In Review: The Once And Future Riot by Joe Sacco

By Graham Baines on December 2, 2025

Review by Graham Baines

The Book: From the ground-breaking graphics journalist and author of Palestine, a revelatory investigation of the deadly sectarian riots in 2013 Uttar Pradesh, India, and their urgent global significance today…

The Once And Future Riot by Joe Sacco - Cover

The Review: Joe Sacco, world renowned creator of war reportage comics, has got his teeth into a riot. In some ways this is a small, even insignificant riot, but as always with Sacco’s writing, this is not just about a riot, it’s about the human cost, societal structure and how systems breakdown, alienate and close ranks around social and religious groups. The Once And Future Riot is a universal story: both the setting and the riot itself could be seen as incidental, although not for the families it impacted. But for you, the reader, this is another deep exploration of the human psyche by Sacco.

For those less familiar with Sacco, here’s a quick potted history; Joe is a journalist who can draw, and this places him in a special category, one that enables him to have complete creative control and singular voice. Sacco is not being filtered through multiple viewpoints and decontextualised editorial constraints.

Through award winning graphic novels such as Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine, Sacco has documented that country’s continuous conflict, offering a deep understanding and empathy with the afflicted. In the past, he has also reported extensively from Bosnia, work funded in part by a Guggenheim fellowship, with reportage such as Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and War’s End. In Paying the Land, published in 2020, he traveled to frozen North America, to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development, telling a sweeping story about money and dependency, loss and culture.

As he asserted recently in an interview with Publishers Weekly, Sacco keeps being pulled “back into the vortex” with his drive to expose genocide in Gaza, and that it is “like shaking you in your sleep and saying your family is threatened.

“At first you feel it’s a duty,” he said, “and later it’s simply the right thing to do. It becomes a part of you.” Sacco has an opinion, and he doesn’t shy away from that; and his stance drives his most urgent work. “I prefer democracy. I would like people to have a voice,” he says. “But the way it plays out in electoral politics can often be hand in hand with violence. Sometimes you can’t separate the two.”

Is Joe Sacco a polemicist? It’s a question I ask myself having read this latest work, alongside Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. And my opinion yes he is, and this makes his work even stronger. Sacco places you directly into the incident and the moral maze that requires unravelling by the reader. The only downside to this approach is that will an audience who doesn’t agree with the politics read through the work and form a counter opinion, and does that matter to Sacco? Has the act of crossing the conflict divide been enough to establish dialogue and discussion? I feel it is, but I certainly cannot speak for Sacco.

The Once And Future Riot blurb sets out its stall. “The Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013, were a relatively small-scale affair”, we are informed, but that is not the point. In this work, we’re offered an exploration of Hindu and Muslins communities turning on one another. And Sacco (and we, the reader) immerse ourselves in the aftermath, shaped by accounts from governmental officials, leaders, locals, village chiefs and the victims. Most victims are landless labourers with limited political protection and have little of anything. And from this inciting incident we are left to explore the myriad narratives and justification for violence and state subjugation upon we, the people.

Is The Once And Future Riot any good? Yes, it is excellent. Visually, Sacco has a unique style, his use of complex scenes extending the narrative, rather than competing. His drawing style is warm and welcoming, with an unusual cross-hatching that reminds me of early drypoint applied as diligently as Lichtenstein’s use of Ben-Day dots. Sacco has true draughtsman talent, his work that of an old school artist who hand renders the whole page. This is not an AI chop-shop or even a Photoshop layered approach, this is raw Sacco. His set pieces ooze both a rawness and a sense of being in the streets. His face design is unique and each character is drawn with a difference as to make individuals recognisable, a skill often forgotten when ‘generic Acme corporation’ drawing is imposed through stylistic restraints and genre purity.

Is this a novel only for people from India? No, and that is its biggest obstacle to overcome. Casual browsers in a bookshop might pass on something that is richly defined by universal themes and objectives. This is a graphic novel for the reader who wants to understand the human psyche, and to deep-dive into the machinations of systemic government power.

Sounds niche? Perhaps, but within The Once And Future Riot you receive a complex multi-threaded story of genuine interest. It looks great, and you might learn something about the Muzaffarnagar riot, India, corruption, and yourself.

Graham Baines

• The Once And Future Riot by Joe Sacco is available now from all good bookshops | ISBN 978-1787334328 | Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape | Published in the US by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt & Co.| Buy it via UKBookshop.org (Affiliate Link) | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)

The Once And Future Riot by Joe Sacco - Gosh Bookplate

• London comic shop Gosh! offer copies of Once and Future Riot with a limited edition bookplate – copies still available here

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Joe Sacco, one of the world’s greatest cartoonists, is widely hailed as the creator of war reportage comics. He is the author of, among other books, Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area: Goražde, which won the Eisner Award and was named a New York Times notable book and Time magazine’s best comic book of 2000. His books have been translated into fourteen languages and his comics reporting has appeared in Details, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Harper’s and the Guardian. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

• In an interview with Henry Holt for Comics Grinder, Joe Sacco discusses India, a country of over one billion people, a significant player on the world stage, that calls itself a democracy. How does that work? Find out in The Once And Future Riot

• The Graphic Memoir Blog: An Evening With Joe Sacco

An intimate look at Sacco’s craft – and the complexity beneath it

• Publishers Weekly: Joe Sacco Asks Why History Repeats Itself | Published 18th July 2025

• New Yorker: A Cartoonist’s Journey to the Scene of a Riot (Subscription Required) | Published 9th October 2025