Beta Testing the Apocalypse - Softcover

Kaczynski, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606995413 ISBN 13: 9781606995419

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2013

Synopsis

Eisner Award Nomination (Best Publication Design)
A heady conflation of philosophy, fiction & comics.
It would be easy to call Tom Kaczynski the J.G. Ballard of comics. Like Ballard, Kaczynski's comics riff on dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.Yet while Kaczynski shares many of Ballard's obsessions, he processes them in unique ways. His visual storytelling adds an architectural dimension that the written word alone lacks.
Kaczynski takes abstract ideas -- capitalism, communism, or utopianism --and makes them tangible. He depicts and meditates on the immense political and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define the limits of who we are and the freedom we as Americans presume to enjoy. Society and the individual, in perpetual tension. Once you've read Kaczynski's comics, it should come as no surprise to learn that he studied architecture before embarking on a career as a cartoonist.
Beta Testing includes 10 short stories, most notably "The New," a brand new story created expressly for this book. It's Kaczynski's longest story to date. "The New" is set in an un-named third-world megalopolis. It could be Dhaka, Lagos or Mumbai. The city creaks under the pressure of explosive growth. Whole districts are built in a week. The story follows an internationally renowned starchitect as he struggles to impose his vision on the metropolis. A vision threatened by the massive dispossessed slum-proletariat inhabiting the slums and favelas on the edges of the city. From the fetid ferment of garbage dumps and shanties emerges a new feral architecture.
Color throughout

About this title

About the Author

Tom Kaczynski learned to read English by reading American capitalist comics in communist Poland. His comics have appeared in The Drama, Punk Planet and Backwards City Review. He lives in Minneapolis with his girlfriend Nikki and two cats.

From the Back Cover

The starting point is arbitrary. From there, the city expands in all directions.

At once science-fiction, a contemporary demonology, an occult theory, a mutant utopia and an architectural treatise, Beta Testing the Apocalypse is a series of fictions about the contemporary global megalopolis. Tom Kaczynski's short stories trace a complex space-time trajectory from the smallest corporate cubicle out to farthest fathoms of the multiverse. Occult economics, metaphysical traffic jams, Marxist zombies on Mars, secret architectural societies, designer ghosts from the future, and demographics demons are just a few elements of a new untested future eschatology. This is a groundbreaking collection by a unique new voice in comics.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606995413
• ISBN 13: 9781606995419
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136