The System

It's said that the flutter of insect wings in the Indian Ocean can send a hurricane crashing against the shores of the American Northeast. It's this premise that lies at the core of The System, a wordless graphic novel created and fully painted by award-winning illustrator Peter Kuper. From the subway system to the solar system, human lives are linked by an endless array of interconnecting threads. Told without captions or dialogue, The System is an astonishing progression of vivid imagery.

About the Author :
Peter Kuper is a cofounder and editorial board member of political graphics magazine "World War 3 Illustrated" and a teacher who has taught at New York's School of Visual Arts and Parsons the New School for Design. Best known for drawing "Mad" magazine's Spy vs. Spy comic since 1997, he has also illustrated covers for "Newsweek" and "Time" magazine. He is the author of the graphic novel "Sticks and Stones," which won the New York Society of Illustrators Gold Medal; "Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico"; and "Drawn to New York." Calvin Reid is a contributing editor and head of the comics department at "Publishers Weekly," where heads the magazine's annual African American issue and coedits its online comics newsletter, "PW Comics Week." They both live in New York City.

Review :
"A dark, dense, subtle portrait of the intricate continuum of urban life--and death--done in such bold strokes and shapes that you will never see the city in the same way again." --Kirkpatrick Sale, author, "After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination" "Like a slow-motion footage of a .45 slug drifting through a gun barrel, Peter Kuper's "The System" gives urban tragedy an almost graceful inevitability. [It] intertwines the lives of several instantly identifiable New York City archetypes . . . into a dreamily suspenseful tale of corruption and ambition [...] utilizing his signature color-stencil-art style to depict a class-conscious saga superior in depth and emotion to a year's stockpile of the New York Post." --Robert Morales, "Vibe" "This is our world, folks, as it exists right now, teetering on the brink of something we can't quite imagine, laid out by Peter Kuper as a flow chart of parallels and coincidences and connecting fibers so powerful and occult that a pin dropped in a back street creates shock waves that make skyscrapers tremble." --Luc Sante, author, "Low Life" "Kuper's brilliant visual novel, much like Fritz Lang, creates a comic noir of corruption and innocence in a city where the devil is always in the details." --Sue Coe, artist and author, "Dead Meat" "Though it has no word balloons or thought bubbles, "The System" is filled with so much urban clatter, you'll want to seal your windows shut. Kuper uses his trademark spray-paint/stencil art to send us careening through a kinetic New York landscape, jump-cutting from a crooked cop to a stripper, panning from a homeless guy to a cell-phone yuppie. The star of the story is the dark city itself, and the point is how money ties all its occupants--whether they know it or not--together." --Gavin Edwards, "Details"