Doom Carousel #1
Another CAKE purchase from…2015 maybe? This book drew me in with te vivid color cover and slick looking package. The cover feels like a psychedelic pastoral painting. A bit serene, a bit shocking.
The interior art isn’t as striking as this, but it’s a nice mult-media batch of strips (as opposed to a single narrative throughout). All in full color on heavy glossy paper.
The strips all deal with a potential doom that could befall the Earth, or rather, one possible factor in the doom of the Earth. The first couple are very matter of fact, almost like Greenpeace Propaganda comics. Later, the doom loosens a little and some humor sets in. Some of the scenarios laid out seem made up. Not entire fabrication, but rather a fabricated narrative dealing with the specific kind of doom. The Y2k story is actually funny and the lonely whale whose song can’t be heard due to oceanic noise pollution (mostly from heavy freighter motors) is heartwarming/breaking.
Lots of these strips are just a page or two, done in an almost web comic style (which is entirely likely the source of these, but I haven’t done any research on their origin). Some stretch to five or six pages though, dealing with more complex, less obvious or at least more difficult to describe dooms.
One of the most interesting is also one of the longest and it deals with the economic theory of Hubbert’s Peak. It attempts to estimate if we’re on the upward slope of our supply of a resource (in this case global petroleum deposits) or if we’re on the downward side and don’t know it (or more accurately, aren’t doing anything to deal with the reality that we do actually already know). There’s also a lot of oil leak doom talk (Timor and Deep Horizon feature heavily). There's a cute cartoon about about a world-destroyer asteroid. The Colony Collapse doom story s really frightening and anthropomorphizes the dying queens. And then the truly baffling strip about the Red Sludge doom. The res sludge is a byproduct of commercial alumina production. The strip tells the tale of the only recorded spill of this waste product that never goes away, can’t be allowed to dry out and can't be kept too wet. Oh yeah, and it’s totally toxic and uses up a tremendous amount of fresh water!
The book ends with an even more depressing appendix, filling out the shorter strips with more facts about the dooms and then wraps up with a nice reading list/bibliography if you’re so inclined to read further. There’s not much of call to action here, not that there’s much I think an indie comic’s limited audience could do to get us off the doom carousel, but maybe that’s just the pessimist in me. It’s no inconvenient truth, but it speaks to the power of comics. The feelings these short strips are able to induce are remarkable, terrifying and give a great sense of perspective on both bigger and smaller potential doom scenarios.
Comic read on 11/3/2017 on my couch at home.
