issue of McSweeney's, which received a fair amount of attention when it was published in 2004 for showcasing a lot of up-and-coming talent in the arts comics field.  It contains a wide range of short comics and excerpts from longer pieces, as well as a few essays or memoirs about comic books, their history, or their influences on other artists or writers.

The biggest problem with reading this book for the first time six years after it was published is that I've read a lot of the material in here in its complete, finalized form.  This is not really a problem, as I am very happy to return to some of the works here, but it did limit the novelty of reading such a well-produced and designed hardcover with some of my favorite 'independent' artists contained in it.

Ware and company have assembled a very interesting collection, with contributions from people like Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings), Joe Sacco (The Fixer),Charles Burns (Black Hole), Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers), Chris Ware, and Los Bros. Hernandez.  There were also plenty of lesser-known cartoonists included, some of whose work I found irritating, while others were quite enjoyable.

Strangely, there was a very visible Canadian delegation to this collection, with and excerpt from Joe Matt's Spent, David Collier's strips about moving to Hamilton, and a long excerpt from Chester Brown's classic Louis Riel, detailing the death of Orangeman and agitator Thomas Scott, a pivotal moment in Riel's story, and a great example of the genius of that book.

Some of the pieces that were new and interesting to me were Ben Katchor's Hotel and Farm strips, one-pagers that dealt with those two topics; David Heatley's Portrait of my Father; and Kim Deitch's Ready to Die, about a man on Death Row.  I also really enjoyed Chip Kidd's memoir on friendships and Batman merchandise.

Of course, as with any anthology like this, there were plenty of things that I either had no interest in, or just flat-out hated (I'm looking at you Kaz), but overall, this was a very worthy purchase.