Excellent - Rated 
Perhaps not quite as superb as Safe Area Gorazde, because the characters are a little less memorable (I loved Riki and the Silly Girls from SAG), whereas the Palestinian characters are almost universally miserable, but then who can blame them. It gets a bit repetitive becuase everything is so awful for the Palestinians, but then this is not meant to be easy reading. In summary though it is superbly drawn and written, and Sacco is a great and entertaining guide to what is probably the most influential piece of land on the face of the earth right now.
Excellent insider's story - Rated
Palestine does what a graphic novel should do -- it uses the pictures to tell the part of the story that you don't get from news reports. Sacco tells us repeatedly that he's not a particularly political person or a hero, just a guy trying to tell a human story. It's a sad, sad story he tells, but a convincingly first hand one.
life in palestine - Rated
I've never been to the middle east. and all I know about the situation in gaza and the area around it comes from tv news. It's very easy to get desensitised to tv news. similar stories from similar regions can start to get over familiar and you can stop paying attention to them.
But journalist joe sacco didnt do that. In the early 1990's he went to the region. and this graphic novel is his account of what he saw there and the people he talked to.
And what a remarkable piece of work it is. it runs for 285 pages in various short sections, each highlighting an event or a conversation or a person. Not only did joe sacco write this, he also drew it. His art is quite realistic and yet also cartoony in it's own way, and it's compelling to look at.
Palestine doesn't take sides. It just tells you what he saw and heard. and what the people he spoke to said. It will teach you everything you need to know about the place, and everything that you should have known long ago.
Comics and graphic novels aren't just for kids. If anyone ever says that give them a copy of this. It'll show them exactly what the form can do. And they'll never forget reading it. I certainly won't.
Brilliant - Rated
Inspirational and engrossing, it feels genuine and provides an insight into life in the East, in a refreshing way when we're saturated in the UK with one sided news reports.
Keep it up Joe Sacco and those like him...
Brilliant, harrowing, unflinching. Oh, and sometimes it's really funny. But only sometimes. - Rated
Joe Sacco's earliest work in comics is some of the funniest and most extravagantly over-the-top graphic work this writer has ever read. I have been an on-again, off-again reader of comics since I was a kid, starting - like so many UK/Irish boys who were young in the 70s - with simple stuff like "Battle" and "Action", rediscovering the power of the drawn panel in the late 80s with things like Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns", and the work of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, and being lucky enough to surf the wave of amazing creativity that reared up in the 90s with titles like Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" and Grant Morrison's fabulously unhinged run of "Doom Patrol".
So I didn't come to Joe Sacco's work as someone who had never read a comic before. I knew that comics didn't necessarily involve girls with enormous breasts and guys who could, like, break guns in half with their mind (to paraphrase "Mystery Men"). I had also read a little about the Arab-Israeli conflict, so I wasn't even totally unaware of what Sacco was talking about.
Nevertheless, "Palestine" knocked my socks off. Part of Sacco's genius as a journalist/writer/artist is that he puts himself into the frame - a small, rather anxious American with Lennon glasses and an unusually wide mouth, who gets into arguments with sexy Israeli girls about the occupied territories and the right of return but who still can't help wondering if he's got a chance of getting laid.
Sacco's earlier work is collected in the laugh-out-loud hilarious "Notes from a Defeatist", which followed something like a maturation from Sacco the chronicler of grungy punk bands to Sacco the struggling, self-doubting, worry-wart artist increasingly troubled by politics and injustice. "Palestine" is of necessity a dark and worrying book. The high spirits of his earlier work are gone, but he is recognisably the same guy: older, more curious about the world around him and more willing to let the people around him tell their stories in their own way. One of these is a Palestinian joke, involving a CIA man, a KGB man and a Shin Bet (Israeli domestic security) man. I won't retell it here because it's too good to spoil, but Sacco's version of it is both hilarious and terrifying.
There is an appreciative and sensitive foreword by the late Edward W. Said, but in truth the book is its own recommendation. Joe Sacco's work has the great virtue of being a purely personal response; he doesn't have the newspaper journalist's need to at least pretend to be "objective" or "balanced". This means that he lets far more information come through than somebody constrained by deadlines and copy length. Sacco is also a lot funnier and better company than Robert Fisk.
A great deal of guff has been written about the Palestinians, most of it by non-Palestinians - most of it, indeed, by Americans. Joe Sacco's "Palestine" is a distinguished exception.
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