A Scream Into the Void

My take on Joe Sacco’s “The Once and Future Riot” is now up at “The Comics Journal.”

https://www.tcj.com/a-scream-into-the-void/

It begins:

It was one war, one battle, one conflict after another, a state – Valuska gazed at the crushed terrain in front of him – where each event was self-evident, and it wasn’t as if there was anything surprising about this…
Laszlo Kraszynahockai. The Melancholy of Resistance

“I know you want peace on Earth,” Dave Edmunds sings. “But we got to kill the monster first.” Only later do you learn the monster is doctors and nurses and babies and little girls with flowers on their skirt, all of them, “underneath the rubble… crying for the dead.” For more than three decades, Joe Sacco has been writing and drawing about monsters. They have been killed by defenders of land they believed God gave them 4000 years ago, or to make up for what they believed the Turks cost them in 1390, or, in his most recent book about Hindus and Muslims in India, in defense of cows. To be fair, no one was actually killed in The Once and Future Riot (2025) for eating a Jumbo Mac, but, by book’s end, some states had made it illegal to possess one and, in a few, slaughtering Elsie could mean life behind bars.