Broken Frontier

Woodrow Phoenix is a British artist and graphic designer who is known for his high degree of formal experimentation. In his latest GN Rumble Strip he ups the ante just one more and even excludes all forms of story and characters in order to get his message across as clearly and powerfully as possible. This is your first and only warning: once you start reading, you can't stop turning the pages of this graphic novel.

Over 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year. By 2020, road traffic accidents could outstrip stroke and HIV as one of the main causes of preventable deaths.

This is a very sad fact and the underlying theme of Rumble Strip is: what are we going to do about it? Phoenix as a writer composes a no-holds-barred monologue about the inner and outer world of people who drive cars. Me, you, everyone. Whether you own a small German car or a big gas gulping 4x4, we all get our turn. And he speaks freely and absorbingly. His prose sucks you right into the story.

The allegory of pianos hanging over your head in a daily life like a sword of Damocles is well played and sucks you in, leading you seamlessly from absurd fantasy into frightening reality. The absence any protagonist or story whatsoever doesn't hamper the flow or the message - it even makes it clearer. All drawings are related to road signage, the road itself and the closest we come to any setting or the vistas of roads in cities or nature. Text and image form a perfect semiotic combination. Sometimes the images serve to speed up the reading process, sometimes they make you stop and enhance the weight of certain statements Phoenix formulates. He touches on how signs form a coherent syntax so that they derive meaning from each other, he explains the relations from those signs to the pedestrian and to the car driver and he talks about how those signs and icons impact our lives, showing how different perspectives lead to different and often dangerous combinations. He elaborates on what a car means for our physical space and for our mental space.

A car is the single most expensive thing most people will ever own, apart from their homes. So it has to be a symbol. A statement. It has to embody all kinds of things.

A car is not just a weapon for self-actualisation. A car is also an actual weapon.

He intersperses his soliloquy with recounting personal tragedies of car victims. At that moment, his prose tends to shift down a notch and becomes more factual, more introspective instead of speculative. The impact of his words hits you more in the emotional gut instead.

The causal link between action and consequence is unhooked in a way that would be considered psychotic in any other area of our lives.

A lot of attention goes to the fact that we need to take responsibility. For our own lives but also for the lives of others and Phoenix tries to unravel just where in our psychological mindset it all went a bit askew or just plain out derailed. As Levinas has said, living in this world is a matter of giving and taking, of making a space for the other in your own world. However, the car an sich - the second most expensive object a person will own outside of his house - has come to stand above the everyday morals and ethics of society and living in society. And it is this fact, this ethical sidestepping people experience when they slam the door of their car, that Phoenix is enraged about the most.

Cars don’t inhabit space, they pass through it.

And then, after all the statistics, Woodrow Phoenix hits you with another emotional bomb:

So here’s how I was nearly killed in my car on the M25 motorway driving from London to Brighton.

Telling his story in slow motion, his feelings, his thoughts, his stream of consciousness while he was flipping over in his car due to a sudden unexplainable movement of another car, cutting him off while switching lanes. And the whole time, the drawings do nothing but start out with a big wide view and while the text reads like a drum, louder and louder, the line-drawings zoom in on a crash barrier, becoming so large that it takes up the whole page. This is an emotional horror story told with a perfect symbiosis of text and image.

This is not a book for car lovers, or maybe it is. It would be too easy to say that this is a manifesto against cars. It is not. What it is, is a strong statement about the dangers of the road. About men's evolution and ideas about personal freedom and how that involves others. This is about taking up personal responsibility in a world where the capacity for harm inflicted upon others through carelessness has become so great that books like these have become a necessity. If it was up to me, Rumble Strip by Woodrow Phoenix would be obligated textbook material in any driving class.

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Rumble Strip by Woodrow Phoenix is 192 pp graphic novel and published by   Myriad Editions  and is available in bookstores or at your LCS on the 12th of June.