“Palestine”, an old graphic novel, is making a comeback

In the winter of 1991, around the time of the first intifada, Joe Sacco, then a young cartoonist and journalist, arrived in Gaza with no particular aim except “to see what’s going on”. He suspected that the version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he saw portrayed in the media was not the full story. For two months he travelled through the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, talking to wounded children, bereaved mothers and broken men. A Palestinian man urged him to write “something about us”. Mr Sacco promised, “I will alert the world to your suffering! Watch your local comic-book store.”