We have covered a lot of comics and cartooning work on the genocide in Gaza over the last year. Some of it has come directly from those living the nightmare. Some of it has been from artists covering events from afar. It has ranged from the immediate and the personal to the wider-ranging horrors of the bigger picture. And it has included direct reportage, allegory, visual metaphor, and socio-political commentary. All of it has affected the reader in different ways and on diverse levels. But nothing has felt quite as scathingly cutting in its account to me as Mazen Kerbaj’s Gaza in My Phone.
Published by OR Books, Gaza in My Phone is Lebanese cartoonist Kerbaj’s reaction to seeing the devastation unfolding every day on his phone. Part call to action and part cathartic exercise in coping, this collection of one-page cartoons is an example of that much over-applied reviewer standby of work that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. That’s largely because of Kerbaj’s direct and righteously confrontational style but also because of the emotional gut-punch that many of the cartoons here deliver.
One early cartoon from October 2023, for example, shows what appears to be a tied sack with the caption underneath reading “I never thought I would see something worse than the body of a murdered child until I saw the video of a father carrying the remains of his son in a plastic trash bag.” Some of the work here is directly representational, some symbolic, and some the most profoundly affecting visual metaphor.
There’s true power to this compilation of work. It is heartbreaking. It is anger-inducing. It constantly makes us ask why is this happening? How can this be happening? Why are these atrocities being casually dismissed by governments across the globe? A hospital bed pillow with a blood-stained bullet in it telling its own story; the multi-perspective re-enactment of an Israeli sniper shooting dead a young mother with a white flag of surrender in her hand in front of her child; the abstract idea of genocide streaming on demand; Kerbaj’s own reflections on his deteriorating mental health in the face of all this; and more abstract cartoons that observe that “the silence of the world is more frightening than the sound of the bombs.”
The book is backed up with an afterword from Kerbaj that gives extra context to his cartooning. Defiant work that everyone needs to read, Gaza in My Phone is another important addition to our Palestine Comics Resource List.
Mazen Kerbaj (W/A) • OR Books, $20.00/£14.99
Review by Andy Oliver
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