“The people he lives among,” wrote Edward Said, “are history’s losers — banished to the fringes where they seem to be despondently loitering. . . .  With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better.”

It may be surprising to find out that a few paragraphs earlier, the iconic Palestinian intellectual was harkening back to smuggling illicit editions of Superman and Captain Marvel into his childhood home, because he wasn’t praising an academic tome or political documentary, but a comic book — specifically, Palestine by Joe Sacco.

Released twenty-five years ago this year, Sacco’s comic depicting life in the occupied territories was groundbreaking. It was — and still is — rare to see someone document the real people living in Palestine, behind the headlines and the political debates. Sacco paints a picture of life in the West Bank and Gaza in all its messy, imperfect reality, without an “agenda” or a proposed solution.