The Maltese-born Joe Sacco is the rare cartoonist with a journalism degree (and, maybe just as rare, a cartoonist with masterful journalistic chops). Sacco’s latest book, “ The Once and Future Riot ,” coming out this month from Metropolitan Books, focusses on the aftermath of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. The book uses the cartoonist’s tools—visual details, captions, balloons, maps, sequential narratives—to tell the story of Sacco’s own reporting: his conversations with victims, village leaders, witnesses, and officials.

Sacco’s style, forged years ago in the tradition of independent comics, favors an autobiographical mode, and he continued to operate in that mode even as his work began to take a journalistic turn. “I began to appreciate what my dra

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