Soft City

Description

"GOOD MORNING EVERYBODY..." So dawns a new day in Soft City, where pill-stuffed citizens sit in traffic, march off to work at Soft Inc., zone out in front of the TV news, and shop, shop, shop. The only graphic novel by the legendary Norwegian pop artist Hariton Pushwagner - completed in 1975, lost for decades, and never before published in the US - is a scathing masterpiece in the tradition of Brazil and Brave New World, but with an off-kilter beauty all its own. Pushwagner gives us an epic, exuberantly intricate vision of a single day in a world gone wrong: a brightly smiling, disturbingly familiar dystopia of towering skyscrapers, omnipresent surveillance, and endless, distant war. Every face looks like the next, and language itself has gone soft: "CLEAN BOMB THE HAPPY WAY," blares the morning paper; "Heil Hilton!" barks an overlord on the news. Welcome to Soft City. Now don't be late for work.

Pushwagner (Terje Brofos) was born in Oslo, Norway in 1940 to an engineer father and a biochemist mother. After a bus accident at age four left him with a coma and bedridden, his father taught him how to draw. In 1968, he began collaborating with his fellow Norwegian, the author Axel Jensen, on a series of graphic novels and illustrations. In 1969 he began work on his own comics masterpiece, Soft City, the pages of which were left in a suitcase and lost in 1972. In Oslo in 2002, the pages were rediscovered, twenty-five years after they went missing. Soft City was included in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and Pushwagner won the rights back to Soft City in Norwegian court in 2009. In 2012, there was a show of Pushwagner's work at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes.

"Created by the Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner between 1969 and 1975, then unseen for decades, the astonishing cartoon treatise SOFT CITY has finally arrived in the United States. Its oversize pages depict city life as an identity-annihilating, cookie-cutter horror, observed by a baby named Bingo." - Douglas Wolk, The New York Times Book Review "This lost work, now published in an oversize hardback edition, comes as an aesthetic revelation...Echoing Ulysses in its one-day structure, and Kafka in its humorous yet cutting condemnation of bureaucratic systems, this book sweeps up the reader in vast yet minimalist panoramas emphasizing the visual monotony of tasks such as going to work and buying one's daily bread...this book will delight fans of experimental and visually lush graphic novels." -Publishers Weekly, starred review "Soft City is Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner's frenetic, prophetic masterpiece...breathtaking and damning in equal measure." -Sean Rogers, The Globe and Mail "Soft City is a compelling storehouse of midcentury anxieties. Even if these anxieties are no longer quite the same-if we now inhabit a world in which the absence of work is more terrifying than its overbearing presence-there is still value to Pushwagner's vision...Soft City turned an era's apprehensions into art." -Brad Prager, Los Angeles Review of Books "The images are simple, but there's something seething behind them, perhaps the passion of an artist possessed of true vision...fans of indie books and art lovers will embrace this as a masterpiece." -Tom Batten, Library Journal "...Pushwagner completes the subversive complex of his work, upending and overturning his readers with both the verbal and the visual. As a result, Soft City is as sumptuous as it is overwhelming: a vision of things to come that is more frightening for what it tells us about the world we already live in." -Shea Hennum, A.V. Club "Pushwagner built Soft City on repetition, and repetition is Pushwagner's genius...on its surface, the comic shows an impersonal day in the life of the inhabitants of Soft City, a dense, highly regimented metropolis, but beneath, Pushwagner's opus reads like a dream casting back at a horrible, cold reality." -Hayden Bennett, Art in America "Another remarkable rescue by the New York Review Comics... One of the best representations of urban alienation in comic form, with soft and liquid lines serving as metaphors of the conformism that creeps under the skin of modern man." -Just Indie Comics "...One of the more unusual and remarkable stories in the history of comics." -Rob Clough, High-Low "Soft City is broad and booming...the pages are often very impressive in the 'god, look at that' sense." -Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal "It's an absolute masterpiece of comics, and looks as if it was drawn yesterday.... It uses the medium of comics to express something profound and complicated.... The book was a revelation to me, and trumps pretty much every underground comic published in America at the same time." -Chris Ware "Pushwagner's Magnum Opus, the graphic novel Soft City, is as feverish as a nightmare acid trip." -The Guardian "Its rediscovery and rescue...confirm how timely and timeless Soft City was, and still is. Prepare to be astonished." -Paul Gravett, author of 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die