Gianluca Costantini is an Italian artist, cartoonist, illustrator and activist. He has contributed to numerous publications and is the author of several graphic novels. He collaborates with organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, ActionAid, and SOS Méditerranée. In 2019, he received the Art and Human Rights Award from Amnesty International.
Francesca Mannocchi is an Italian journalist and filmmaker who has worked for Italian television for many years and has written for a range of international and Italian magazines.
In 1993, Joe Sacco published Palestine in the United States, a work that marked the birth of a new language in the world of comics: comics journalism. It was that book that opened the possibility for drawing to become an investigative tool, illustrating a direct and critical narrative of reality. Since then, comics journalism has assumed a precise identity—a form of journalism that unites comic book and illustration techniques with the rigor of reportage. Information—whether interviews, data, on-the-ground reports or contextual background—is fused into a single narrative flow of images and words: panels, balloons, maps, infographics, but also silences, glances and white space.
What is comics journalism, really? To me, it's an author who uses drawing to tell the world's stories, but does so by adopting journalism's rules: gathering sources, fact-checking, observing, selecting. Journalism is a complex activity that involves critical evaluation and the responsible presentation of information. When journalism enters the world of drawing, all of this becomes even more challenging.
Unlike a traditional reporter, who can describe a New York street in a few lines of text, a comics journalist must draw it. They must ask: How are the people on the street dressed? How do they move? What expressions do their faces carry? What kind of light is falling at that moment? Every detail must be represented visually. That demands study, documentation and acute observation.
Yet, even with the same reference material, no two artists will ever depict that street the same way. Drawing is interpretation, it is choice—what to include, what to omit, what to emphasize. And it's precisely this subjectivity that makes comics journalism so powerful. Because it's not just news; it's also a perspective. And a perspective, when it's informed and documented, can become an instrument of truth.
We felt the urgency to tell Palestine's story through a series of short narratives that could, with simplicity and precision, render the complexity and humanity of what is happening.
- Gianluca Costantini
In 2018, I was following with great attention the work that journalist Francesca Mannocchi was doing in Libya. Her reports, intense and lucid, managed to capture a complex, fragmented reality that is often invisible in public discourse. I was deeply struck not only by the quality of her reporting but also by its ability to bring out the human stories behind the headlines, to focus on the intersection of politics, war, migration and international affairs.
From that interest came the idea to create a book of comics journalism about Libya. I sensed that drawing could offer another kind of vantage point: more immersive, more empathetic, capable of revealing the unseen. Yet I also knew that such a delicate and layered subject required guidance, someone who had traversed those places, spoken with the people, built concrete memory.
So I decided to contact Francesca. I wrote to propose working together on a book that would combine her texts, her firsthand field experience, with my visual language. She agreed immediately, with enthusiasm and generosity.
From that moment Libya was born—a project built in tandem that tries to convey, through words and drawings, the complexity of a country devastated by war, marred by human trafficking, traversed by foreign powers, the lives of its people in suspension. The book does not pretend to explain everything, but seeks to tell and portray, with honesty and precision, what too often remains at the margins. Drawing Libya was also for me a way to cultivate a responsible gaze, to make drawing not only an artistic act but also a tool of testimony and memory.
In this dramatically charged moment in history, Francesca and I felt the urgency to tell Palestine's story through a series of short narratives that could, with simplicity and precision, render the complexity and humanity of what is happening. These illustrated accounts were published in Italy in Linus magazine, in the United States here in the digital pages of Democracy in Exile, and also collected in the volume Cartoonists for Palestine, published by Crucial Comix.
In December 2023, Qatar launched a humanitarian initiative to evacuate critically injured patients from Gaza and provide them with medical care. About 1,700 people, including 400 children who had undergone amputations, were transferred via Rafah into Egypt and then on to Qatar. They now live in the al-Thumama Complex in Doha, a residential compound built for the 2022 World Cup. The evacuations were halted on May 7, 2024, after Israel took control of the Rafah crossing.
One of these evacuated children is Sanad, who survived an Israeli bombardment of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza that killed his parents and siblings and cost him an arm and four fingers. He now lives with his grandmother, Marwa. After days of suffering and a severe infection, his right hand was amputated. Despite everything, he's begun to walk and play again, even though he still feels pain and disorientation.
Other Palestinian children share similar stories. Mahmoud, a nine-year-old hit by an Israeli missile, underwent surgery without anesthesia under dire conditions in Gaza. Today in Doha, he still plays soccer, despite his amputation. "I want to be a pilot, but of peace airplanes," he says.
Stories of loss, resilience and hope intertwine among the apartment blocks of the complex in the Gulf, where every Palestinian scar is a living memory. Children are not numbers. They are whole lives, broken but not defeated.
Stories of loss, resilience and hope intertwine among the apartment blocks of the complex in Qatar, where every scar is a living memory.
- Gianluca Costantini
Cartoons by Gianluca Costantini
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