Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Fantagraphics | Tagged: china, joe sacco

Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot Gets A 75,000 Printing… Finally

Joe Sacco's The Once And Future Riot gets a 75,000 printing even though Chinese printers refused to print it.

Published Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:56:04 -0500

Article Summary

Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot receives a 75,000-copy first US print despite delays.
Chinese printers refused to print the book due to political concerns over map depictions.
Publisher Metropolitan pushed back the US release after seeking alternative printing options.
Sacco’s graphic novel explores the deadly 2013 Muzaffarnagar Riot and political violence in India.

Joe Sacco's latest graphic novel, The Once and Future Riot, to be published by Metropolitan on the 14th of October in the US and by Jonathan Cape on the 13th of November in the UK, has had a 75,000-copy first printing for the US version alone. But it was intended to be published in September. What happened?

Dean Simons wrote a great piece for Publishers Weekly last month, which quoted Carolyn O'Keefe, director of publicity for nonfiction at Metropolitan, saying, "We were going to print it in China. But they objected to maps that depicted borders in ways they didn't like."

While Eric Reynolds, VP and associate publisher at Fantagraphics, explained that it was down to the Chinese government's General Administration of Press and Publication or GAPP, which monitors everything that Chinese printers print. Previous flagged Fantagraphics books include Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2 for philosophical dialogue, and Atsushi Kaneko's manga Search and Destroy, Vol. 1, for "improper" use of Soviet-style architecture, both of which had to be printed elsewhere. While Joe Sacco's The Once And Future Riot will be published a month late.

: Joe Sacco's The Once And Future Riot

The Once and Future Riot Hardcover – October 14, 2025 by Joe Sacco
From "our greatest living comics journalist" (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a revelatory investigation of deadly sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh, India, that explores the mechanics, dynamics, mythologies, uses, and abuses of political violence everywhere
Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair―some scores of people were killed and several tens of thousands displaced. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath.
In The Once and Future Riot, Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs, and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds, rather than leaders, to influence the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the accounts that perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed.
Hailed as "the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman" (Economist), Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, he turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for all precarious multiethnic, multiracial societies everywhere.

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