Books like The System

A wordless graphic novel by Peter Kuper first released in 1997, now re-released in 2014. With brightly colored stencil and spray painted drawings that sort of bleed across panels, this is an impressively told story, though the story itself is pretty grim, with what seem to me some pretty stereotypical images of the New York he know and loves well. I think of the silent Charlie Chaplin and Eric Drooker's Flood and Franz Masereel's wordless work, though Kuper seems to me grimmer. Maybe Drooker is equally grim, but there is complexity in his tale… I guess the appeal here is in the artwork, and the very wordlessness of it, that much gets accomplished without the words, and so much gets told. It'e exuberant in its grimness, in a way, maybe calling forth the love/hate relationship many New Yorkers have for their City...