In the graphic un-novel Palestine, a squinting Palestinian boy hunches in the rain while Israeli soldiers, having made him take off his keffiyeh, interrogate him from the shelter of an awning. “Comics have outgrown their superhero underpants,” notes Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow as she interviews cartoonist Joe Sacco, who specialises in one of their most dynamic young subgenres: the political comic book.

“Sacco uses comics to deliver familiar content in an unfamiliar form, disarming us of our numbness to images of war and privation. His focus – preferring the anecdotal to the panoramic – excavates details that seldom make it to the news or the history books.”

Between 1991 and 1992, Sacco immersed himself in the Palestinian existence, “taking notes and drinking endless cups of tea” with the locals and procuring intimate testimonies that the Western media ignored in order to narrate the “bigger picture” to the public. His impetus for going, in his own words, was that he felt the American media had really misportrayed the situation. He grew up thinking of Palestinians as terrorists and it upset him enough to go, and, in a small way, give the Palestinians a voice.

Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. Originally published in 1993 as a nine-issue comic series, it won the 1996 American Book Award. It was then republished in a single 300-page volume with a new introduction by one of Sacco’s primary influences, Edward Said.

Published in 2001.