Exclusive: Joe Sacco's The Great War, documentary on the creation of an extraordinary graphic history

Cory Doctorow 8:00 am Thu Nov 7, 2013

Joe Sacco is a spectacular political comics creator, and has earned a well-deserved reputation for his work on war and conflict with books on Sarajevo and Bosnia, Gaza and Palestine and other modern militarized zones.

But now he's created The Great War, a wordless, gate-folded work on World War One. It's gorgeous and haunting, and beautifully presented in a slipcased hardcover. His publisher, WW Norton, prepared a short documentary on the book and we've got it exclusively (for now). I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

From "the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman" (Economist) comes a monumental, wordless depiction of the most infamous day of World War I. The Great War is a 24-foot black-and-white drawing printed on heavyweight accordian-fold paper and packaged in a deluxe hardcover slipcase. The set also includes a 16-page booklet featuring an essay about the first day of the Battle of the Somme by Adam Hochschild and original annotations to the drawing by Sacco himself.

The Great War by Joe Sacco [Vimeo]

The Great War [Amazon]

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