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Stieg Larsson's "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (here) survives one very light bullet in the brain. It is possible. Some Gazans have survived multiple bullet wounds. One man, interviewed by Joe Sacco for Footnotes In Gaza, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier standing directly above him while he lay on the ground. The man claims that he survived thirty six bullets in the head although Sacco does not believe that number.

Telling The Tale

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End and Joe Sacco's Footprints In Gaza, characters tell stories. In Footprints In Gaza, the drawn characters are real people describing real events. I am unfamiliar with Chaucer although we know that the Tales is a literary template for stories told in an inn and that Gaiman follows Chaucer.

It is possible for the reader to become at least as interested in the narrators' setting as in the stories that they recount. Joe Sacco and his friends are in present day Gaza when they are told about incidents in Gaza in 1956. (The "present" is the period of the Iraq War.) We need to know about the events researched by Sacco but we also appreciate his drawings of present day Iraq and its inhabitants. The pictures starkly depict social interactions, division, oppression and physical dereliction. We see an Israeli settlement in the distance but do not see inside it.

Hard Rain

Joe Sacco, Footnotes In Gaza.

"A hard rain has begun as everyone hoped.
"While Israeli bombers roar low and unseen overhead, it washes the blood from the streets." (p. 145)

He means the blood of bulls slaughtered for the feast of Abraham's sacrifice but maybe this passage also expresses an aspiration for a future without the shedding of human blood?

Bob Dylan used the phrase, "a hard rain," with a completely different meaning.

What I Missed

Rereading Joe Sacco's Footnotes In Gaza, I realize that I had accidentally skipped past pp. 116-117. P. 116 immediately follows Sacco's question:

"What are we to make of this?" (see here)

He suggests three possibilities:

that Omm Nafez, distraught at her husband's death, blocked her memory of Khamis' presence;

that Abu Antar was too young to remember;

that Khamis heard the story of his brother's death so often that he internalized it, feeling, in his guilt and grief, that he should have been there.

Sacco reminds us that:

Israeli soldiers shot Khamis' three brothers on 3 November, 1956;
the UN alleges that the Israelis killed 275 Palestinians in Khan Younis on that date.

Footnotes In Gaza: Versions II

Joe Sacco, Footnotes In Gaza, p. 301.

These quotes lead in to the The Legend Of The Doves. We are not told what happened after the intervention of this foreign officer.

We also read some interesting views at the beginning of the Iraq War:

"Saddam will be victorious.
"The entire Arab world and the whole world in general will change owing to the American defeat." (p. 369)

"Saddam Hussein 100 per cent!" (p. 371)

However, Khaled, wanted by the Israelis, says:

"It's not a matter of victory.
"It's a matter of resisting to the end." (ibid.)

Sacco calls Khaled's view philosophical, stripped of illusion and self-reflective.

Gathering Facts

Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco is about facts and gathering facts:

"The more we hear, the more we fill in our picture of that day in '56, the more critical we become of each tale we hear.
"'I think he's exaggerating.'" (p. 203)

"...I remember how often I sat with old men who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead...how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did." (p. 385)

Joe and his friends are referred to a man who might be able to help them but the guy talks about a different event on a different day in a different year. They do not stay to listen because that is not their story and they are pressed for time.

Stories that circulate but are never corroborated are classed as "legends."

Out of this process, the truth emerges.

In Gaza

"Eyeless in Gaza" is a phrase in a dramatic poem by John Milton and the title of a novel by Aldous Huxley. Footnotes In Gaza is a graphic documentary by Joe Sacco.

Since Milton's dramatic poem, Samson Agonistes, applies the form of a Greek tragedy to content taken from the Biblical book of Judges, these three works cover an extraordinary range of literary and narrative forms.

A welcome fourth work in this sequence would be one to be entitled Peace In Gaza.

Merciful Angels

Joe Sacco with Chris Hedges

Saleh Mehi Eldin El-Argan, who saw the three doves, said:

"These are merciful angels who've come to us."

But the man sitting beside him said:

"Where are those angels? There is no mercy here."

Maybe there are two kinds of spirituality:

the belief that supernatural beings intervene on our behalf;
the belief that each of us has the potential for an inner transcendent state without supernatural help.

Footnotes In Gaza: The Legend Of The Doves

For reference, see here.

In Gaza in 1956, Israeli soldiers forced hundreds of Palestinian men into a school yard (see image) where they had to kneel for hours with their hands on their heads and soldiers sometimes firing above them. In the afternoon, an officer, not Israeli, maybe British, arrived, stopped the firing and told them to raise their heads.

A dove came and stood on his shoulder. Three doves flew up and down near the men.

People hallucinate under pressure. We remember Biblical visions and the significance of doves and of the number three. I always thought that, at Jesus' baptism, the Spirit descended as gently as a dove, not in the form of a dove, but who knows?

Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco: Versions

Joe Sacco, Footnotes In Gaza (London, 2009), pp. 114-115.

Stories (myths, legends and fictions) have different versions. So do news stories, even including eye witness accounts:

Khamis recounts in detail how he saw his brother, Subhi, die in agony from bullet wounds in his stomach;

Subhi, lying on his back on the floor, asked to be taken to the clinic;

Khamis tore down a door and put a mattress on it;

Subhi tried to move himself onto the mattress but gurgled and said that he couldn't;

pointing at his family, he asked Khamis to take care of them, then he died;

Abu Antar and Omm Nafef, also present, confirm Khamis' account of Subhi's death except for one detail;

both say that Khamis was not there;

Abu says that Khamis returned two months later when everything had calmed down;

Omm says that Khamis retuned four months later after the Israelis had left;

Sacco asks in the concluding panel of p. 115, "What are we to make of this?"

We know that:

the massacre happened;
Subhi died from bullet wounds;
there was a single sequence of events even though we do not know all its details;
the past is not in a superimposed quantum state;
it is more likely that the others forgot that Khamis was there than that he imagines that he was there;
we do not know everything.

The Arab Of The Future by Riad Sattouf

Observations
(i) A cartoon-style comic strip with words and pointing arrows in some panels.

(ii) Intensely autobiographical.

(iii) Riad Sattouf, like Neil Gaiman, remembers what it was like to be a child.

(iv) Riad seems to lose his artistic gift when he prefers to emulate his peers' scribbling.

(v) Amazing, eye-opening information about living conditions and life styles in Libya and Syria.

(vi) An extremely unflattering account of the author's father.

(vii) Riad's French mother seems to have put up with everything.

(viii) Very slow-paced: Riad remains a child on the concluding p. 154 and there are further volumes.

Fables: War Stories

Fables: War Stories reworks The Creature Commandos.

The Big Bad Wolf is a werewolf and the Wolfman. For the war effort, Bigby has let some mundies know that he exists.

It looks like Frankenstein was a Fable who existed in the mundane world.

Bill Willingham, like Garth Ennis, incorporates war stories into a contemporary fantasy series.

Dig it.