There will come a time when he can no longer do this--when he turns 50, Sacco believes, he will be unable and probably uninterested to sit in cold places for hours or months, and Sacco will then move to telling, maybe, his own stories. Already he has begun considering his autobiography, a life story told through the music of the Rolling Stones. But first comes Gaza, available in three years, more or less. There are tapes to transcribe, photos to dig through, pictures to draw.

"I think that the special thing that comics have is that they are so accessible," Sacco says of the reasons he chose this as his medium. "It's just hard to interest people in certain subjects. It's hard for me to sit around with people who just don't pay attention to the news and discuss the Palestinian situation. They're gonna listen a little bit to be polite, but in the end they're just gonna want to talk about something else. And with this book I think there's a segment of the audience that says, Well, I should have read something about this a long time ago, and this looks really damn easy.'" He laughs. "It's subversive in that way because it's accessible as an object, but what's inside it can be just as brutal or just as deadly as anything else."