The System

Description

It's said that the flutter of insect wings in the Indian Ocean can send a hurricane crashing against the shores of the American Northeast. It's this premise that lies at the core of The System, a wordless graphic novel created and fully painted by award-winning illustrator Peter Kuper. From the subway system to the solar system, human lives are linked by an endless array of interconnecting threads. Told without captions or dialogue, The System is an astonishing progression of vivid imagery.

Peter Kuper is a cofounder and editorial board member of political graphics magazine World War 3 Illustrated and a teacher who has taught at New York's School of Visual Arts and Parsons the New School for Design. Best known for drawing Mad magazine's Spy vs. Spy comic since 1997, he has also illustrated covers for Newsweek and Time magazine. He is the author of the graphic novel Sticks and Stones, which won the New York Society of Illustrators Gold Medal; Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico; Drawn to New York; and Ruins, winner of the 2016 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Album. Calvin Reid is a contributing editor and head of the comics department at Publishers Weekly, where heads the magazine's annual African American issue and coedits its online comics newsletter, PW Comics Week. They both live in New York City.

"Cartooning is an art that can be universally recognized and appreciated. The purest of this form is the wordless comic, where the cartoonist creates a strictly visual language. If done properly, it is capable of displaying a range of ideas and emotions that people all over the world are able to understand. It is comparable to the early days of silent films when actors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton only had gestures and facial expressions to tell their stories and convey complex feelings. Pantomime cartooning shares this limitation, yet the challenges are even greater. Not only are there no words to lean on, but there is also no movement. Every action and emotion in the story has to be conveyed through static images alone. Over the years there have been a few geniuses in this specialized art form. One of them is Peter Kuper. Long may his pencil, pen and brush silently flow." --Al Jaffee, legendary Mad cartoonist "Though it has no word balloons or thought bubbles, The System is filled with so much urban clatter, you'll want to seal your windows shut. Kuper uses his trademark spray-paint/stencil art to send us careening through a kinetic New York landscape, jump-cutting from a crooked cop to a stripper, panning from a homeless guy to a cell-phone yuppie. The star of the story is the dark city itself, and the point is how money ties all its occupants--whether they know it or not--together." --Gavin Edwards, Details "Like a slow-motion footage of a .45 slug drifting through a gun barrel, Peter Kuper's The System gives urban tragedy an almost graceful inevitability. The System intertwines the lives of several instantly identifiable New York City archetypes (drunken subway motormen and drug-dealing beat cops) into a dreamily suspenseful tale of corruption and ambition. Somehow Kuper orchestrates this Robert Altman-esque black comedy without any dialogue, utilizing his signature color-stencil-art style to depict a class-conscious saga superior in depth and emotion to a year's stockpile of the New York Post." --Robert Morales, Vibe "This is our world, folks, as it exists right now, teetering on the brink of something we can't quite imagine, laid out by Peter Kuper as a flow chart of parallels and coincidences and connecting fibers so powerful and occult that a pin dropped in a back street creates shock waves that make skyscrapers tremble. The System is a silent epic in the tradition of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse and Lynd Ward's Gods' Man--paranoid, yes, and with good reason. --Luc Sante, author, Low Life