For his latest book, Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco traveled to Gaza to find eyewitnesses to an Israeli army massacre of Palestinians in 1956. The book took him more than six years to complete. I interviewed Sacco for the UtneCast. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation:

First, I asked why he makes himself such a prominent character in his books:

Joe Sacco: When I was younger I would read books where people went to these interesting places and it was all such a mystery to me. It didn’t feel like something I could do, so it’s always been important for me to show the process; to completely or as much as possible demystify it; to show the fallibility of the process and the scenes in a story.

Jeff Severns Guntzel: Once you’re finished with the reporting and research phases—I know you spent months in Gaza, you were looking up documents at the United Nations archives in New York City, and you hired Israeli researchers to go through Israeli archives—once you’re done with all of that, what comes next?

JS: I spend quite a long period transcribing tapes and indexing notes. I have hundreds of pages of journal entries and then hundreds of pages of interviews and I make a relatively thorough index of all the stuff and then I start writing. I write the whole script and then I start drawing. If you’re talking about writing and drawing the story, it was about six and a half years [to do Footnotes in Gaza].

JSG: Is there anything you’ve learned about drawing Gaza and Palestine?

JS: Well, I'm always impressed by the number of kids. In my journal I will sometimes write notes to myself, "don’t forget to draw lots of kids." I’m always reminding myself that kids are following you around. They’re curious. There’s shooting and kids are going to show up because little boys want to see what’s going on. That’s the striking visual thing that sticks in my mind when I’m drawing any scene in Palestine.

JSG: Speaking of children, there’s a really powerful passage in your book. You’re interviewing a mother whose son was injured in the Intifada; he lost a hand. She says, “We say the boys who have been killed are martyrs, but when you’ve seen your son crippled, then what? When you see your son with one hand cut off and he’s trying to pull up his pants, you die little by little. And then when someone goes to make a suicide attack, the whole world turns upside down.”  It does seem that while children are everywhere in Gaza and in Palestine while things are going on, they’re not really a part of the story we get here. Especially the children—and victims generally—who are injured, not killed.

JS: It's not just there, but almost everywhere. That kind of thing is airbrushed out of historical accounts. It’s almost easier to talk about those who are killed. But those who have to live out the rest of their lives with some debilitating injury, that’s a real hard thing to face, so we don’t face it. We try to avoid the subject.

JSG: There’s another passage in the book where a young boy had gone to throw stones at a military position and an Israeli soldier shot him in the head. You were asked if you’d like to go and take a photo of the corpse, and you said no. You write: “After all, what right do I have to intimacy with the poor kid’s corpse? Only time, history, the bone-bleaching years can strip the dead of their privacy and make them sufficiently decent for viewing.” Was this the only time you were invited to go to a morgue?

JS: What was interesting was later on in the book, you’ll see that I do go to a morgue.

JSG: To see Rachel Corrie’s corpse.

JS: Yeah. And it’s interesting because I’ve thought about that line. And I really meant the line as I wrote it about that young boy in the morgue. But in the end, if you’re there for a long enough period it’s just thrust on you. In the end it’s not about distance—you can’t get that sort of distance from death. I was trying to get a distance from death in a way. But death is thrust upon you and you have to deal with it. There’s no time for the sun to dry the bones. If you’re there long enough, it’s going to be thrust in your face.

JSG: And in the case of Rachel Corrie—the American activist from Olympia Washington who was crushed under an Israeli bulldozer when she and other international activists were protesting home demolitions in Gaza—you went to the morgue when you heard the news and when you arrived there, you found her friends in a state of shock. What was that experience for you?

JS: I guess I haven’t said this to anyone, but I was really shaken up by that. I thought to myself, “OK, now is the time. Are you here to confront what happens, or are you going to not confront it?” And on the way to the morgue, I just couldn’t imagine the whole scene or what had happened really. I was very uncomfortable, frankly. But then I thought, "You know what? You put yourself in this position, you cannot hide from it now. Why are you here? are you going to take up space or are you going to confront this?"

JSG: When you are finished telling a story like this, is there a sense of closure or do these stories still kind of just bounce around in your head and haunt you?

JS: I think it was almost easier while I was doing it. It was very difficult, especially drawing the bodies—I got very sick of drawing the bodies. And now, for some reason, I’m even more exhausted thinking about it than I was drawing it. There’s something purging about just drawing—even though I don’t like what I’m drawing, I’m drawing it, so I’m sort of purging it out of my system. What I've realized is that it hasn’t really purged and I’m no longer drawing. I feel maybe a little less comfortable with all that stuff now.

JSG: Could you talk about what it’s like to draw the bodies? There are so many people who are either dead, dying, or badly injured in this book. Is there a point where you say, “I just don’t want to do this anymore?”

JS: Yeah—and I can’t. I’m obviously not trying to relate this as the experience of someone who’s witnessed these things, but as an artist who’s trying to interpret it. But what you try to interpret is you start to think about, ok, what does a body feel like? What is the weight of a body? How does it slump? You’re starting to think about all this sort of stuff, and when you’re drawing something—not just a body, but almost any figure—you try to inhabit it somehow. And just putting yourself in that frame of mind over and over again, it’s just not a pleasant thing to do. And this is a mass event. We’re talking about a lot of bodies, and what do I do? Do I not draw them, or do I draw them once and leave it alone? I thought, you know what, this is what happened. You just have to draw it the way it is. You don’t have to make it spectacular. You just have to draw a lot of bodies in these scenes, and just draw it as it probably looked and leave it at that—don’t even try to be artistic about it.

JSG: Do you have a sense of what your next project will be? Do you talk about that?

JS: I’m doing some illustrations about Camden, NJ.

JSG: This is magazine work?

JS: Yeah, this is for Harper's magazine. I’m only doing illustrations; Chris Hedges is doing the article.

JSG: Who you originally went to Gaza with?

JS: Yes, that’s right. And probably in February I’m going to India to do a story about poverty there. So I’m still keeping my hand in journalism, obviously, but I think I’d like to step away from journalism for a while. I think this book really exhausted me, and I kind of need a creative break from the world’s troubles.

JSG: What would that look like?

JS: Maybe some fiction, maybe some history, something about theology, something about philosophy, something about ideas, perhaps. I’d like to do something like that. And maybe some funny work too, just some humor. I think I need it.

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