Trans-Animus In An Anthropocene Era.
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A Day in the Life: Constructing Dystopia in Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City
Although rooted in the Norwegian underground art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, the graphic narrative Soft City — drawn by the artist Terje “Hariton Pushwagner” Brofos (1940-2018) and scripted in collaboration with sci-fi writer Axel Jensen (1932-2003) — crosses geographical, cultural, artistic, and linguistic borders. It was begun in Norway and completed in London (before vanishing into thin air for more than twenty years), consequently employing a visual vocabulary that bears the signs of both cultures. The imagery at play further combines the aesthetics of an iconic silent film such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) with the artistic expressions of pop art and pop music as well as with the severe geometry of technical drawing. In parsimonious dialogue and sporadic captions, languages such as Norwegian, English, and German mix and intertwine.
My paper will investigate the construction of the black-and-white inked universe in Soft City as a dystopian space which could be seen as the dark side of the Scandinavian welfare state. In the representation of a day in the life of a nuclear family in Soft City, numerous themes as disturbing and gut-wrenching as the volume is bulky and heavy are put forward. Dystopian motives such as the loss of individuality, convention, alienation, nightmarish monotony, robotic behaviour, and mass consumerism are explored both thematically and visually. Since Soft City is almost wholly entrusted to the visual code of comics, the work will be used to provide an insight into how the media affordances of comics can serve to build a dystopian vision of society.
Camilla Storskog University of Milan, Italy