Joe Sacco's anti-Israeli graphic novel is going back to press

The UK Guardian, a very bad MSM outlet themselves, published a puff piece about Joe Sacco's GN titled "Palestine", which was intended as anti-Israel propaganda, and is now seeing new print, clearly for the sake of obscuring the Hamas' savagery on October 7, and pandering to the crowd of creeps supporting them:

An acclaimed nonfiction graphic novel about Gaza, which pioneered the medium of “comics journalism”, has been rushed back into print after surging demand since the fresh outbreak of the conflict two months ago.

Palestine, by Joe Sacco, was originally released in comic book form by the American publisher Fantagraphics 30 years ago, then published as a single volume by the company, and by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 2003.

It was created by Sacco, a Maltese American journalist and cartoonist from Portland, Oregon, as a record of his own journeys around Gaza in 1991, and has since then won a clutch of awards and been included on university courses as a primer for the whole conflict. Edward Said, the Palestinian American academic and critic, said in his introduction to the book: “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.”

Gary Groth, the co-founder of Fantagraphics, said that after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October and the subsequent bombing of Gaza demand for the book had soared.

He said, “We blew out of our inventory of several thousand copies quickly and are reprinting now. Retailers and wholesalers began ordering the book in far greater quantities than in the recent past, which indicates that every element down the chain – consumers and retailers – are expressing demand for it.”

Well, this is certainly telling about Groth to boot, the same disgrace and shame who did a sugarcoated interview with Maurice Sendak years ago. Of course, one must also wonder where any and all comic retailers stand on a subject involving Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Will Eisner and Gil Kane's Israeli brethren. If any are seeking to capitalize on the tragedy that struck many Jewish women and children in particular, that's offensive in the extreme, and they have no business associating even remotely with the creations of famous Jewish artists. Sacco, along with the article writer, makes clear he remains sympathetic to followers of Islam, and shows no sign of horror over what followers of the Religion of Peace in Gaza did to innocent and defenseless women and children. That's what really makes this Guardian article repulsive. Unshockingly, they didn't even see fit to mention that Edward Said falsified his history. None of which matters to Sacco, sadly, nor to Groth. I absolutely do not want to buy from Fantagraphics if this is the kind of graphic novels they're going to market.

And Sacco's GN didn't so much pioneer comics journalism as it did propaganda, and exploiting the medium for that specific goal. It's sickening to think how many GNs of this sort came down the pike in the past 2 decades that did more harm than good for the comics medium's image overall regarding political issues.