A survivor of Morocco's Years of Lead draws his own arrest, torture and imprisonment as political detainee under Hassan II, using the comic form to render specific beatings, detention conditions and interrogation methods in sequential images. The particularity (named techniques, cell layouts, the bodies of fellow prisoners) makes the repression documentable rather than abstract.
The regime withholds and rations food not from scarcity but as a calculated instrument to break prisoners' will, as the title's image of starving rats asserts. Deprivation is administered as policy, making hunger itself a mode of interrogation and domination.
When a state suppresses records of its abuses, a survivor's hand-drawn reconstruction preserves what official archives omit, converting memory into a durable visual document. The comic becomes counter-archive precisely because it can depict what was never photographed or filed.
Viewing a political system through the physical states of its detainees (wounds, emaciation, scars) exposes the regime's true operating logic more directly than its public rhetoric does. The suffering body functions as the readable record of how power actually behaves behind closed doors.