Bad Island

June 29, 2020
Donwood (There Will Be No Quiet), resident artist for the band Radiohead, unfurls a wordless parable that contrasts the relentless power of nature with the violence of humankind. Donwood opens cinematically, with a slow tracking shot that roams through a roiling sea, represented by swirling horizontal lines, to an island with smoldering volcanoes. Life on the island slowly reveals itself as it transforms: various flora and prehistoric creatures are supplanted by humans. Images of hunted animals and toppled trees give way to houses and buildings. Perhaps inevitably, vapors from the volcanoes merge with fumes billowing from factory smokestacks, which are then accompanied by skyscrapers and other symbols of modern civilization. Only a few marginal human figures are visible, dwarfed by their surroundings. Finally, missiles fill the skies and lead to annihilation. With this microcosm of evolution, Donwood presents humankind as a force driven to sow destruction of the natural world—an ages-old theme enlivened considerably with Donwood’s striking imagery­—rendered in bold black-and-white woodcut-like visuals, mixed with rhythmic op art patterns—including one standout sequence that juxtaposes patterns of raindrops, bare tree branches, and churning waves. The result is a hypnotic, trenchant allegory that is both beautiful to look at and hard to look away from.

Starred review from August 15, 2020
In this wordless, black-and-white graphic novel, we visit an island surrounded by rough seas and populated by monsters that become increasingly familiar. Simple but powerful images do all the talking as Donwood stylishly zooms across what looks like a spaghetti bowl of rolling striped waves toward a low-slung island on the horizon. A dense forest awaits onshore, and within its shadows lurks a pair of white pinprick eyes set within a vaguely humanoid shape, soon joined by a progressive menagerie of nasties--serpentine and dinosaur; seismic and torrential; twisted, technological, and cataclysmic. Donwood's style is denuded and bold--stark whites and flat blacks, no shading, like a woodcut or stencil. He masterfully moves from one full-page image to the next, speaking in primal symbols (toothsome grins, lightning strikes, storm-tossed branches) that capture the island's turbulent life cycle in the changes between pages--alternating between devastating and devastated, and haunted by the humanoid shadows with piercing eyes. He lingers on the most contemporary of monsters (deforestation, gathering dark clouds of pollution, downpours of ballistics), perhaps underscoring the depravity of our modern age. For all its terror and destruction, the book allows the faintest hint of optimism--or the worrying promise of a renewed cycle. A picture book of the damned--devoured quickly and savored for days.

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