Joe Sacco's breakthrough work of graphic journalism -- a now-established genre almost single handedly invented by Sacco -- won the American Book Award upon its initial release in 1996, and has remained a perennial, essential work for understanding the Palestinian Israeli conflict in the Middle East. This new hardcover edition includes a new afterword by Israeli journalist Amira Hass and also features Palestinian academic and critic Edward W. Said's timeless 2001 introduction to the work. Based on several years of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews, Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. Like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter through the immersive lens of the comic book medium. Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best.
