Joe Sacco's epic, 24-ft-long depiction of the first day of the battle of the Somme has been recreated on the wall of the Paris metro.

Published last autumn, the acclaimed cartoonist's wordless panorama The Great War picked out the events of the first world war battle, which began 98 years ago on 1 July, from the British soldiers who went over the top, to the mass burials of the dead. It drew glowing reviews on publication. Steve Rose called it "a cross between Hergé and the Chapman brothers; the Bayeux Tapestry as a silent movie" in the Guardian. Sacco himself has said the work was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry.

"It all started when I was playing darts with a friend of mine in New York," he told AFP. "'Why don't you do something on the first world war?' he asked. That was 15 years ago. I thought of the Bayeux Tapestry: it is a long corridor of images you can read from left to right. And I have been interested in the first world war since I was 10 years old."

Now the comic is being shown in the Montparnasse metro station in Paris in a display which runs to 130 metres. "I'm delighted by this project," said Sacco, according to Le Figaro. "I really believe in public art exhibition, because art is, by its nature, public."

He told Le Monde that the fresco was trying to show "the scale of what happened that day". "I wanted to give an idea of the size of the massacre, an idea of the losses and the human suffering," he said. "The first day of the battle of the Somme was the bloodiest in British history; 120,000 men left to attack the German lines. At the end of the day, there were 20,000 dead, and 40,000 wounded."