Sub-titled, "July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme", The Great War presents in a single image a visual distillation of the events of that day.  While this is not the first 20+ foot-long single image comics book that has come our way – that honor going to Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel's hyper kinetic Elvis Road, originally published in Switzerland in 2002 by Pipifax, and then in the USA by Buenaventurra Press in 2007.  But whereas Elvis Road presented a frenzied instant of urban chaos that was unreadable – in the sense that there was simply no way to narratively digest the complexity of the image; all one could do was bask in the feeling of being overwhelmed by the impossibility of taking it all in (which was, of course, the point) – in The Great War, Sacco has devised an elegant and ingenious synthesis of single image and narrative progression.  All 24 feet of the drawing that makes up The Great War are devoted to delivering a seamless flow of the story of that day,  from the pacing general, through the supply lines heading to the front, to the trench diggers, through the troops themselves in full battle action on to the medical teams removing the dead and wounded to the hospital tents and finally to the cemetary - all in one seamless image that is the graceful comics equivalent of a artfully choreographed tracking shot.  And then there is a mysterious shadow that looms over the center of it all, a shadow, that  – at least here at The Copacetic Comics Company – brings to mind T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem, "The Hollow Men":  Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow.  A true tour de force.  Kudos to Mr. Sacco on his accomplishment.