Comics journalist Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960 and subsequently lived in Australia, Los Angeles, and New York before settling in Portland, Oregon. In 1991 and 1992, Sacco spent two months in Palestine and Israel, interviewing about one hundred people on both sides of the conflict for his American Book Award–winning Palestine (2001). His next two books focused on the Balkans. Safe Area Gora?de takes place at the end of the Bosnian war, and The Fixer, set in Sarajevo, jumps between 1995 and 2001. Sacco’s comics are characterized by a painstaking attention to visual detail, especially evident in his breathtaking, wide views of refugee camps and swarming village streets.

Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco’s second book on the Middle East and his first with a mainstream publisher (Metropolitan Books, 2009), runs over four hundred pages and, as with his previous work, its word-and-image narrative is built on his interviews with witnesses to the war. A seven-year project, Footnotes in Gaza investigates two massacres of Palestinians in November 1956 in the wake of the Suez Canal crisis: one in the town of Khan Younis, in which a presumed 275 people were killed, and one in the neighboring town of Rafah, in which a presumed 111 people were killed. Little has been written, especially in English, about either event, and Sacco conducted extensive research of U.N. and other documents, and hired Israeli researchers to go into archives in Israel. He captures the testimony of the many living survivors he tracked down from both events.

Sacco has done numerous shorter comic reporting pieces for venues including Time, the New York Times Magazine, Details, Harper’s, and VQR. When I sat down with him in the Thompson Hotel in New York City last winter, where we drank mini-bar bottles of whiskey, he conjectured about his next project, for which he wants to travel to India. He also mentioned one of his longtime ambitions, a work provisionally titled The Gentleman’s Guide to the Rolling Stones. “I’ll get the India thing done, and see how I am,” he told me, “but then I’m going to do my Rolling Stones book, damn it!”

— Hillary Chute

I. NOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DEAD?

THE BELIEVER: Were you in a total zone working on this last book?

JOE SACCO: When I was working, yes, I was in a total zone. But, I mean, I have a life. I have a social life. I have a girlfriend back in Portland. So…

BLVR: I wasn’t implying you were some freak who never saw sunshine.

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