By Abraham Martínez, translated by Montana Kane (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-268-7 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-269-4
With ballots flying everywhere and almost everyone frantically keeping their plebiscite-riddled heads down, I thought it might be worthwhile to look at another splendid graphic argument for sticking your baffled, beleaguered bonces over those figurative – or, if you’re in France, literal – parapets and getting involved.
Do you want to read something that is really scary?
Who doesn’t love a good cathartic chiller, but every one of us also has a point where it stops being safe entertainment and becomes instead disturbing, unsettling and in fact extremely unwelcome. For me – and Spanish author Abraham Martínez – it’s clearly the terrifying prospect envisioned in his 2017 graphic novel translated by those fine folk at NBM.
Of course, the concept of a corporate superstate is not new, but I’ve never seen it better thought out or more crushingly realised down to the finest penny-pinching detail than here – and I’ve been reading Judge Dredd since 1977…
Rendered in drear industrial tones (mostly neutral greens and basic blues) and shapes cunningly reminiscent of bog-standard informational stencil forms in a devastatingly underplayed agitprop manner, Plutocracy follows one insignificant drone through a corporate landscape as he breaks free and begins digging for answers in a world where profit is everything.
After years of closer and closer ties between big business and national governments, in 2051 the last corporations swallowed each other to emerge as one all-encompassing unit – “The Company”: an entity that simply bought out nationhood and established a system to cost-effectively run the world. Everybody worked for, were paid by and consumed goods and services from the same entity: a perfect perpetual motion machine for society.
… They even managed to remain plausibly democratic, although there was only ever one party or candidate to vote for on any occasion. A little bit like now in so many places…
Detective Homero Durant grew bored when the majority of police work became desk-based investigations involving fraud and deception. With precious little to do, he took some career sidesteps and eventually became a writer.
Growing increasingly interested in how the world reached its present state, he applies to write a book about it, and is astounded to discover, instead of closed ranks and obfuscation, the powers that be welcome his project. The Company provides every possible access, even to personal interviews with the far-sighted mogul who had single-handedly engineered the death of nations and triumph of the Plutocracy…
As the deeply suspicious investigator plunges on, meeting nothing but cooperation at every step, his resolve starts to falter, but his tell-all exposé has taken on a life of its own, and nothing can stop it becoming the biggest sensation in The Company’s past history… or projected profit forecasts…
Dark, bleak and brimming with mordant satire, this trenchant tale is an ideal metaphor and warning for our times and one no contemplative rational consumer can afford to miss.
© Text & illustrations Abraham Martínez 2017. © Bang. ediciones, 2017. © 2020 NBM for the English translation.