The Palestine Set — Joe Sacco

Full Title: The Palestine Set — The Complete Original Serialization, Issues #1–9
Joe Sacco
Fantagraphics Books · Seattle · 1993–1995
Original Serialization · First Editions · First Printings· Signed

The Set:
The complete original serialization of Joe Sacco’s Palestine, comprising all nine Fantagraphics issues published between 1993 and 1995, each in its original publisher’s wrappers and verified as a first printing. Rather than a later collected edition, this set preserves Palestine exactly as it first entered the world—issue by issue, across its original two-year publication sequence. Issue #1 bears a signature attributed to Joe Sacco.

Condition:
Very Good+ overall. All nine issues remain complete in their original Fantagraphics wrappers, preserving the full publication sequence from Issue #1 through Issue #9. Each issue is individually protected in an archival Mylar sleeve with an acid-free backing board, with the complete set housed together in an archival folio.

Included in the Set:
Palestine #1 — 1993 · First Edition · First Printing · Signed by Joe Sacco
Palestine #2 — 1993 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #3 — 1993 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #4 — 1993 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #5 — 1994 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #6 — 1994 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #7 — 1995 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #8 — 1995 · First Edition · First Printing
Palestine #9 — 1995 · First Edition · First Printing

Story Of The Set

War does not happen all at once. It unfolds through ordinary days, interrupted lives, and individual stories that history has a habit of reducing to abstractions.

Joe Sacco traveled to the West Bank and Gaza during the First Intifada and turned his attention toward ordinary Palestinians—their conversations, memories, routines, displacement, imprisonment, humor, and experiences of life under occupation.

Then he drew what he had witnessed.

Between 1993 and 1995, Fantagraphics published that work across these nine individual comic-book issues. Sacco combined interviews, observation, history, and sequential art into a form of reporting that would help establish what became known as comics journalism.

Sacco was not illustrating history after it happened. He was using comics to report on people living inside it.

The later collected editions made Palestine widely known. These nine issues preserve something different: the work as readers originally encountered it, one installment at a time, while both Sacco’s investigation and the history surrounding it were still unfolding.

Why It’s In The Collection

The Palestine Set belongs in Consigned to Darkness because witness begins by refusing to let human beings disappear into someone else’s narrative.

Sacco turned toward people whose experiences he believed were insufficiently represented in the American media and gave their voices sustained space on the page. Whatever a reader’s politics, the underlying journalistic act is fundamental: replacing abstractions with names, faces, memories, contradictions, and individual lives.

This set was intentionally assembled issue by issue in first-printing state rather than represented by a later collected edition. Together, the nine original issues preserve the publication-event object through which one of the defining works of graphic journalism first entered public life.

Before Palestine became a book, it was reporting arriving one issue at a time.

Collection Categories: Graphic Literature · Witness Literature · Investigative Journalism · Anti-Colonialism · Anti-Apartheid

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Authentication Evidence

• Complete original Fantagraphics serialization is present, comprising Palestine Issues #1 through #9, published between 1993 and 1995.

• All nine individual issues are present, establishing a complete publication sequence with no missing issue.

• Individual indicia have been verified for issue number, publication date, and first-printing status.

• Issues #1 through #4 correspond to the original 1993 publication sequence.

• Issues #5 and #6 correspond to the original 1994 publication sequence.

• Issues #7 through #9 correspond to the original 1995 publication sequence.

• All nine issues retain their original Fantagraphics publisher’s wrappers.

• No evidence of later-printing substitutions, facsimile issues, reproductions, or replacement copies is observed.

• Issue #1 bears a signature attributed to Joe Sacco; the signature is physically present on the copyright page.

• Publisher, indicia, wrappers, issue sequence, and physical production characteristics are consistent with the original 1993–1995 Fantagraphics serialization.

• Archival Mylar sleeves, acid-free backing boards, and the archival folio are later preservation materials and are not original components of publication.

• Taken together, the complete issue sequence, verified indicia, original publisher’s wrappers, and first-printing characteristics support identification as the authentic complete original 1993–1995 Fantagraphics serialization of Palestine, Issues #1–9 · First Editions · First Printings.