Welcome to Hell: From the West Bank to Gaza
Cartoonist: Mohammad Sabaaneh
Publisher: Street Noise Books
Publication Date: June 2026
Given the length of the comic, just a little over a hundred pages, it would be easy to think Mohammad Sabaaneh’s Welcome to Hell is slight. Indeed, the assumed slightness is further extenuated by an at times minimalist style akin to Lynd Ward’s woodcarvings with each page containing, on average, one or two panels each. Then again, the craft that would make a comparison to Ward worthwhile is not something to simply be tossed aside.
Consider, for example, the use of page colors. Comics typically utilize a white page to present the images to the reader as a base reality. When alternate page colors are used within a comic, it’s often used throughout the work. In Welcome to Hell however, Sabaaneh uses the black pages to highlight the claustrophobic conditions experienced by the various prisoners within Israel occupied Palestine. The blackness allows the page to feel even more cramped and alienating.
Further adding to the alienation is the character designs. A common motif within Sabaaneh’s work is a move away from human proportions. Sometimes, prisoners feet will calcify away from the thick black outlines and towards the splatter of blood and static. Frequently, Israeli occupiers will transform from traditional humans into a collection of geometric shapes with barely a coherence of humanity. There is a frequent err towards surrealism with characters speaking while their heads have been removed from their bodies, men crawling inside bottles that should contain ships that are themselves within bottles, and giant birds with only thick blackness for color picking up bodies atop impossible perspectives.
The reasoning for this is quite clear: to highlight the sheer surreal horror of living under a settler colonialist regime. The most telling sequence has the main character — Sabaaneth’s brother, Thamer — being accosted by a dog, sicked on him by his captors. In many scenes of this type, the dog will obey his masters and maul the prisoner’s body in some truly gruesome fashion. Indeed, the sequence begins with the dog containing the same geometric fervor that has infected the settler unleashing him on Thamer. But over the course of three pages, the dog, in Thamer’s own words, “showed more humanity than any of you.” The dog did not attack. What’s more, Sabaaneth demonstrates the dog’s change in personality visually through altering his shape. Starting out with a more geometric collection of shapes before gradually rounding out the edges of the dog before he looks like an actual dog.
Much of the violence within Welcome to Hell isn’t graphic. It’s certainly painful and bloody, but you never see a man’s intestines hanging out in specific detail. But rather than dilute from the overall messaging and implications of the comic, Sabaaneth’s more surrealistic stylings instead present the true horror being experienced day in and day out within Palestine with the depth and honesty it deserves.
Welcome to Hell is a modern day Kakafian nightmare presented with an absolutely maddening art style befitting of the unmitigatingly bleak horror occurring within the world today.
Welcome to Hell: From the West Bank to Gaza is out in June via Street Noise Books
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