100 books like Everywhere Disappeared

This is an excellent textbook to get readers and comic makers of all experience levels to loosen up, think deeply and personally, and make better, more confident comics. It’s warm but practical, smart but approachable, deep but unpretentious. This is a comics veteran generously sharing both her knowledge of comics and teaching, as well as her own methods for drawing, brainstorming, and writing. It’s an incredible resource and one I often find myself quoting and recommending to my own students. 

This is the most profoundly absorbing experimental art-comic the world has ever produced.

It’s a fun book to sit with someone else and page through, backward or forward, or just ambling around, discovering things. The very simple conceit is that it’s a book that spans millions of years in time, but all happens in exactly one single space. It grew out of a six-page short story that blew people’s minds in the 80’s comics anthology Raw.

I remember hearing that the author had decided, two decades later, to expand it to book form, and wondered if that was really necessary. The short version had been such a perfect jewel of a piece. Turns out he had very good reason. 

Press Enter to Continue is incredible on every level. The art is beautiful, with a technicolor palette and skillful drawing that belies the corporate horror in the narratives. We see humiliating job interviews, vampiric computer viruses, and cosmic labor camps that feel a little too close for comfort in our online world. It’s a collection of short stories told with a deadpan minimalism that makes the reader think, sweat, and maybe put their phone away for a while.

This is one of the first graphic novels to truly reinvent the medium, and is absolutely required reading for anyone who wants to experiment with visual storytelling. Instead of a traditionally bound book, you get an oversized box filled with pamphlets, booklets, newspapers, and more. The comics themselves read pretty straightforwardly, but it's the act of rifling through this giant box for the first time, not knowing exactly where it'll lead you, that's truly a unique reading experience. 

Cleaver by name, cleaver by nature? Certainly, as an analyst following in Marx’s footsteps, Harry Cleaver resembles a nimble knife aspiring to a heavy-duty hatchet.

His ideas are impressive but make easy reading. So much so, he has attracted a great following since the publication of his now classic work Reading Capital Politically (1979). Rupturing the Dialectic (2017) is one of Cleaver’s most recent books. In three parts, he sings the praises of Marx’s work-oriented concept of ‘value’, delves into ‘decoding’ the financial sphere that currently mires us, and argues that "getting rid of money and markets entirely is not only a necessary condition for getting rid of capitalism but also desirable in its own right."

Observe the cleaver in action!

Economists are arguing to this day what gave rise to the enormous rise in living standards since the 1750s. Deirdre McCloskey argues in this first book of her Bourgeois trilogy that it resulted from a cultural shift in which bourgeois virtues replaced aristocratic ones. The book opened my eyes to the importance of cultural attitudes (dignity and stigma) of various economic and social activities. McCloskey claims that sustained economic growth and innovation were crucially dependent on the dignity of the bourgeois and their commercial activities. McCloskey’s fluent prose which interweaves empirical historical knowledge with literary allusions remains a model to me. 

On my shelf, there are many outstanding books on degrowth—by Giorgos Kallis, Jason Hickel, and others. But one with the most coffee stains is this one.

I dip into it often because it covers all the angles. And it begins to tackle the ultimate question: If economic growth is trashing the planet, and if growth is the engine of capitalism, then what could come after?

This book was published after communism collapsed. Heilbroner doubted America’s intention to reform the market system, he saw a new society emerging that does not believe in the promise of progress. Heilbroner saw the communist collapse as giving corporations the opportunity to control the economy and reshape society. As I wrote in my books, the communist system was politics’ last attempt to control economics, therefore, the collapse of communism allowed large corporations and banks to control the political process, corrupt politics, and politicians, and control global wealth. The latest report by Oxfam says that since 2020, the richest 1% of the world’s population took 63% or $26 trillion of the global wealth, leaving %37 or $16 trillion for 99% of the world’s population. 

This is a defence of Smith's continuing relevance. It combines an overview of Smith's life and writings together with an assessment of his long-term and enduring contribution.

What is distinctive is that second-half of the book takes up Smith's ideas thematically and analyses them in the light of contemporary issues. Norman's judgment is that mainstream academic discussion of 'economics' is too self-absorbed and would be improved by heeding Smith's inclusive insights.  Impressively what could have been a heavy read is conveyed in a readable, accessible style.

Althusser’s (in)famous article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was the result of copy and paste edits from this much longer manuscript. An extended philosophical investigation on how the capitalist mode of production’s duration over time requires a state formation, Althusser eventually ends up elaborating on Gramsci’s conception of hegemony so as to theorize the state machine according to “repressive” and “ideological” apparatuses. The former apparatuses concern the state’s coercive aspect; the latter apparatus concerns its aspect of “consent,” i.e. the promulgation of ideological norms. Although I go back and forth on my assessment of Althusser’s philosophical project as a whole, his work continues to challenge me and has marked the way I understand philosophy as, to quote Althusser from elsewhere, “class struggle in the terrain of theory.”