Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman Answer the Question in “Never Again and Again”
Comics do not often make news.
A little over a hundred years ago, in 1924, the now-forgotten “Andy Gump” comic strip character—chinless but full of life and hugely popular—ran for president from artist Sidney Smith’s palatial home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. “Andy” promised to crack down on the railroad monopolies and the Wall Street swindlers. (His statue remains
in public view in Lake Geneva.) After one night, Andy, or Sidney, yielded the campaign floor to Robert La Follette in nearby Madison, running with pretty much the same challenges to the mighty.
Drop down to the early 1950s, when the great “Comic Book Scare” saw comics burned in some localities and comic book publishers enduring Red Scare-like congressional hearings. One, in particular, stared down the investigators: William M. Gaines, publisher of Mad Comics. Although it was his horror comics that stirred the ire of the mighty, it might be said that the resulting Mad, as a magazine exempt from censorship under the newly created “Comics Code,” would go on to vindicate the purpose of comic satire and social commentary.
Drop down further to 1990–91. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, anticipated in excerpts but still not the commercially produced global hit, achieved a prestigious exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. By interrogating the stereotypes of the past—by the artist-author actually interrogating his survivor father, both cranky and racist—Spiegelman brought the graphic novel into its own. It was, or could be, a serious art form.
One might say that Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, challenging the logic of the Reagan years in the funny pages, had already come a long way in social statements (some of his more controversial strips were “pulled” from local papers). Graphic novelists, several of them winning MacArthur Awards, helped push the social criticism agenda along. None more than Joe Sacco, whose graphic journalism during the 1990s about the residents of Gaza and of Gorzade in the Balkans placed the artist literally on the scene.
On Gaza, a 32-page collection of Sacco’s ongoing series about the horrors of the assault and the rationales offered by President Joe Biden for making them possible, appeared in December from Fantagraphics Books in Seattle. He recalls that in the 1990s, he had urged his friends in Gaza to take a page from Gandhi and mass peacefully at the border, to which they answered that the Israelis would shoot to kill. In the “March to Return” in 2018–19, as he shows, a mass of demonstrators, a few of them throwing rocks, approached that border, and two thousand were shot down. “After that, I had no more suggestions” (p. 2).
Fast forward to the doomed Biden re-election campaign, with spokesperson John Kirby insisting, even as U.S.-made bombs fell on schools and hospitals, that Americans were actually “alleviating the pain and suffering” of Gazan civilians (p. 5). A few pages later, we are reminded that Biden insisted, three times at televised press conferences, that he had “SEEN” Israeli babies’ heads ripped off by Hamas terrorists. Like Biden’s recollection that his uncle, captured during the Second World War by natives of the Pacific and eaten by cannibals, these were the product of an active imagination (pp. 6–7).
Sacco follows with the recollection of his mother, who lived through the Nazi bombing of the little island of Malta and wondered, with others, whether she would be better off dead. More pages pass, and Sacco goes to fifth-century Melos, whose leaders refused to join the Athenian alliance. All the men were executed, all others sent into slavery, and colonists came from Athens to fill the empty villages.
Fast forward to 2025. Spiegelman joins Sacco in an unprecedented strip appearing first in the British-based Guardian, with its global audience prepared for difficult truths. Never Again and Again takes us on a visual journey with no pleasant moments and a good deal of horror. The comic is not framed around the conflict itself as much as around what the world will do and, most directly, what the artist should do.
From the opening panels, they make their own shared political position clear: Netanyahu and Israel are committing war crimes. But how to define these crimes? Sacco asks Spiegelman if he considers the current conflict to be a genocide. Spiegelman responds that he initially thought of it as “genocidish” and referred to it as “ethnic cleansing,” but after seeing images of starving Palestinian children, he felt the need to strengthen his language.
The two of them proceed to walk through frames, discussing details of the conflict and how their own work relates to it. Sacco asks Spiegelman the inevitable diasporic, non-Zionist Jew’s question: if he can imagine a world without Israel. Art responds that it is too late—the Jewish state already exists, and “there is no putting the toothpaste back in the bottle.” He then makes one of the comic’s most substantial points: that Maus “is not meant to be a recruitment tool for the IDF.” Spiegelman’s stance on this is clear.
The several-page mini-comic feels like a direct response to the question, “What do you think of the conflict?”—a question both authors have undoubtedly been asked repeatedly. Their answer is a firm condemnation of Israel’s war crimes. While the conversation itself may resemble something overheard in a restaurant, the combination of beautiful illustration and the casual nature of the dialogue adds a realism that is quite compelling.
Sacco brings a personal perspective to the situation by incorporating his interactions with a Palestinian friend living in Gaza. In Never Again and Again, Art asks Joe whether he has heard from his friend, and Joe responds that he has indeed received messages. Joe proceeds to read aloud a despairing message from his friend, followed by another, angrier message in which his friend expresses hope that Israel and the United States will be held accountable for their actions.
Art shifts the conversation to discuss the potential equivalence of Hamas’s and Israel’s actions, a point many would not dispute. If this scene apparently risks coming across as critiquing a starving person’s table manners from the relative comfort of their positions in the West, the reason comes quickly: none of us are far from the chatting artists.
After October 7, The New York Times and other news outlets repeatedly framed Israel’s bombings and aggression as mere responses to October 7. A leaked memo to Times editors warned their journalists to refrain from using either “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing.” Soon enough, the international community—the International Court of Justice and the UN—came to use the language of genocide when talking about Israel’s current actions in Gaza.
Sacco and Spiegelman clearly do not share the Times’ framing of war crimes. Never Again and Again signals what the artist, the comic artist, can do by speaking out with passion and self-denigrating humor.
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