Bad Island
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
'Bad Island is an extraordinary, unsettling document: a silent species-history in eighty frames, a mute future archive. I can imagine it discovered in the remnants of a civilisation; a set of runes found amid the ruins. Stark in its lines and dark in its vision, Bad Island reads you more than you read it' Robert Macfarlane
'I've read lots of Stanley's stuff and it's always good and I am in no way biased' Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead
From cult graphic designer and long-time Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood comes a starkly beautiful graphic novel about the end of the world.
A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and things do not go well for the island. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke, choking the undergrowth and the creatures who once moved through it. This is not a happy story and it will not have a happy ending.
Working in his distinctive, monochromatic lino-cut style, Stanley Donwood carves out a mesmerizing, stark parable on environmentalism and the history of humankind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Donwood (There Will Be No Quiet), resident artist for the band Radiohead, unfurls a wordless parable that contrasts the relentless power of nature with the violence of humankind. Donwood opens cinematically, with a slow tracking shot that roams through a roiling sea, represented by swirling horizontal lines, to an island with smoldering volcanoes. Life on the island slowly reveals itself as it transforms: various flora and prehistoric creatures are supplanted by humans. Images of hunted animals and toppled trees give way to houses and buildings. Perhaps inevitably, vapors from the volcanoes merge with fumes billowing from factory smokestacks, which are then accompanied by skyscrapers and other symbols of modern civilization. Only a few marginal human figures are visible, dwarfed by their surroundings. Finally, missiles fill the skies and lead to annihilation. With this microcosm of evolution, Donwood presents humankind as a force driven to sow destruction of the natural world an ages-old theme enlivened considerably with Donwood's striking imagery rendered in bold black-and-white woodcut-like visuals, mixed with rhythmic op art patterns including one standout sequence that juxtaposes patterns of raindrops, bare tree branches, and churning waves. The result is a hypnotic, trenchant allegory that is both beautiful to look at and hard to look away from.
