From Hell to Electropolis: how comics depict cities – in pictures
Delirius, the planet-sized city. William Gull shaking his bloody fists at the Nat West tower. The gentle Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. For every urban locale and lifestyle, comics are obsessed with cities like no other genre
-
Cheap Novelties, the Pleasures of Urban Decay with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer by Ben Katchor. Katchor describes Knipl’s beat as taking place in “a large, unnamed East Coast city of my own invention”.
Illustration: Ben Katchor
-
One of six illustrations from Will Eisner’s City: a Narrative Portfolio. Much of Eisner’s work chronicled aspects of the city, especially New York.
Illustration: Will Eisner
-
A spread from Delirius by Philippe Druillet, which features a planet-sized city dedicated to pleasure: “Four million of untold pleasures for everyone.”
Illustration: Philippe Druillet
-
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay. Little Nemo dreamed his way through the New York Herald and New York American between 1905 and 1926, and was architecturally inspired by rollercoasters and city expos.
Illustration: www.comicstriplibrary.org
-
Originally serialised in 13 parts in the early 1990s, Sin City has fuelled other projects since, including films such as 2014’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Sin City is a fictional town in the American west, properly named Basin City.
Illustration: Dark Horse Comics
-
William Gull has a vision of the Nat West Tower in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell – an influential portrayal of Ripper-era London, published in 1999 and which inspired a film of the same name.
Illustration: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell/Knockabout Comics
-
Dean Motter’s Electropolis – a retrofuturist portrayal of 1999 as envisioned in 1939 –ran in the early 2000s: “Aircars and autogyros flit between mile-high skyscrapers, and monorails shuttle the blissful populace to their ultra-modern workplaces in the morning and their automated domiciles at night, to be attended to by dutiful robotic servants”.
-
An image from Berlin: City Of Stones, part of a trilogy of graphic novels set in the twilight years of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
Illustration: Jason Lutes/Drawn & Quarterly
-
An illustration from Brüsel, Les Cités Obscures by Francois Schuiten. From a family of architects, Schuitencreated this series in 1983 with writer Benoit Peeters. It portrays city states on a “Counter Earth”, and was influenced by what he called Bruxellisation – the advent of indiscriminate modernist building in Brussels.
Illustration: Francois Schuiten
-
Hariton Pushwagner, Apokalypse: Klaxton. Norwegian artist Terje Brofos, whose best known work is Soft City (2008), revels in the repetitive dehumanisation of urban life, stretching as far as the eye can see.
Illustration: Terje Brofos
-
In the ongoing Acquefacques series by the French artistMarc Antoine Mathieu, the structure of comics themselves form the puzzle-like habitat for the protagonist, Julius Corentin.
Illustration: Marc Antoine Mathieu
-
Barefoot Gen: a Japanese manga series that ran from 1973 to 1985, portraying the experiences of six-year-old Gen in and around Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bombing.
Illustration: Keiji Nakazawa, translation by Project Gen
-
Freak Angels was written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Written between 2005 and 2011, it is set in a “post flood” London. For Duffield, London is a character of its own – “a kind of ghost”.
Illustration: Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield
-
The Long Tomorrow (1975) was written by Dan O’Bannon and illustrated by Moebius.
Illustration: Dan O’Bannon and Moebius
Comments
All Comments