Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco’s next book is set in India, though it won’t be out for some time. He was in Delhi-NCR for a few quiet weeks, teaching and conducting workshops, but found himself overwhelmed by how keenly the city and its readers responded to his presence by the end of his visit. After a long trek to Sonepat, I found him in the off-hours early in November, while most of the signings, talks, discussions, and interviews celebrating and asking questions about his body of work were still being planned.
Beyond being an occasion to celebrate and learn from his journalistic integrity, this also provided a chance to explore how his draughtsmanship is underpinned by a strong relationship with the arts. Most striking was his admiration for Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, infamous for infiltrating peasant gatherings in disguise to observe and depict their lives faithfully. The Renaissance painter’s antics echo how Sacco himself doggedly pursues the truth in conflict zones around the world. His concern for how best to represent these stories may often seem to clash with his ambivalence towards the excesses of the underground comix tradition he emerged from. Yet, he insists on their necessity for pushing boundaries, risking discomfort and backlash to test how far truth-telling can go.
Cinema, literature, and art history are shored up in all kinds of unexpected places throughout Sacco’s decades-long career, even though he claims to have no real expertise in any of these domains. In a conversation with Scroll, he spoke generously about how he reads literature, his experiments and collaborations beyond journalism, why he will never draw himself realistically, what he fearlessly copied from his peers, and the differences in his ways of dealing with colours and lettering in his work.
You have always maintained that what you do is comics. But India is also a country where the “graphic novel” as a format was defined by the publication of a handful of books (Maus, Palestine, Persepolis, etc.) that included your own. What do you think about the romance comics you started with?
That rubbish? That was in Malta. I was young and that sort of fell into my lap because a publisher knew I was interested in drawing and suggested three options: children’s comics, action comics, or romance comics. I chose romance comics because that was so out of my league that I thought it would be kind of humorous. It ended up as a series called Imħabba Vera (“True Love”). I think it was the first [art] comic series in Malta at the time: black and white, 64-pagers, each written and drawn in one month. It was quite an effort to get those out. I burned out on it after six issues. Also, the fact that the publisher wasn’t paying me had something to do with burning out on it.
They were terribly drawn. But what was sort of amusing is that Malta had no history of comics, so I could tackle subjects that would be unacceptable in American comics. Romance comics, but the girl gets pregnant and has to go to Amsterdam to get an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where abortion isn’t really allowed. So I explored those sorts of issues and no one really raised an eyebrow because I don’t think most people realised. This is not your typical comics fair, because they didn’t read comics. They didn’t really know what comics could do. It was good just to force me to draw, draw, draw.
I wish I could say my drawing improved a lot because of it. I don’t think it did. That took a lot more time.
But you had a robust readership. Are there plans to translate it?
It did well. I can’t remember the figures or whatever, but I know they sold out and they were doing well.
I hope they are not translated. I hope those things are burned at the stake.
That’s what Kafka said about his work.
Well, some things might be good for some academic who wants to understand or dilute whatever impact I’ve ever had. That’s what that stuff’s there for. It’s not good. It’s not probably not worth it. But I don’t know. Maybe one day when people get really obsessed about me…
You’ve talked about how much the underground comix scene in the US meant to you, how much you learned from it. You are self-taught. But that couldn’t have been what you started with. What were the comics of your childhood?
I grew up in Australia, so the comics of my childhood were a mixture of American comics and British comics. Very distinctly, I was not interested in caped crusaders in superhero comics. Though I did read the Phantom because someone’s parents gave their child’s comics to me because they were too old for them. So I read them, but I would also read Sgt. Rock, which was a stupid American war comics series and these British war comics and Westerns that I got from someone.
Then I was reading MAD magazine, but not really understanding it. If you want to ask what’s the first thing that really made an impact on me, it was when MAD started reprinting the comics version from the 1950s. That stuff was head and shoulders above the then-current edition of MAD. It was so zany and wild. Things were going on the page and in the stories that, as a kid – I was about 12 years old at that time – I couldn’t fathom what was going on. I didn’t know those things were possible. It was like having one of those epiphanies: “Wow, you can do that.” Reading Bill Elder – one of the great cartoonists – who was making such busy stuff with all these funny gags in the background and such a dense approach to everything going on, obviously had an impact on me also.
When I went to college [in the US], it was the late seventies and the tail-end of the hippie movement. You could find underground comics in head shops, they were called, where you bought drug paraphernalia. At that time, marijuana and hash weren’t legal, but the paraphernalia was legal. That’s where you got those comics.
Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix and S Clay Wilson’s Checkered Demon strips were things that I would pick up and read and often be really repulsed by. When I first saw Crumb’s work, I didn’t like it. I was reading and thinking that it wasn’t even funny. It’s just like these two little men talking to each other. It’s funnier now to me somehow. Then I remember seeing [Crumb’s] Angel Food McSpade, which was so over the top, I was really repelled by it. I’m still kind of repelled by it. I will defend it now, but I can’t really look at it myself. It’s just too much. But all that did sort of shake me up and eventually, I began to sort of look at this stuff a bit more closely and really begin to appreciate it, because that really nasty stuff of Crumb’s that a lot of people find objectionable is such a small part of his oeuvre. Over time, I just really got into some of those underground things and I loved the aesthetic. I loved especially that they seemed to be real outliers, kind of outlaw artists, really.
You’ve done your part in building upon that scene. There are three series that you edited once you were in the US, which are the fifteen issues of the comics newspaper Portland Permanent Press, the last two issues of Fantagraphics’ anthology Honk, and the one that followed it, Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy…
…whose title people hated so much. I couldn’t believe it. The inspiration for it was from Huxley’s Brave New World. The book featured a game called “bumble puppy,” but “Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy” had more parts to it, and it was designed to increase consumption. It was a plaything that required you to buy things and attachments for it. I really like that reference to materialism and consumer culture.
That’s the satirical element of the title and people had to sell the book in bookstores or in comic book stores at the time. The retailers hated it and would send letters to my publisher, just complaining that no one wants to buy a book with this title. I’m thinking, why exactly does no one want to buy? I didn’t understand that. I didn’t understand the resistance. I still don’t understand the resistance to a wacky title. They used to buy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right?
So you’re a young cartoonist, you’re figuring things out and curating the work of others. What comes out of it?
It was hard to attract people when you were paying $30 a page, or sometimes even $25, which wasn’t much money even back then. The anthology was not doing well either.
But I was interested in satire. What I wanted from the artists, and it was hard to sort of get it out of them – it’s probably too much to have asked for political satire – was social satire. There were cartoonists that I found that were doing that, but it seemed like a strain to find that. When I was in college, I took a class on satire. It was a great course, and we read some great works: Candide (1759) by Voltaire, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), among others.
That also helped – along with the EC Comics and MAD stuff – shape my humour. I realised you could use humour to make commentary. That’s what I was trying to push with those magazines. I was never really interested in a joke. I mean, I might like watching Jerry Lewis fall down the stairs, but as far as my own work goes, I was never interested in a laugh just for a laugh’s sake. It always had to have something behind it. That’s how I always approached it, which basically meant satire.
Underground comix was also about provocation, but there’s a difference between being provocative and actually taking it to satire. How did you deal with that push and pull?
Taking it to an intellectually higher place. It’s not that I was against the underground stuff, but it was more like those underground artists, what they were doing was really going far to the boundaries of the acceptable, then crossing over into unacceptable territory and going even further and planting all these flags. That was incredibly useful for those who followed. They showed what was possible, whatever you might think of their work – misogynistic, some people accused them of being racist at times – it was pushing boundaries really, really far.
I don’t think many cartoonists, at least self-consciously, have tried to get there. Those guys were doing it because they were those people. [Crumb contemporary and contributor to Zap Comix who later also drew a graphic biography of Che Guevara] Spain Rodriguez was a motorcycle rider. I don’t know many cartoonists in America who are motorcycle riding, with a chain and getting into fights in bars. I mean, most cartoonists are just not like that, that I know of.
My peer group went for more: they were influenced like I was, but they didn’t need to go that far necessarily. They were trying for something else. I think they were more influenced also by literature, you know, like they wanted to do things more literary. But I think comics have lost sort of that ability to push it far enough. But that’s another topic.
On the topic of the literary: that first page from Yahoo, the Comix Bistro #1, where you’re calling yourself a “cartoon genius” is on all the posters now, at least in Delhi. Behind your imposing self-insert figure, what one notices is all the books in the background. What was the literature that you engaged with? What do you think are the things that really affected you
That was literally the books on my shelf at the time. I read pretty much everything: all of Orwell’s novels and a four-volume collection of his letters and essays. That stuff influenced me. Aldous Huxley influenced me. I was pretty interested in English literature from the 1920s and 1930s, situated between the wars. Then that extended to more obscure figures like George Gissing, others from the 1900s, and then eventually into some German literature like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and then especially, the Russians. I’ve never sort of gotten out of the Russians. I re-read Dostoevsky and some Tolstoy more than once for deep psychological themes and for really trying to engage with the world as it is and they had a profound impact on me. It’s not so much that they’re going to have a direct impact on your work, it’s just the scope. I admire artists who have a real scope with the stories they’re trying to tell.
I’m less inclined to read – though I’ve worked with Harvey Pekar on these smaller stories – literature that's just sort of about a conversation in the kitchen. I’m outward going. I want to go out the door, you know, and I want to see the world. With the Russians, I always felt this sense of wonder that I’m in this other place with these larger than life characters behaving very passionately, alongside these conflicts between rationality and irrationality, the meaning of religion – all really interesting ideas. It’s not like I can say for certain that this affected that, but it’s just broadening your mind to other things.
Even in my fifties, I started engaging with things that I wish I’d studied in school. I didn’t know it at the time that I should have, but I started reading philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and other things just to keep sort of feeding for whatever reason. You don’t even know why you’re putting it in your head, but you realise it has an effect.
The popular perception of the graphic novelist is as a solitary figure who works and creates all on their own. But even outside of your editorial work, there are also these volumes where you have actively collaborated with others. Beginning with a 2002 labour history [From The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend: An Illustrated History Of Labor In The United States] where you are credited as just an illustrator but your recurring self-insert character starts doing these theatrical reproductions of every age that he’s representing.
Then there’s the 2012 book with Chris Hedges [Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt] which starts out with illustrations, then you break out into comics and then suddenly there’s an illustration which has its own speech bubble. The third one on climate change from 2018 [Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale] is also similar in that sense. How does that work?
They’re all very different. All because I either liked the people I was going to be working with, I knew them already, or the project seemed like a good project. With Chris Hedges that took a long time because we were going to different places. Then we’d come home for a month or two and then go somewhere else. I’d met him before in Bosnia. He was writing for the New York Times at the time and was their bureau chief in Sarajevo. We just clicked while talking about books. We talked about Evelyn Waugh. We were in the same convoy going up to Gorazde in the same vehicle. I was furious because the whole convoy had waited because he was coming. I was furious when he got into our little armoured jeep, and I thought, “This asshole!” The convoy actually waited for a guy because he’s from an institutional paper. They wouldn’t have waited for me. We got in the car and started talking, bonded somehow and became friends!
But the great thing for me was all of those people were such intellects that, to me, I was just learning a lot from talking to them. I mean, Chris Hedges is now kind of probably one of America’s most well-known dissidents and he’s incredibly well-read and he comes out of the seminary. I mean he’s got a way of thinking that really comes from being able to convince people and he has a very high standard of rhetoric. Just to be around those people in a car for hours, talking about books, talking about politics, talking about the stories we were actually working on at that moment was a sheer pleasure. I’ve been blessed – if you don’t mind me using the word – to be around people like that.
What about your work with [Cleveland cartoonist and Crumb associate] Harvey Pekar?
Harvey Pekar is a funny one because he called me out of the blue when I was working on the Palestine comics series, the nine issues that came out and were later collected. He called me out of the blue and I picked up the phone and he was like, “Joe, this is Harvey Pekar.” I knew who he was, but I was convinced that was one of my friends pretending to be Harvey Pekar because why would Harvey Pekar call me up? I was like kind of nobody, really. It was Harvey and he said he liked the first issues of Palestine that he’d seen.
He saved me in a certain sense because he right away said, “Do you want to work with me? Do you want to draw some of my stories? I’ve got this gig with The Village Voice and I’m writing about jazz musicians. Do you want to draw those?” It was a monthly gig drawing about his writing on jazz musicians and my drawing them, trying to research them. This is before the internet. So I could draw them. This was almost $500 a month, which was a lot of money for me.
It really helped sustain me while I was doing the Palestine strips. We became friends over time. We’d talk to each other. He was probably one of the only genuine working class people who ever was in the arts who remained a working class person. He was a file clerk at the Veterans Administration. Even when he was well-known and appearing on talk shows, he was still a file clerk.
You’ve said multiple times that you’re obsessed with the middle ages. From “The Buffoon’s Tale” (1988) [a hilarious medieval pastiche] to The Great War (2018), which unfolds as a single, unfurling illustration that moves from left to right, capturing the collective experience of World War I. It is where you have come closer to many of your other peers who’ve experimented a lot more with the medium itself. How has this 30-year experience from the former to the latter been like?
Well, I mean, that was in Yahoo. Most of my peers were doing comics based around a certain character or they had a cast of characters. It was almost like sitcom stuff. Each issue, those characters would interact. There’d be some sort of a TV model. But I didn’t know if I wanted to come up with a character that would just continue and continue. So, early on, it was all really experimental. If you see the first couple of issues, it’s all over the place. Some realistic stuff, autobiographical stuff, and then there is “The Buffoon’s Tale,” which is a mock tale from the middle ages told in verse.
I’m not sure why I came up with it, but I was and am deeply influenced by Bruegel. Every time I look at it, I’m just transported to that world. It’s like opening a window into a land in such an organic manner that all the people he’s painting just seem like they could be sitting with me. They’re vomiting in the corner, they’re dancing in the street…it’s perfect! So that definitely has a Bruegel-esque sort of feel to it.
How would Bruegel approach these human foibles if he was a cartoonist? That’s what I was thinking. The Great War was a way of getting away from my journalism where I was often focused on individuals. Over time you begin to question what you’re doing and why and what you’re finding out. You’re doing journalism, but over the course of many years and projects, you begin to ask yourself questions about human nature, human psychology: why people do what they do more than “this happened on that date.” My work started to shift towards something else. I think that was sort of one way of thinking, I wanted to get away from the individual and think of humanity as a whole.
So an editor called me up and just said, “Oh, we’re doing something about World War I.” It was his idea. “Do you want to do this pullout?” He had a model called Manhattan Unfurled (2001) [by Matteo Pericoli], and he sent it to me. He asked me, “Why don't you do something about World War I, like draw the Western front?” It didn't interest me until I thought about the Bayeux tapestry and how that is an illustration that sort of flows. There’s no separation. There are words in Latin here and there, but generally you read an illustration – if you're a Westerner – from left to right.
I thought you could actually show time progressing if you read something from left to right. It can be one illustration, but it can show time. Here are the people leading up to the front. Here are the people getting into the trenches. Here are the people going over the top. Here are the people returning from the combat and going into the hospitals and into the cemetery. You could show it. It’s about the first day of the battle of the Somme. Then it became more interesting because then it had a narrative structure and comics are about narrative. So I never wanted to just draw an illustration. I got intrigued because I realised you can tell a story even with one illustration, as you can with a single panel. Even a painting like Goya's Third of May 1808 (1814) has a narrative. You can see people coming up to be shot, people about to be shot, people who have been shot. There’s a structure there, right?
So it was an experiment and I thought, okay, let me think about humanity as a collectivity. If aliens were hovering over the earth, what would they see on July 1st, 1916, if they were over that part of France? They would see all these people collectively going to their slaughter, but in a very organised fashion, cooperating to try to kill other people, getting killed themselves by other people who were cooperating to kill them.
To me, it was sort of scary to think about. I don’t know if that comes across, but as I was doing it, that’s what I was thinking. It’s scary to think about the amount of human effort that goes into carnage.
That is the state of exception that conflict zones you document often exist in, with chaotic violence that is highly organised on some level. You’ve mentioned spaghetti westerns as an influence for your comics. These are all set in frontier towns where the law has often gone for a toss. What has been your relationship with such cinema in how you visualise or think of things
I don’t study film. Over time, I’ve begun to appreciate it more. I’ve begun to see the films that everyone should watch. I just saw [Ingmar Bergman’s] The Seventh Seal (1957) for the first time a few months ago, you know, and I thought it was really a pretty great movie! But I don’t know a lot about film history. The truth is that I don’t know a lot about art history. But sometimes you’re just watching something, and without studying it or scrutinising it for possible influence, something just hits you.
I remember watching A Fistful of Dollars, and just seeing those close-ups by Sergio Leone. The music might have had something to do with it because it really enhanced the images and close-ups. People were kind of grotesque. It wasn’t like the John Wayne sort of stuff. It was sweaty people with bad teeth, a lot of weird facial hair, and pockmarked skin. It was really grotesque and strangely attractive. In a way, I realise now, that it’s also what I appreciated about Bruegel. He sort of shows humanity as it is, rather than some of the Renaissance imagery, which is very idealised, a lot of it. So sometimes I just look at something, and right away, it’s almost like I’ve absorbed a crash course on what can be done. Just look at it once, and you just get it.
That’s sort of what happened there. I’m not sure if any other film ever influenced me as much. I’m telling you, it’s like a matter of seconds. I literally saw that movie and went up to my room and started a comic called “A Fistful of Tequila,” which will probably never see the light of day, because it’s full of high school sex fantasies alongside being a parody of the film. It had such a visceral impact on me that I started drawing something immediately after I turned off the television set.
You often bring up the criticism your work has received in the past for being a representation of a certain kind. You’ve taken that on your chin and are very open to talking about it while also standing your ground that you would not do it any other way, even as you express that you will try to figure out how to address what is being said. In your more recent work, however, everyone else is drawn in a realist way while the author character is drawn in that stylised, exaggerated manner that we usually associate with your earlier work. In the introduction to Journalism, you say that making it difficult to draw yourself out of a scene relieves you of making a “virtue of dispassion” in your comics, of reporting what you’ve seen. What is your approach to depicting people now and vis-a-vis them, yourself?
I mean, over time I’ve drawn more representationally. That’s because I think if my work is going to be journalistic, it needs that. Some of that was based on criticism of how I drew, you know, having not studied drawing at all, you know, coming up with my own way of drawing as a child and just progressing from there, and things looked very cartoony.
People – one Arab and one Jew, separately, I was told either directly or through someone else – said that they were really offended by how I showed Arabs and Jews, respectively. So I had to think about that. After that, I tried to draw more representationally, which is not natural to me. It is still not natural to me. Over time, I’ve learned to do it better. I think I can draw humans pretty well, I think, but I’m always hammering it into shape. I don’t have a natural facility, like some cartoonists I know who can just get there. I know Craig Thompson [creator of Blankets (2003), Habibi (2011) and the forthcoming Ginseng Roots (2025)], who can just, without any pencil marks, draw the human form. I can’t do that. I’m constantly trying to assess if I’m drawing it right. But you just get better at it, just because you’re doing hundreds and hundreds of pages over the years. But I’m glad in a way that I cannot draw totally representationally, because then what’s the point of even drawing at all?
I’ve always wanted to keep some cartoony aspect, because every now and then you need to break it out. There’s a scene in a comic I made called Šoba (1998), where people are headbanging, and if you saw the way that’s drawn, or you saw some guy playing air guitar, there are no swish marks in real life. I employ all the cartoon tropes of showing movement and sort of this perspective to give you the feeling of headbanging, and how do you draw headbanging with a still image?
Adopting a cartoony approach allows you to show the movement. Every now and then you need to draw from those tropes, and because things are drawn in the same hand, it's easy to make, you can allow for that plasticity, you know? Over time, again, generally I will do more representational work, but I still want my hand in the more cartoony aspect that you saw in Palestine, for example.
You have Tom and Jerry in Palestine.
Yeah, in a lot of ways, that’s sort of true. If you look at the very beginning, like Palestine, where it seems like I fit in with all the other weird-looking characters, you’re right. I don’t quite match up to that representation, but I’ve also changed. I’m less cartoony than I used to be, maybe not 100 per cent representational, but even that had to do with the fact that I literally never thought through that whole thing. At some point, someone asked me why do you still draw yourself like that? Everything else is drawn more realistically, and I hadn’t noticed myself. When I draw my own character, it’s more like it’s so rote and easy to draw, that it just comes out the way it comes out without me thinking about it.
You have also allowed the character to age.
Well, I’ve aged. I’m always a little offended when I meet a cartoonist who draws himself as if they were young. They still keep on at it, and I keep thinking, man, you look way worse in real life, and I’d rather look much better in real life. I think it’s a better look, [laughs].
You’ve spoken about taking your limitations and making that your strength. This was about how your work rarely features colour and that you’ve never learned Photoshop. You do everything manually while many of your peers have used it, and you acknowledge that they do great work, but colour is just not something you do. You mention cross-hatching and how it's meditative, and also how not working in colour was something that came from the underground tradition. But you do have some stories that are in colour. How was that experience?
Well, I had a colourist do them. I basically colour things in with pencil, like a child. It was a woman in both cases – Rhea Patton. She did the colour with a computer. I have experimented a bit with, actually, painting. I mean, if you have the original Šoba cover, it’s painted, and I tried gouache with a story called “Christmas with Karadzic.” I was really upset by the way that it printed out, because I liked the way it looked on the originals, and it just looked so ugly on the page. So, I thought, I’d rather have a crisp line instead.
Doing comics is a process. It’s not just about what you’ve drawn, it's how it’s printed. If it’s not printed well, rather than trying to correct it, I don’t want to do that experiment again. Maybe if I had kept doing it, I would have ended up expanding from black and white to grey tones and eventually other colours. Who knows where it would have ended up?
In the end, I just decided, let me try to use black and white to its full advantage. Even then, I’m influenced by some of my peers. Like, looking at Charles Burns’ work, you see the heavy contrasts. It’s just got such a power. Or you see Jaime Hernandez’s pages and go, okay, more blacks. It's not like I'm studying the work. It's clear what the artistic message is. Then you cop from your peers. There's tons of stuff I've copped from my peers. Like, even the big faces, the big faces saying something: I got that from Daniel Clowes’ A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). We’re all friends, so everyone cops from each other. It’s okay…unless I get a lawsuit one day.
We need to talk about how you letter your comics. Strips of text keep going down and across the pages of your books. Your text is either zigzagging, in the gutters [space in between panels] or margins, or they’re peppered into the art itself, like little bits cut out from your journals or field notes. Both the voice and how it is presented are constantly changing in your work. How do you think of lettering: as narration, as your voice or your characters’, as information or opinion, or as a sense of history?
To be very simple about it: comics are an amalgamation, and a synthesis or a sort of a compound molecule, of writing and drawing. But for me, experimenting over time and letting my mind just be open to things, I'm trying to meld them more. Generally, I don’t tend to rely on placing a caption at the top of a page and an illustration at the bottom of the page, as if they’re removed from each other. To me, if it’s really about words and images together, why shouldn’t the words be part of the art? Why shouldn’t the words obscure the art? Why should the art be so holy that you have to do this drawing that has to be perfect?
I would rather just lay a caption right in the middle of it. So it’s all melded together. The idea of these little captions, these phrases sort of shot out as if like by a shotgun. That’s something I picked up from a French novelist named Ferdinand Selene, who would have a four or five-word phrase, with ellipses, again a four or five-word phrase, and then ellipses – often redundant phrases – which became new ways of saying the same thing. But this cumulative effect was really exciting, like galloping. You feel like you’re being just taken by the hand and you’re running through a corridor of words. It’s amazing in prose. I began to wonder, “How do I match that sort of intensity?”
The way I came up with it is actually literally having small phrases, clipping them, and having them at different points on the page. Over time, this is what I have developed: I will draw the captions. I get two blank sheets because I design the left and right-hand pages together. They’re going to be seen together, so they should be designed together. I write all the captions out. I cut them out. Then I place them in a way that I feel like this could lead the eye a certain way, on both pages. Then I decide where I'm going to put the images based on where the words are. That’s very different from how I think a lot of cartoonists do things. Most cartoonists are thinking in terms of image. For me, the first question is: “Where am I going to put the words?” I’m putting the words down first. But because they’re on a piece of paper, if the image needs it to move it just over here because a certain section is crucial enough that I need to keep it in, and then I can adjust it.
This is a very fluid arrangement between images and words, but they’re really part of the same thing to me. There are so many things you can do with counterpoint, like how you can lead the eye. You can have irony with the words and image as a counterpoint or you can emphasise things. There’s too much that can be done with it. This is what I try to do.
Finally, what are your thoughts on the comics scene in India?
My understanding of it is limited by some of the packages I have received from time to time. I’ve definitely read Longform Volume 1 (2018) [the title of this edited anthology was inspired by an essay by Sacco]. I was talking to Vishwajyoti Ghosh [author of Delhi Calm (2010)] yesterday when we had lunch together. It feels like things started quickly and with quite a high level of ambition, which is good. It seems, however, that the economics of it remains difficult. It’s a big country. Obviously, there must be a lot of readers here. A lot of people seem to know my work, but they should know Indian cartoonists too. I don’t know how that’s corrected. But what I like about reading Indian comics is that they feel like they’re from India. I see the commonalities in some of the stories because of their universal appeal. But you do feel immersed in an Indian context. That I appreciate a great deal.
