Beta Testing the Apocalypse. This item is unavailable.Beta Testing the Apocalypse

Tom Kaczynski takes abstract ideas ― capitalism, communism, or utopianism ― and makes them tangible. Beta Testing the Apocalypse includes approximately 10 short stories, most notably “The New.” “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.

While Tom Kaczynski's comics share many of the obsessions found in the prose work of J.G. Ballard, with riffs on dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technology, Kaczynki's visual storytellingadds an architectural dimension that the written word alone lacks. Beta Testing The Apocalypse includes 10 short stories, depicting the immense political and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define the limits of who we are and the freedoms we presume to enjoy. Tom Kaczynki is a new, unique voice in the comic firmament.