TheGreat War

An extraordinary piece of book production – akin to Chris Ware’s Building Stories as a celebration of paper and print in a digital age.Of all the books published to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I this will be the most original and striking.Joe Sacco is universally acclaimed as the inventor and best exponent of ‘comics journalism’.

Joe Sacco’s acclaimed books include Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Adam Hochschild is the author, most recently, of To End All Wars. He lives in Berkeley, California.

AN ILLUSTRATED PANORAMA WITH AN ESSAY BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD

The first day of the Battle of the Somme has come to epitomise the Great War. This monumental panorama captures the unimaginable horrors of that fateful day.

On 1st July 1916, almost 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 were wounded during the first day of The Somme. In The Great War, acclaimed cartoonist Joe Sacco depicts the events of that day in an extraordinary, 24-foot-long wordless panorama: from British soldiers going ‘over the top’ and being cut down in No-Man’s-Land, to the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers retreating and the dead being buried en masse.

Printed on fine accordion-fold paper and packaged in a deluxe hardcover slipcase with a 16-page accompanying booklet, The Great War makes visceral one of the bloodiest days in history.

‘This is incredible. It is fantastic. He’s showing you far more than a film or photographs could. It’s just drawing ? it’s a superb example of what art can do.’ David Hockney, Sunday Times

‘Sacco’s work [is] the best argument around for comics as a journalistic medium’ GQ

This is incredible. It is fantastic. He’s showing you far more than a film or photographs could. It’s just drawing — it’s a superb example of what art can do.Insanely beautiful… This is yet another total masterpiece from one of the most important comic artists of all time.A vast panorama of the first day of the battle of the Somme. This is a stark, uncompromising book … A breath-taking achievement too, its beauty and power lying in its attention to detail, the way it forces the reader to look, and look again … The kind you need to own, the better that you might return to it again and again.Stunning.It is a powerful, sustained piece of work, an example of Sacco's journalistic approach.