Soft City

""GOOD MORNING EVERYBODY. . ." So dawns a new day in Soft City, where pill-stuffed citizens sit in traffic, march off to work at Soft Inc., zone out in front of the TV news, and shop, shop, shop. 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"--