Joe Sacco believes in the power of the people. But as a comics journalist whose reporting has taken him to some of the most brutal conflict zones on Earth, he’s also keenly aware that people and their prejudices can be leveraged by politicians. “The people are dangerous; the people are our only hope,” says Sacco, via Zoom from his drawing desk in his home in Portland, Ore. “It’s like she loves you, she loves you not—both can be true.”
Sacco, considered the forefather of comics journalism and best known for his American Book Award–winning Palestine, is a marvel at briskly breaking down complex social issues, a skill on display in the meticulously constructed layouts of his forthcoming The Once and Future Riot. The graphic narrative, out in October from Metropolitan, documents a 2013 riot between ethnic factions in Uttar Pradesh, India, and brings into focus how politicians flame violence and manipulate its aftermath to divide electorates. In its starred review, PW called the book a “timely work” that is “as powerful as it is artful” and pays “homage to the importance of seeking truth, however elusive.”
“As the United States and the West gradually, over the next few decades, decline in relevance, it’s really China and India where trends will be set,” says Sacco, who’s made a career drawing comics from the fields of war. “I began to think, Why does this all happen? We all live in illusion, to summarize the philosopher Ernest Becker. The point is, what illusion do you choose?”
Sacco was born in 1960 in Malta, but his family soon emigrated to Australia, where he grew up listening to stories of World War II—tales that seeded his fascination with international conflicts. “Most of the people in our community were immigrants from Europe who’d left after the war,” he says. “So stories about the war from different people from different countries were what I heard around the dinner table.”
As a child, Sacco disdained superhero fare but picked up American and British war comics. Mad magazine was also frequent reading material—what he liked best were 1970s issues with tipped-in reprints of Mad comics from the 1950s. They “completely opened my mind,” he says, “to how subversive comics could be.”
When he was 11, Sacco and his family moved to Los Angeles; in 1974, they moved again, settling in Beaverton, Ore., where Sacco wrote for his school newspaper. In 1978, Sacco enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he later received a BA in journalism. Notably, he never went to art school—his precise realism and spiky caricature are entirely self-taught.
At the start of his career, Sacco bounced between journalism gigs: at the National Notary Association in Los Angeles, Tomorrow magazine in Malta, and Downtowner in Portland. Drawing autobiographical tales about what he calls his “foibles” was his introduction to the comics industry during the punky, indie heyday of the 1980s and ’90s. He even cofounded a satirical comics rag, the short-lived Portland Permanent Press, in 1985.
In 1986, Sacco became a news writer at the Comics Journal. Over time, he began producing more serious political pieces. His travelogue comics took him to the Middle East and he began reporting on political strife. And as an autobiographical cartoonist turned reporter, he literally drew himself into the frame—a commentary on myths of journalistic objectivity. (In The Once and Future Riot, he draws his hands taking notes on the edges of some panels.) In 1991 and 1992 Sacco visited the West Bank and the Gaza strip and created the Palestine series, the first volume of which was published in 1993 as Palestine: A Nation Occupied by Fantagraphics.
In addition to Palestine, Sacco is the author of Footnotes in Gaza and most recently the Eisner-nominated War on Gaza. He’s also reported extensively from Bosnia—work funded in part by a Guggenheim fellowship—in Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and War’s End. In The Great War, Sacco looks back on WWI, and in Paying the Land he explores how atrocities against Indigenous people correlate to economics and climate change.
With The Once and Future Riot, his 17th book, Sacco attempts to understand how a deadly scuffle in India between young men of Hindu Jat and Muslim backgrounds turned into murderous retributions and mob violence. In the opening pages, Sacco and a local journalist are driven by a nonchalant cabbie at breakneck pace through the traffic of rural India. As Sacco interviews witnesses and village leaders, the facts of the riot—the number of deaths, who killed whom, which houses burned—blur and are disputed. The result is an analysis of how people in conflict refashion facts, indulge in ersatz nostalgia, and create stories that serve their worldviews, as well as an examination of cycles of violence that can be traced back to partition.
It was a “relatively small riot that seemed to fit the bill—I felt like I could talk to all the major actors,” says Sacco, whose urgent, cogent cartooning depicts the mobs across spreads and into the margins: a crush of carefully individualized angered faces, and hands holding swords, clubs, and guns.
Despite the gravity of his work, Sacco—who was recently selected for the Eisner Hall of Fame—remains grounded. “For an artist, and someone who immerses himself in the most miserable of human conditions, he’s the least neurotic person I know,” says Sacco’s longtime editor at Metropolitan, Riva Hocherman. And, after decades in war zones, he’s trying to pick up other beats. He told the Comics Journal that The Once and Future Riot may be his last work of journalism.
Still, he recently returned from Egypt, where he was drawing interviews with Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Sacco says he keeps being pulled “back into the vortex” because the drive to expose genocide in Gaza is “like shaking you in your sleep and saying your family is threatened. At first you feel it’s a duty, and later it’s simply the right thing to do. It becomes a part of you.”
When discussing The Once and Future Riot, Sacco holds up an oversize page, hand inked and lettered. He never learned Photoshop, calls his technique old-fashioned, and makes corrections by cutting and re-pasting. “It’s a significant part of the pleasure of the work—the fact that I’m working with my hands,” he says. And while the book is set in India, its analysis of factional violence will resonate with American readers, which Sacco adamantly states was intentional. In one sharply worded passage in the book, he asks readers, “Do you believe in the people?”
It’s a query and a callout. “I am one who thinks that the people are our only hope,” Sacco says. “But that can be flipped around, depending on what they’re told, how they’re manipulated. We tend to think of democracy as a good, as a moral good. I prefer democracy. I would like people to have a voice. But the way it plays out in electoral politics can often be hand in hand with violence. Sometimes you can’t separate the two.”
Correction: A prior version of this article incorrectly identified an award won by Sacco; it was an American Book Award not a National Book Award.
