User:Rustedgantries/sandbox


   Terminal Tower is a science fiction graphic novel by André Coelho and Manuel João Neto, published in 2014 by Chili Com Carne.[1] The book was developed in a non-traditional form, with the script and the art being developed simultaneously and conditioning each other, rather than following the usual process of having a script that is graphically interpreted.[2]

The book was officially released in the International Comics Festival of Beja, with an exhibition of original art from the graphic novel.

Plot

edit

The book's central theme is the delirium of a paranoid solitary man secluded in a watchtower who enters a complete state of alert and engages a series of defensive mechanisms and radio transmissions.

Another man, Big Ivan, with a face bearing no features and deformed by an awkward disease, travels to meet him with the hopes of confronting or joining the plan.

A strange flying sphere obsessively presides over the landscape and might be the cause of all the deformities, but the true nature of this sphere is never fully explained, neither are the real purposes of the man in the tower or if technological engagements are real since nothing seems to work in the bunker tower or derelict elements in surrounding the landscape.

Towards the end, both men discuss the next step in the obscure plan behind this ongoings and their consequences, until it is clear that the engagement of the spheres is nothing but a consequence of the delirious state of mind of one of them.

Characters

edit
  • PKE632 - The secluded man inside the watchtower;
  • Big Ivan - The deformed man who travels to meet PKE632 in order to verify the ongoing plan.

Influences

edit

"Terminal Tower" is divided into 5 chapters, each of them containing quotes by William Blake, Thomas Pynchon, Peter Sloterdijk, Giulio Douhet, R. Oppenheimer and Maurice Blanchot.

Besides these references, it is notorious the influence of the derelict landscapes of J.G. Ballard by setting most of the plot in a bunker that is both a ruin and an echo of the future.

"Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald has it's echos in the narrative with the setting of a post-nuclear environment and the paranoid defensive seclusion as displayed on his "Appendix A: Training the Nuclear Warrior: A Manual for Level 7".[3]

Graphically, the graphic novel presents mostly full page illustrations, with a wide mix of techniques from paper colage, acrylics and black indian ink that links to the work of Enki Bilal, Alberto Breccia, Danijel Žeželj or Dino Battaglia.


   ==References==
   Terminal Tower (graphic novel)