Earlier this year at Broken Frontier we reported that cartoonist Peter Kuper (Ruins, Spy Vs. Spy, World War III Illustrated) had been announced as a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. An accolade that included work from his environmentally-charged collection of cartoons Wish We Weren’t Here: Postcards from the Apocalypse. It’s an incredibly powerful compilation of silent work with its opening cartoon of a logger chopping down a tree and slowly constructing his own coffin from it underlining the tone of what is to come.
A damning indictment of the ecological destruction that has become less an existential threat and more an existential certainty, Wish We Weren’t Here almost exclusively uses four-panel grids to make its very cutting points. While the work is wordless each strip is accompanied by a relevant news media quote usually acting as the basis for the comic above or otherwise underscoring and complementing its subject matter.
Kuper constantly uses tools unique to comics, particularly its unique relationship to the passage of time and our between-the-panels reading comprehension. A cable car that begins its journey over a snowy ski resort, for example, but three panels due to rapid climate change later ends its journey in a desert with an onlooking camel.
Of course, the problem with reviewing work like Wish We Weren’t Here is that in discussing individual strips we drain them of their comedic value in the process. But the examples here are excellent samplers of Kuper’s approach. Particularly effective is the one below with a meta manipulation across the four panels as a small group of young activists push back against a polluting industrialist usurping his own panel with theirs before eventually shoving him out into the gutters of the page.
Work herein is split into a number of broad subject areas: climate, water usage, plastics, capitalism, rainforest destruction, ocean pollution, technological impact and so on. Kuper uses recurring motifs that often intersect and weave in and out of each other with his use of visual metaphor being some of the cleverest socio-political cartooning you will ever likely see (a doomed dimetrodon-style dinosaur whose spines resemble the Shell logo is particularly memorable.
In turns uncompromisingly angry and bleakly witty, Wish We Weren’t Here: Postcards from the Apocalypse is the most damning indictment of where we find ourselves a quarter of a century into the 21st century as the planet burns and climate change deniers keep up their narrative out of short-term self-interest. In Wish We Weren’t Here Kuper reminds us that sometimes we have to react to things with dark humour simply because otherwise existential angst would consume us.
Peter Kuper (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $19.99
Buy online from Gosh! Comics here
Read our Broken Frontier ‘Climate Change and the Environment’ comics resource list here
Review by Andy Oliver
Fantagraphics at 50 Month runs through August at Broken Frontier. You can see articles as they’re published in one tagged list here.
