Joe Sacco is an acclaimed comics journalist whose works include Footnotes in Gaza, Palestine, Paying the Land, and Safe Area Goražde. Join us for a discussion of his new book The Once and Future Riot, the art of nonfiction narrative, and the process of crafting artworks from real events. The event will be moderated by Daniel Worden, Professor of Art History at RIT and Eisner-nominated author of Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics. This is a special program sponsored by WNY Comic Arts and the Rochester Indie Comics Expo.

Joe Sacco is one of the world’s foremost cartoonists and is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area Goražde, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. After completing a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, Sacco set out to crisscross the globe, producing comics along the way. In the early 1990s he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories, traveling and taking notes. When he returned to the U.S. he recorded what he had witnessed and heard during his Middle Eastern travels, combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation. Palestine, the resulting book, set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first nonfiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. In 2000, Sacco finished Safe Area Goražde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995: a 240-page exploration of a small Muslim enclave in Bosnia called Goražde. Sacco’s most recent major work is a book about the southern Gaza Strip, called Footnotes in Gaza, published by Metropolitan Books in early 2010. Joe Sacco is a citizen of Malta and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.