Joe Sacco publishes “Requiem for Gaza”, a documentary comic on the conflict

American cartoonist Joe Sacco publishes Requiem for Gaza, a new comic book about the Palestinians. To create it, the author based himself on testimonies from Gazans who had taken refuge in Egypt after the October 7 attacks and the Israeli offensive. An album that he would have “preferred not to make”.

Requiem for Gaza, published by the French publishing house Futuropolis, is an investigation that mixes pages from Joe Sacco's comic strips and texts written by journalist Chris Hedges, former war reporter for the New York Times. Published in France, Switzerland and Belgium, the book will be released on October 6 in the United States, then in the United Kingdom. “Since the 1990s, this is the fourth book I have written on the Palestinians,” Joe Sacco, 65, explains to AFP on the sidelines of the Nancy book festival. “It wasn't planned because I wanted to stop drawing violence, but it imposed itself on me. A moral duty. I would have preferred not to do it,” adds the pioneering author of documentary comics. He is particularly known for his albums on the war in Bosnia, the migration crisis and indigenous peoples.

Requiem for Gaza is based on the testimony of around thirty Gazan families met and interviewed in the spring of 2025 by Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges in Egypt, where they took refuge. Joe Sacco says he is “not an activist”: “I am a human being who sees injustice and names it as I see it. And I’m a journalist.” But critical voices exist to qualify him as “supporter of Hamas”. “Maybe they say I’m anti-Semitic. This is nonsense intended to silence and scare me, to divert attention to me rather than the facts,” he adds. In 2025, Joe Sacco joined forces with Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, a major comic book on the memory of the Shoah, to publish in several newspapers a mini-story entitled “Never Again! And Again... and Again... and Again..." on the situation in Gaza.

Launched in retaliation for the deadly attacks perpetrated by Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023, the war led by Israel in Gaza has left more than 73,000 dead, according to the Ministry of Health of this territory controlled by the Islamist movement, and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.