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.