The Once and Future Riot (Hardcover)

From “our greatest living comics journalist” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a revelatory investigation of deadly sectarian riots in India that explores the mechanics, dynamics, and abuses of political violence everywhere!

Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013—the Muzaffarnagar Riot—were a relatively small-scale affair. Scores were killed and tens of thousands displaced. It had happened before and will likely happen again: Hindus and Muslims, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another while the truth fragments along religious lines.

In The Once and Future Riot, Joe Sacco immerses himself in the region, speaking to government officials, village chiefs, and the victims—mostly landless peasants—in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the power of crowds, the collision of competing narratives, and the accounts perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed.

Hailed as “the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman” (Economist), Sacco turns his masterful visual reportage to a story with profound implications for all multiethnic and multiracial societies.