Trans Terra is a mutant memoir that melds comics, politics, and philosophy into a heady brew exploring work, creativity, emergence of the new, and the possibility of utopia. The author's journey begins in the frigid wastelands of contemporary consumer culture. Like a surreal HMS Beagle, Trans Terra meanders through time and space exploring archipelagos real and imagined. Prominent stops include Soviet Siberia, Communist Poland, Plato's Atlantis, nineteenth-century New York, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Arriving on the polluted shores of collapsing global civilization, Tom K glimpses the faint light of utopia beyond the veil of Apocalypse. Taking cue from Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method, the author unearths improbable connections between thinkers as disparate as Ignatious Donnelly, Alvin Toffler, Rem Koolhaas, Slavoj Å½iÅ¾ek, and many others. Translated into several languages, Trans Terra is a comic book manifesto for the post-capitalist-crisis world.
Tom Kaczynski (a.k.a. Tom K) is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist, designer, illustrator, writer, teacher, and publisher. His comics have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Mome, Punk Planet, The Drama, and many other publications. Beta Testing the Apocalypse, a collection of his Mome stories, was published by Fantagraphics Books in July 2012. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his partner Nikki and their two black cats.

Trans Terra: Towards a Cartoon Philosophy

Kaczynski, Tom

Uncivilized Books

Eisner Award Nomination (Best Publication Design) A heady conflation of philosophy, fiction &amp; comics. It would be easy to call Tom Kaczynski the J.G. Ballard of comics. Like Ballard, Kaczynski's comics riff on dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.Yet while Kaczynski shares many of Ballard's obsessions, he processes them in unique ways. His visual storytelling adds an architectural dimension that the written word alone lacks. Kaczynski takes abstract ideas -- capitalism, communism, or utopianism --and makes them tangible. He depicts and meditates on the immense political and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define the limits of who we are and the freedom we as Americans presume to enjoy. Society and the individual, in perpetual tension. Once you've read Kaczynski's comics, it should come as no surprise to learn that he studied architecture before embarking on a career as a cartoonist. Beta Testing includes 10 short stories, most notably "The New," a brand new story created expressly for this book. It's Kaczynski's longest story to date. "The New" is set in an un-named third-world megalopolis. It could be Dhaka, Lagos or Mumbai. The city creaks under the pressure of explosive growth. Whole districts are built in a week. The story follows an internationally renowned starchitect as he struggles to impose his vision on the metropolis. A vision threatened by the massive dispossessed slum-proletariat inhabiting the slums and favelas on the edges of the city. From the fetid ferment of garbage dumps and shanties emerges a new feral architecture. Color throughout

Beta Testing the Apocalypse

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Fantagraphics Books

In this new, expanded edition, the starting point is arbitrary. From there, the city expands in all directions. At once SF, a contemporary demonology, an occult theory, a mutant utopia and an architectural treatise, Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse is a collection of graphic fictions about the contemporary global megalopolis. This groundbreaking collection, originally published in an Eisner-nominated, smaller edition a decade ago, has only proven more prescient and resonant to our contemporary times than ever. For this new edition, Kaczynski created the original stories "Billion Dollar Budget" and "Rediscovery of the Real" and annotations. There's also a new foreword by science fiction writer Christopher Brown (Tropic of Kansas) and an entirely new cover design. Tom Kaczynski's graphic short stories trace a complex space-time trajectory from the smallest corporate cubicle out to farthest fathoms of the multiverse. Occult economics, metaphysical traffic jams, Marxist zombies on Mars, secret architectural societies, designer ghosts from the future, and demographics demons are just a few elements of a new untested future eschatology. Full-color illustrations throughout.

Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaczynski, Tom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kaczynski, Tom

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaczynski, Tom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Trans Terra: Towards a Cartoon Philosophy

Beta Testing the Apocalypse

Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse