Street Cop — Robert Cooper & Art Spiegelman

This illustrated tale—set in a dystopian world of infectious living dead, murderous robocops, aging street walkers, and walking streets—scrutinizes the arc of the American myth. Coover and Spiegelman bring their combined force to bear on technocracy and the police state.

Street Cop challenges us to inhabit the mind of a bumbling policeman driven by a nostalgia for the gutter. Author, illustrator, and protagonist, wade through the characters, tropes, messages, and genres—from noir and horror to the police procedural—that populate the fragmented American psyche. In doing so, Street Cop insists on the possibility of emergent empathy, even as it maps the malignant structures of our time. As Coover has argued, "in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life."

Written before the pandemic, Street Cop is both provocative and prophetic—injecting new Kafka-esque complexities into the unfolding news stream and interrogating the line between a condemnable system and a sympathetic individual. If Coover ventriloquized the seat of power and corruption in The Public Burning, here he speaks through the lowest, but still complicit, bureaucratic cog: an ineffectual protagonist stripped of agency. Spiegelman, in a return to his underground comix roots, illustrates the story as his response to the events of 2020 and COVID-19. Concerned with virality in a world where time and space have lost their coordinates, Spiegelman draws on a vast cultural databank to create a collage of comics history.