Fresh Comics

The only graphic novel by the legendary Norwegian pop artist Hariton Pushwagner - completed in 1975, lost for decades, and never before published in the United States - is a scathing masterpiece in the tradition of Brazil and A 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.