Comic Book

A comic book containing two apocalyptic stories.

The first is a factual excerpt from the documentary Into Eternity, which talks about the world’s first nuclear waste depository, Onkalo, built in Finland. Disposal of the spent fuel 400 m deep in the Finnish bedrock will begin in the early 2020s and continue for the next 100 years. Onkalo must last for 100,000 years. A hundred thousand years ago, Europe was in the middle of the Ice Age: Homo sapiens had not yet arrived on the continent, and mammoths and woolly rhinos roamed the landscape. That period is far longer than any man-made structure has survived to date. How do we prevent future generations and/or species from digging up these copper canisters, which could be interpreted in the future in a similar way as we interpreted the pyramid graves? Did we listen to their pleas for not entering?

The second story is an excerpt from the classic sci-fi book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – the description of an eerily smooth but dystopian society where everybody is perfectly happy all the time. This is assured through destroying the free will of most of the population using genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning, keeping everybody entertained with endless distractions and offering a plentiful supply of the wonder drug Soma to keep people happy. Brave New World has been celebrated for being one of the most accurate predictors of the future, although written almost 100 years ago.

IMAGERY: Created collectively by 20 graphic design students (a pool of 2,000 images)