For example, his new book last year was The Once and Future Riot. It's about a specific set of events in India's Uttar Pradesh state during August and September of 2013 - or, more precisely, the record of Sacco's investigations into those events a few months later. About midway between those investigations and this book's publication, Sacco had an entirely separate book, Paying the Land, about Indigenous people in Canada. I have no idea if Riot stalled on Sacco, so he researched, wrote and drew Land in the middle, or if Land was chugging along in the background during his trip to India.
It doesn't really matter, but I do wonder. Book-length comics take a while to make, which somewhat fights against the impulse for journalism to be quick and timely. And Riot is a book about a riot that comes a decade later. I haven't kept close track of Indian politics and Hindu/Muslim tensions, but I have to assume there have been other riots and (I hope, vastly more, and more productive) less violent movements since then: Modi is still in power, but there was an apparently-successful major youth protest over the past few weeks as I write this.
Which is to say: I don't think things have gotten better in Uttar Pradesh since 2013. They may well have gotten worse. Sacco's book isn't about long-term trends, though he does try to provide background: it's about this event, and primarily about his and his journalistic colleagues' efforts to untangle the statements from various officials and victims and local leaders to find the truth. (Spoiler: the local leaders, in Sacco's estimate, were mostly bullshitting at best, and Sacco all but accuses several of them of being leaders of violence in their villages.)
The spine of the book is Sacco's time in Uttar Pradesh: he's a character on most of his pages (as in his other books), but a viewpoint and an interrogator rather than a main character. Sacco and his colleagues - a translator/fellow journalist, mostly - are trying to dig into what happened on those days in September. Much of the book, like Sacco's other work, is made up of interviews, of refugees and community leaders and other witnesses, about what happened.
It's a complex situation: Muslims are a minority in Uttar Pradesh, but a fairly large one, and had traditionally been the swing voters that defined winning administrations. Muslims are also not uniform: there are two very different groups, one of very poor farm-workers, living alongside the Hindu Jats in villages, and another group of better-off homeowners and butchers and other more skilled trades, who tended to live in their own towns. The latter were the focus of the political power, obviously, and the former were the ones hit hardest by the riot.
But who started the riot? That's not clear, and there possibly was no one single "start" anyway. Tensions had been rising - fomented primarily by a group of Hindu nationalist politicians, in Sacco's telling, and using a crude but effective "they're seducing our young women to fuel plans to replace us" lie campaign.
Also, and under everything: India (or maybe Uttar Pradesh specifically) seems to be a deeply corrupt society on many levels. The police will respond to immediate large-scale problems - such as the riot of the title - but getting them to investigate day-to-day crimes requires either the payment of bribes or use of political influence from above the local police-station level. Sacco implies that the higher-level police leaders may not be personally corrupt in the way the local station leaders and cops are, but some of them are political creatures, tied to specific parties and with an interest in certain narratives and thus in investigating crimes to make them fit those narratives.
And, of course, if the local people - both Muslims and the Jat subsect of Hindus who are dominant in this region - don't think the government and police and other officials are honest and will investigate to find actual facts, they will be looking for other outlets for their anger and fear and hatred.
When two distinct groups live side-by-side, they don't necessarily conflict. But when political leaders see gain in that conflict, or have an aim to eliminate the other group, they absolutely will.
Riot is a book about an overdetermined outburst of violence. Sacco points out, several times, that this was not a huge violent upheaval. It ended in a day or so. Only a few score people died; only a few hundred were turned into refugees. On a global scale, that's small. (India may have seen worse since then; they certainly saw vastly worse, along the same ethnic/religious lines, during partition, and occasionally later.)
But it's a riot that came about because of longer-term trends, that was fed by leaders who do seem to be looking forward to larger bloodshed or expulsions (Jat mobs are said to have chanted "Pakistan or the grave" at Muslims during the riot), and that have not been solved or cured or made right. Those are riots that can recur, that can get bigger, that can expand. And, again, Sacco talked to a few people in the course of this book that seem to be hoping and working for that end. Hence the "future" of the title. It hasn't happened on that scale yet. It might still be avoided.
This is not a story about only India, of course. It's applicable to groups that are not Jat or Muslim. Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places. The future riot could be much closer to home - wherever your home is.
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