The Once and Future Riot, out in October from Metropolitan Books, could be Joe Sacco’s last longform work of graphic journalism. Speaking with the Comics Journal last week, the author of Palestine (Fantagraphics), Paying the Land (Metropolitan), Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan), and War on Gaza (Fantagraphics) cited burnout while expressing a desire to explore other forms of cartooning.
“The world is rough, and after a while it sort of gets to you, doing journalism,” Sacco told the Comics Journal’s Zach Rabiroff. “Maybe for the first 20 years I could deal with everything. But over time, you dig deep into what's going on in the world, how humans behave in certain situations. They're very worthy subjects. I'm never going to say they're not. But for me personally, I've just had my fill and I wanted to approach some of these same subjects, perhaps, but in a very different way.”
A Guggenheim fellow and Eisner Award–winning Maltese-American comics creator, Sacco is considered a pioneer of the combined use of cartooning alongside investigative journalism. A veteran of the 1980s alternative comics scene, where he began his career as a graphic satirist, he turned to graphic journalism with Palestine, which was serialized between 1993 and 1995 and collected in a single volume in 2007.
Following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent launch of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, its publisher, Fantagraphics, went back to print with the title in December of that year, and crashed the publication of War in Gaza a year later. In its review, PW called the forthcoming The Once and Future Riot, which turns Sacco’s gaze to Western Uttar Pradesh in India, a “meticulous and beautifully crafted account of religious and territorial strife,” adding, “this timely work is as powerful as it is artful.”
For now, Sacco won’t rule out shorter works of graphic journalism. “I've wanted to move away from journalism for a while, but I had a couple of books in the pipeline and needed to finish them,” he told PW. “Then Gaza happened and I'll be doing a little more journalism yet.” Still, he hopes to return to the satirical work of his early career. “My future work—though it's satirical perhaps, and though it's even funny—is very serious in my own mind and continues the project that my life is, but in a different way, in a way that I can sustain,” he told the Comics Journal. “It's been difficult to draw what humans do to other humans.”
