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.
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 that 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.
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(Hamish Hamilton, 13 February 2020, 144 pages, hardback, #ARC from @PenguinUKBooks and voluntarily reviewed)
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I wasn't sure what to expect with this. I thought it was your average graphic novel and it seems to be marketed as such. It's not really though. It's a collection of stark yet beautiful black and white images about the end of the world. The only real issue I had is that the book doesn't contain any text, at all, not even one word. Call me old fashioned but a book needs to have some text in it for me. I've read a lot of graphic novels and they tend to have plenty of words in them. Picture books for children, by their very purpose only contain images. This is not a picture book for children. It's marketed as a graphic novel for adults. It's clearly not. A novel has prose in it and Bad Island has none. You flick through the images and you get an impression of a sequence of events. That doesn't make it a novel in my book. The illustrations are well done and impressive but for me, this is not a novel, graphic or otherwise, it's a collection of images, a piece of modern art. Also, there is not enough detail in the images to create any kind of emotional connection or response.
