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.

[Sacco] specializes in showing what photos can’t: the enormousness and the enormity of what happened that day on the Western Front.

A landmark work which makes visceral one of the bloodiest days in history.

The art is such that you will pore over the book, cross referencing with the annotations, almost hearing the tick tick tick of the seconds that separated each wave of men from their terrible deaths. It's a powerful 'read' (despite being entirely wordless), and interesting both as a work in its own right but also as a placeholder within Sacco's career.

The "comic book journalist" has gone into a new realm with this, a book that folds out into a single piece, 24ft wide, wordless pen and ink drawing of soldiers leaving the trenches

The First World War is often described as a literary war, but it was also the first great photographic war. This book is an extraordinary collection of photographs from the archives of the Imperial War Museums. Depicted are the machines of destruction, the battlefields, the trenches, the beaches but above all the soldiers. Nothing reveals the face of war quite so vividly as the faces of the warriors.

A mini-masterpiece.

His silence first mirrors and then amplifies our own horrified stupefaction – and his inky crosshatching speaks for itself, sorrow and rage in every dogged line.

Unlike anything you've ever seen before...renders the destruction on an epic scale but each of the thousands of soldiers is depicted with humanity and detail.

Unfolds in breathtaking detail… Haunting and beautifully rendered.

One of the finest pictographic achievements in recent years… A vivid portrait of courage and honour which will astound you.

The "comic book journalist" has gone into a new realm with this, a book that folds out into a single piece, 24ft wide, wordless pen and ink drawing of soldiers leaving the trenches.

[Sacco’s] ability to cram in detail is extraordinary. And it is the details that linger.

When stretched to its 24ft length in the Saga Magazine office, we pored over it for ages. We predict you will want to do the same.

About Joe Sacco’s The Great War, one can write only essays or short, ecstatic sentences... A beautiful accordion-book, it unfolds on the Western Front, with all its monotony and misery: simple, but intricate; wordless, but vocal; brutal, but beautiful. A masterpiece of quietly affecting numbers, the thousands of lines, dots, and crosses that demarcate the thousands of lives, deaths, and crises.

The detail in this work is phenomenal, capturing the aloof generals, death in the trenches, and the wounded... [Sacco] makes visceral one of the bloodiest days in history.

Wordless and brilliant.

Sometimes words and photographs are not enough… [An] astounding book.

A unique and unforgettable experience.

A meticulous visual depiction.