Oppressive ( )

I give a lot of stuff five stars, but THIS ONE RIGHT HERE, is special. You ever want to just ingest a book, absorb it into your body? This makes me want to create more, think better, find ways to express it...very grateful this book exists and that I have a friend who would think to tell me about it. ( )

Graphic novel in childlike style about a world of identical white families, with the men all going to work at the same time for the same Soft corporation and the women all going shopping at the same time, until the day ends and they take a pill to sleep just as they took a pill to wake. More Brave New World than 1984, though there are screens everywhere showing terrible things. Graphic novels for adults are depressing, guys. ( )

Welcome to Soft City - the place where you take a pill to live and a pill to sleep and you are the same as everyone else on your block, in your town, in your world. That's one of the comics that need to be read in the context of the time it was written. Which is why I wish that Chris Ware's introduction had not delved into the details of the work itself - part of it introduces the times and the context but part of it tells you what happens in the work you are about to read. I almost with I had not read it before I read the graphic novel but I do wonder if I had appreciated some of what was happening without it.

Written in the 70s, with the artist under the influence more often than not, the graphic novel is a satire of a society that is heading towards higher and higher buildings and more "being the same". Both the introduction and the afterword (by Martin Herbert) make connections to other works from the same time (or from earlier) and it fits.

Then there is the art - hand drawn (and some of these pages have a lot of repeated details), massive and in black and white (not even grey) except for a few traffic signs. It is a story of reversal - get up, say goodbye to the family, go to work... then when work is done, go home, say hello, go to bed. That repeated reversed cycle is beautifully realized. Together with a few surprising elements here and there (which you may miss if you are not looking for them) that show that people are not part of the machine as much as it looks. And the story is framed by a baby that wakes up and goes to bed; by the sun coming up and the moon coming up.

It is a massive book and because of the details and the size of the pages drawn by Pushwagner requires the big pages. That's a book that won't work in a smaller format or in a digital format - the details are more important as part of the tableau and not as themselves so you need to be able to see the whole double spread at the same time.

I've never heard of Pushwagner before this book was published (and it has an interesting enough publishing story on its own). I am not sure that I want to see more of him - the art is a bit too crude for my taste and I wish that there was more of those hidden gems like the tropical scene. But I am happy that I read it. It won't be for everyone and it does have a bit of an old fashioned style to it - even though compared to the comics of the time it was written it, it looks a decade if not more ahead of its time. ( )