Trans Terra: Towards a Cartoon Philosophy

4/5 ( ratings)

Trans Terra is a mutant memoir that melds comics, politics, and philosophy into a heady brew exploring work, creativity, emergence of the new, and the possibility of utopia. The author's journey begins in the frigid wastelands of contemporary consumer culture. Like a surreal HMS Beagle, Trans Terra meanders through time and space exploring archipelagos real and imagined. Prominent stops include Soviet Siberia, Communist Poland, Plato's Atlantis, nineteenth-century New York, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Arriving on the polluted shores of collapsing global civilization, Tom K glimpses the faint light of utopia beyond the veil of Apocalypse. Taking cue from Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method, the author unearths improbable connections between thinkers as disparate as Ignatious Donnelly, Alvin Toffler, Rem Koolhaas, Slavoj Žižek, and many others. Translated into several languages, Trans Terra is a comic book manifesto for the post-capitalist-crisis world.

Tom Kaczynski is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist, designer, illustrator, writer, teacher, and publisher. His comics have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Mome, Punk Planet, The Drama, and many other publications. Beta Testing the Apocalypse, a collection of his Mome stories, was published by Fantagraphics Books in July 2012. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his partner Nikki and their two black cats.