We blinked and missed this the week it came out, but now it is in stock at Copacetic!

Written and drawn by the undisputed master of comics journalism,The Once and Future Riot is a 135 page hardcover that takes a deep dive into the forces driving Hindu/Muslim sectarian violence in India.  Sacco focuses on exploring the mechanics of mob behavior and in these pages he pushes his abilities to leverage the comics medium to do what it does best.  Sacco's labor-intensive renderings of the scenes of mob violence are filled with heavily detailed drawings of individuals which together enable this work to demonstrate the physicality of mobs in ways that prose journalism simply can't – but also in ways that are more tangible than what can be accomplished by film or video documentaries.  You'll come away from this work with a deeper appreciation of the volatility of human nature  and the fundamental irrationality of much of human behavior, but also with a sense that while individual actions are often unpredictable, mob behavior is driven by underlying social/biological/chemical/physical forces that exist wholly outside of consciousness, and, as such, conditions for the advent of mob violence can be foreseen in ways analogous to natural disasters such as forest fires and the like, or forecast like the weather – but, alas, like them, also difficult, if not impossible, to prevent or control.

There's a nice preview up at The New Yorker online, HERE.