The only graphic novel by the legendary Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner -- lost for decades -- Soft City is a scathing masterpiece in the tradition of Brazil and A Brave New World, but with an off-kilter beauty all its own.
Pushwagner (Terje Brofos) was born in Oslo, Norway in 1940 to an engineer father and a biochemist mother. After a bus accident at age four left him with a coma and bedridden, his father taught him how to draw. In 1968, he began collaborating with his fellow Norwegian, the author Axel Jensen, on a series of graphic novels and illustrations. In 1969 he began work on his own comics masterpiece, Soft City, the pages of which were left in a suitcase and lost in 1972. In Oslo in 2002, the pages were rediscovered, twenty-five years after they went missing. Soft City was included in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and Pushwagner won the rights back to Soft City in Norwegian court in 2009. In 2012, there was a show of Pushwagner's work at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes.
"Created by the Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner between 1969
and 1975, then unseen for decades, the astonishing cartoon treatise
SOFT CITY has finally arrived in the United States. Its oversize
pages depict city life as an identity-annihilating, cookie-cutter
horror, observed by a baby named Bingo." – Douglas Wolk, The New
York Times Book Review
"This lost work, now published in an oversize hardback edition,
comes as an aesthetic revelation...Echoing Ulysses in its one-day
structure, and Kafka in its humorous yet cutting condemnation of
bureaucratic systems, this book sweeps up the reader in vast yet
minimalist panoramas emphasizing the visual monotony of tasks such
as going to work and buying one’s daily bread...this book will
delight fans of experimental and visually lush graphic novels.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Soft City is Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner’s frenetic, prophetic
masterpiece…breathtaking and damning in equal measure.” —Sean
Rogers, The Globe and Mail
"Soft City is a compelling storehouse of midcentury anxieties. Even
if these anxieties are no longer quite the same—if we now inhabit a
world in which the absence of work is more terrifying than its
overbearing presence—there is still value to Pushwagner’s
vision…Soft City turned an era’s apprehensions into
art." —Brad Prager, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The images are simple, but there’s something seething behind them,
perhaps the passion of an artist possessed of true vision…fans of
indie books and art lovers will embrace this as a masterpiece.”
–Tom Batten, Library Journal
“…Pushwagner completes the subversive complex of his work, upending
and overturning his readers with both the verbal and the visual. As
a result, Soft City is as sumptuous as it is overwhelming: a vision
of things to come that is more frightening for what it tells us
about the world we already live in.” —Shea Hennum, A.V. Club
“Pushwagner built Soft City on repetition, and repetition is
Pushwagner’s genius…on its surface, the comic shows an impersonal
day in the life of the inhabitants of Soft City, a dense, highly
regimented metropolis, but beneath, Pushwagner’s opus reads like a
dream casting back at a horrible, cold reality.” —Hayden
Bennett, Art in America
“Another remarkable rescue by the New York Review Comics…
One of the best representations of urban alienation in comic form,
with soft and liquid lines serving as metaphors of the conformism
that creeps under the skin of modern man.” —Just
Indie Comics
“…One of the more unusual and remarkable stories in the history of
comics.” —Rob Clough, High-Low
“Soft City is broad and booming…the pages are often very impressive
in the ‘god, look at that’ sense.” —Joe McCulloch, The Comics
Journal
“It’s an absolute masterpiece of comics, and looks as if it was
drawn yesterday.... It uses the medium of comics to express
something profound and complicated.... The book was a revelation to
me, and trumps pretty much every underground comic published in
America at the same time.” —Chris Ware
“Pushwagner’s Magnum Opus, the graphic novel Soft City, is as
feverish as a nightmare acid trip.” —The Guardian
“Its rediscovery and rescue...confirm how timely and timeless Soft
City was, and still is. Prepare to be astonished.” —Paul Gravett,
author of 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die
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