Joe Sacco Book Penguin The Once And Future Riot Muzaffarnagar

. His books along with those of a few other cartoonists such as Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman, have managed to carve out a distinct space for non-fiction comics within mainstream publishing and bookshops, and have inspired so many others around the world to take to this format of comics journalism, telling first-hand accounts of conflicts and people’s movements.

To have his newest book, The Once and Future Riot that investigates the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, rejected for distribution in the country by Penguin India is not just saddening but also shocking given his longstanding credibility as an artist and journalist. While technicalities such as one particular image of a hand drawn map and its accuracy are cited as reasons for why this book is not going to be distributed by them here, it does make one wonder what kind of precedent this sets for artists and writers who take on the task of researching and truth-telling in India today.

While speaking about The Once and Future Riot in an interview, Sacco says a lot of his research during his time was done by conducting interviews in Muzaffarnagar after the riots and speaking with journalists who had been reporting on it. It meant distinguishing fact from lies, and continuously fact-checking the stories he heard. Across various panels in the book we can see a skeptical Sacco leaving conversations he is having, only to question the truth of what he’s being told, such as by upper-caste leaders in a particular village. For Sacco, part of keeping at writing and drawing this book over many years was also because he felt he had “troubled people for their stories” and had to honour that somehow. As with his previous books, we have Sacco’s own drawn-out cartoon character across pages, with a notebook and pen in hand and often looking bewildered and overwhelmed, leading us through the landscape and conversations. This method, along with the fact that each page is elaborately hand-drawn across the book, repeatedly reinforces for a reader that the work is one person’s storytelling and research. It is precisely this play between personal and political, objective and affective, that makes comics journalism so appealing.

It also inserts the researcher as a human being sitting within conversations and untangling messy webs of stories instead of being an all knowing and all powerful entity. In that, the comics journalism format as Sacco has shown us, with all its messiness of boxes, characters, speech bubbles and descriptive text boxes, tries to grapple with the complexities of violence and its conflicting histories without flattening it out to a single narrative.

It has the unique ability to hold contradictions, personal narratives as well as the larger landscape of overarching politics, all on one page. It does so by also laying out the position of the artist-guide bare across the page, and inviting the viewer right into it, to walk along, with bits of dry humour to keep you going.

Reading Sacco’s work is how so many comics makers have understood the very grammar of this medium. In a country like ours, especially, where there aren’t many avenues to train oneself in comics journalism, it becomes all the more important to have his books easily accessible. Without works like this around, what is the kind of visual storytelling, illustrations and comics that are going to surround us — do we really need yet another sci-fi mythological reinterpretation cramming up bookstore shelves?

Mehrotra is a graphic novelist and educator based in Delhi and author of Uprooted: A Graphic Account of the Struggle for Forest Rights