Big Brother/Little Brother

Death to Dream: Hiya, big brother.
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Season Of Mists (New York, 1992), p. 102, panel 3.

Death to Dream: ...but the dead are coming back, little brother.
-op. cit., p. 103, panel 5.

Which?

Various Comics Converging On The Sandman

Cain hosted The House of Mystery.
Abel hosted The House of Secrets.
Lucien hosted Tales of Ghost Castle.
An unnamed woman with a raven hosted Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love.
Eve with a raven appeared in Secrets of Sinister House, Secrets of Haunted House and Plop!
The Three Witches hosted The Witching Hour.
Matt Cable, Cain and Abel appeared in Swamp Thing. 
A tall man in a frock coat was Adam and becomes a raven in Lilith by George MacDonald.

Thus, nine comics and one novel with Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel all present.

Cain and Abel and their Houses are in the Dreaming.
Lucien wears a frock coat and was Morpheus' first raven.
Ghost Castle was Morpheus' castle during his imprisonment.
The unnamed woman is Eve who lives in a cave in the Dreaming.
Matthew, Morpheus' current raven, was Matt Cable.

Thus, Neil Gaiman weaves diverse strands together.

36

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.