Wish We Weren’t Here – Postcards from the Apocalypse

by Kevin Wolf

Peter Kuper has produced a phenomenal variety of graphic works. He’s been illustrating Spy Vs. Spy in Mad magazine since 1997; he created the comic strip Eye of the Beholder (Visual Puzzle collections published in 1996 and 2000); he co-founded the World War 3 Illustrated; he’s created many graphic novels (including The System (1997), Theo and the Blue Note (2006), New York New York (1988), Speechless (2001), Sticks & Stones (2004)) and some classic adaptations (Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (2003) and Kafkaesque Fourteen Stories (2018), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1991), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2020)); written several travel diaries/memoirs (ComicsTrips – Journal of Travels through Africa & Southeast Asia (1992), Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook of Two Years in Mexico (2009/2017), Stop Forgetting to Remember (2007), Stripped – an unauthorized autobiography (1995)) and he’s written several environmental histories (Insectopolis – A Natural History (2025), Ruins (2015)) and editorial cartoons (Topsy Turvy – Political Comic Strips (2007)), including most recently Wish We Weren’t Here – Postcards from the Apocalypse. The latter book includes a Forward by Jake Tapper, the journalist, and covers many public health topics, including pollution, climate change, drinkable water loss, climate refugees, microplastics, fossil fuels, renewable energy, among many others. Kuper’s illustrations, using “pencils, pens, watercolors and Photoshop [p. viii]” are colorful and tell a mostly wordless story. Kuper dedicates this book “to Jules Feiffer (1929 – 2025) the Fred Astaire of political art (© page].” I highly recommend Wish We Weren’t Here in the hopes that it provides an education to those who read it.

Kuper provides four types of text with his otherwise wordless illustrations. The first type is his and Jake Tapper’s discussion of the illustrations to follow. The second are apropos quotes from various people (e.g., from Rachel Carson in 1963 “Now, to these people apparently, the balance of nature was something that was repealed as soon as man came on the scene. Well, you might just as well assume you could repeal the law of gravity [18]” The third have minimal text or corporate names with an example of the former on page 19 showing a four-panel strip of a typical freefall from a plane with a child strapped to an adult with a parachute that has “1.5⁰ C” written on it. But lo, that parachute falls away to have another parachute appearing with “2.0⁰ C” on it; but that too falls away; and now they’re back in free fall with presumed dire consequences And the fourth type of text shows a caption “below each strip [with] excerpts from the articles that inspired them [ix].” The caption for the freefall strip is “Assessing temperature rise using the prior decades will delay formal recognition of when Earth breaches the 1.5 degrees [Yale.edu, December 1, 2023].”

Though Kuper’s imagery primarily holds corporations (fossil fuel and plastics industries, among them) and their greed responsible for climate change, essential resource loss, and pollution, among other concerns, he doesn’t let the individual off the hook, including himself. One example of the latter is the following strip:

Wish We Weren’t Here, pg. 101, “Deforestation is one of the main environmental problems we’re facing. 42% of all global harvest is used to make paper, The World Counts, March 12, 2020.”

Kuper accepts that he carries some responsibility and guilt for using a pencil, including presumably publishing this book, which could be part of forest loss, but he’s trying to assuage that guilt by sending a check to Save the Trees Fund, which actually exists. Though other groups (Rainforest Alliance, Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, among others) support similar causes.

Here are three more of Kuper’s illustrations.

Wish We Weren’t Here, pg. 34; “Majority of America’s underground water stores are drying up, The Hill, January 24, 2024.” 

Wish We Weren’t Here, pg. 60; “Scientists find high levels of microplastics in wastewater from unnamed UK plant and in air surrounding the facility, The Guardian, May 23, 2023” Weblink of similar results and timing.

Wish We Weren’t Here, pg. 65; “Rising sea levels could cover more than twice as much land as previously thought by the end of the century, Euronews, January 27, 2023.”

The illustration from page 34, shows a typical person in the United States sucking down a glass of water, only to find himself parched when the water is gone, falling to the ground and his head morphs into the dried-up husk that is the expired United States; and the cracks on his face make that face a dying and drought-ridden U.S. map. The image from page 60 uses the well-known recycling symbol as a metaphor of how our disposal of plastic bottles aren’t actually recycled but come back as microplastics to permeate the air we breathe and the water we drink. And, the last illustration I show uses a metaphor of being saved from a shipwreck by reaching a tiny tropical island, only to find that short-lived after the seas rise from climate change’s melting icecaps. This latter image is a symbol for global climate refugees that will have to flee inland or countries with higher ground as sea levels rise.

Kuper closes with several (pages 127 – 132) positive futures, including …

Wish We Weren’t Here, pg. 129; “Young Montana residents bring climate change case to court for first time ever, The Guardian, June 12, 2023.” More recent web link from Reuters.