Joe Sacco: The Great War: July 1, 1916

Joe Sacco has spent his career as our most trenchant "comic journalist" depicting the horrors of human conflicts in Palestine, Bosnia, and the Persian Gulf. His latest work, The Great War: July 1, 1916 (W.W. Norton & Company), is an astonishing panorama of the Battle of the Somme, that folds open into one continuous illustration over twenty feet long. Sacco elaborates on his interest in the Somme -- a battle infamous for its human errors -- and reflects on his decades-long development of the comic into a form that can soberly contain the worst extremes of human violence.