In 1969, Norwegian artist Terje Brofos (better known as Hariton Pushwagner) locked himself inside a writer’s friend’s house and hallucinated a man named Mr Soft, who was driving a car. “Was he on LSD?” Rude question. You should shut your whorebag mouth. Yes, he was on LSD.

Three years and several misadventures later (near-homelessness in London, a hotel fire in Paris, and an arrest when trying to board a flight to Madeira walking on his hands and knees), Pushwagner became a parent. This—plus a soup of trauma from his own difficult childhood—inspired him to create a full-length comic about Mr Soft. This book, lost for a quarter of a century, finally saw publication in 2008.

Mr Soft now lives in a bright, endless city. It’s a horrifying arcology of poured steel and concrete. Buildings swallowing the sky like abominable wallpaper, and strangely-eyelike windows peering down at the streets in obsessive contemplation. Even the sun has an eye. Soft City is familiar yet alien: it seems like a place for termites to live, not men.

The comic has no story and no characters. It shows Mr Soft going about his day in this urban insect hive. Like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (an inspiration, I believe), it cuts out a twenty-four hour slice of time, and forces the reader to interpret it with no past or future. What yesterday could have led up to it? What tomorrow can come after it? Who knows. We can only dream. Pushwagner cuts away context like a cancer, making you stare at what’s in front of you until the eye bleeds.

I’ve long felt that the best setting for any work of dystopic fiction is right now. It’s a well-worn piece of Orwell lore that 1984 wasn’t written about the future but about Orwell’s current times (notably, 1984 is a rearrangement of 1948, the year the book was written). Whether or not that’s true, dystopic fiction loses its edge when it’s set in the future, which can seem very foreign and far away. I used to commute to work through snowdrifts of litter. When I visited rural China, and all the men had cigarettes sticking out of their mouths, like antennas to hell (my own country was the same two generations ago). People don’t care about the inhabitants of the future, not even when those inhabitants are their own future selves. They exist outside our moral circle. Pushwagner knows not alienate his humans by setting them in a far-off fairytale land we can ignore. He makes them alien for other reasons.

The men of Soft City are like clones or robots. They wake up at the same time, take their pills (there’s a “life” pill to wake them up, and with a matching “sleep” pill for the end of the day), have repetitive interactions with their wives and children, and then collectively commute to work in the beating unheart of the city.

Obviously, their jobs are a parody of useless corporate wagecucking (and their boss is like Glengarry Glen Ross’s Alec Baldwin after a frontal lobotomy), but their home lives are equally artificial. There’s no escape from the existential contrivance of life. Pushwagner loves the trick of showing Mr Soft enjoying some touchy-feely personal moment, like kissing his wife or playing with his baby son—then zooming out, so we can see the same thing happening in hundreds of other windows. It’s commodities, all the way down. This is one of those all-purpose satires that could be read as commentary on capitalism or communism. It depicts a failure mode, a Molochian trap. The early bird catches the worm, but not every bird can be early. When you get up early to beat the traffic, you shift the hour of peak traffic a little earlier, and if everyone’s doing that…

Mr Soft becomes impossible to regard as the main character, because he is like everyone else. He drives in a stagnant sea of cars, driven by indentikit humans that look like they rolled off a production line. We lose sight of him—a human sorites’ paradox. Occasionally someone does stand out in Soft City, but it’s always for bad reasons—like that person crying out “HELP!” as a baton-swinging officer pounds him into the asphalt. By the end of the book (which can be read in about an hour), we cannot even conceive that Mr Soft is a human being. He’s more like a molecule, propelled from place to place, but never alone, and never of his own will.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that people can maintain effective social connections with just 150 people: everyone else overflows the bucket and becomes an “outgroup” that our brains regard suspiciously, as if they’re not quite human. (“They always screw the little guy“. In this sentence, “they” are the outgroup.) Who’s “in” or “out” of your Dunbar circle depends on context. Why is the relationship you have with your mother sacred? Because there’s just one of her. If you had 1,000 mothers, you wouldn’t feel any sort of connection to them, would forget their names, and wouldn’t even care enough to try to remember them. Soft City takes us on a similar journey. At first, Mr Soft is a human. One of us. By the end of the book, Dunbar’s Number has prevailed. He has been mashed and puree’d into exactly the black inhuman paste that Soft City thinks he is.

The minimalistic art means all objects look the same. People take pills to get through the day. The pills remind us of the cars. Everything is a hollowness: just a container for something else, lacking its own existence. Pushwagner sometimes uses mirrors to duplicate cars. This reduced his workload (there are literally thousands of cars), while adding to the sense of artificial sterility. In this society, a car is a shell for a driver. A cubical is a shell for a worker. A woman is a shell for a baby. It’s a world of cardboard boxes, which exist to hold other, smaller cardboard boxes.

Judged as a comic, Soft City is bleeding-edge alternative. You could call it outsider art. Pushwagner’s wobbly, fussy linework is easy to understand, challenging to interpret, and harder to love. His shapes don’t close. There are no colors or even shading, and no sense that his world would support them. There’s also a strong impression—and I think this was intended—that the drawings are missing something. Your senses grasp and hunger for something that isn’t there. It’s like an 80s videogame, where lush artwork has been brutally downsampled to 16 EVGA colors: you feel the missing hues. Everything is stripped down and function-based and the baby got thrown out with the bathwater a long time ago.

Pushwagner lived on the wrong side of the world to participate in the San Francisco “comix” scene. Had the cards fallen differently you could imagine Soft City serialized in Spiegelman/Mouty’s RAW anthologies, or Crumb-era Zap Comix. In 2008, it heavily evokes the “ugly on purpose” aesthetic of Adult Swim cartoons such as Superjail! Movies like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, and Jacques Tati’s Playtime draw from the same well, as do many books by JG Ballard. Conformity, corporatism, the bland ineffable horror of packing an image with cubicles and chairs and cars and people until it breaks the viewers mind like an overloaded conveyer belt.

Yes, the social commentary is shallow. Pushwagner isn’t the first person to dislike traffic jams and office cubicles and consumerism. Sometimes it approaches “I’m 14 and this is deep” territory. Like when we see a man dreaming of being a fighter pilot, which is later echoed by scenes of what the Soft City air force actually gets up to. (“Heil Hilton!”)

Other times, the naive “outsiderness” of Pushwagner’s art gives it emotional poignancy. It has something of the realness of a child opening his eyes and noticing the world—truly noticing—for the first time.

Most artists don’t manage social commentary on this level without a sense of smugness and intellectual superiority. I’m smart, unlike these dumb-dumbs. Banksy has never sat well with me: his shtick ultimately feels like a 4chan troll going “thank you for proving my point for me”. But the emotions here seem simple but real and earned.

This is because Soft City is also a mirror held up to the artist’s face. Pushwagner doesn’t exculpate himself from this society. The first living thing we see in the comic is not Mr Soft, but Mr Soft’s young child, who has an innocence that can’t and won’t last long. It’s one thing to live in a place like this. But what does it mean to have a baby in Soft City? Pushwagner had recently become a father, which meant he confronted that choice himself.

This also makes hard to understand. As I piece together fragments of Pushwagner’s life, I feel like I’m reading a half-mythical folklore figure, not a man. Living on the margins. Shredding his mind through drugs and outre experiences. Even the account that Soft City was “lost” for a time is curiously muddled. Pushwagner insists that his portfolio was stolen upon his 1979 return to Oslo, while biographer Petter Mejlaender says it was merely lost. Legal disputes were also involved. If he’d lived in America a few years earlier, we’d have called him a “beat”. As with someone like Robert Crumb, he was a weird man who inflicted deliberate damage upon his brain to become still weirder. Mr Soft lives a life of conformity. From what I know of Pushwagner, his own life was defined by non-conformity. Maybe in Mr Soft, he saw the Devil. Someone who made all the wrong choices in life. But it shows that the reverse of stupidity isn’t necessarily intelligence, Pushwagner was right to fear the horrific legibility of the modern age. But the polar alternative—radical freedom—isn’t so pleasant, either.

Dirty Pair: Project Eden is the benchmark and NIST reference for “80s anime”. When someone talks about “the 80s anime aesthetic”, this is what they are talking about.

What to expect: overwhelming energy and style, thick black fuck-you lines, explosive colors, explosive explosions, a steady drip-feed of sleazy PG-13 fanservice (the director really likes feet), robots, spaceships, gunfights, and bad dubbing. Two seconds of exposure to the Dirty Pair franchise will rot your brain to crude oil, let’s be real, it’s not like your brain was on the verge of solving Fermat’s Last Theorem or anything. Humanity will soldier on without it.

Plot? Yes, there’s a Bladerunnerish sci-fi detective plot that technically—as philosophers say—”exists”, but it only faint relevance to anything that happens on the screen. Two female detectives investigate a series of raids on a distant planet’s trade routes, then technobabble, technobabble, technobabble. In the final third of the film, the plot says “I’m going to the corner store to buy some cigarettes, be back in five”, walks out the door, is never seen again, and the animation unit is then forced to raise the movie as a single parent, working double shifts at the exploding-robot and fanservice factory until it’s finally over.

You will know within 30 seconds whether Dirty Pair: Project Eden is for you. It’s virtuously upfront about what it is. It does not lie to you. Its target audience is a 50-50 split between snobby neckbearded “RETVRN” purists who only watch post-2000s anime to clench their fists over the CGI, and self-described gendertrash trans goblins frantically clicking “refresh” on the tracking data for the DIY bathtub estradiol they just ordered.

Me? I’m spiritually on Dirty Pair‘s side. It’s stylish and colorful and leaves an immediate visual impression. The trouble is, it drags a fair amount of unwanted baggage with it: such as a tedious and irrelevant male lead who is in way too much of the movie for how entertaining he is. The girls are great. The guy stinks. It’s like being invited to a party, having your friends abandon you, and now you’re stuck in a conversation with someone who wants to tell you about his “Goblin Slayer is a metaphor for the Bolshevik revolution” fan theory (“bro, listen, it all makes sense, bro…”) for two hours in a droning monotone.

Something I’ve noticed about anime—even great anime—is that they never feel 100% like themselves. There’s always side stuff that doesn’t feel central to the experience, and is never mentioned when fans discuss it afterward. The Akira film gets bogged down in political digressions that made sense in the manga but come to nothing in the film (which is a psychodrama). Neon Genesis Evangelion (particularly the first half) is loaded with comedic stuff involving Pen-Pen. Sometimes, the difference between remembering an anime and watching one is vast.

Dirty Pair is a hydralike complex of media properties, including novels, OVAs, TV shows, and manga. Most were created by totally different people. Unlike most famous anime, it doesn’t reflect the vision of a single artist. The various incarnations of Dirty Pair land all over the spectrum in tone, style, quality, and internal consistency. Like Yuri and Kei themselves, the franchise lacks a father.

Even viewing Project Eden in isolation, Yuri and Kei make little sense. They’re simultaneously ultra-competent badasses and ludicrous hyperfeminine ditzes, constantly tripping and pratfalling and exposing themselves. Their contradictory natures—private eyes, action heroes, eye-candy—never quite resolve. Ultimately, they’re not characters, they’re plot motors. And the plot is governed by a rule that cool and sexy things must happen at all times.

I assumed Dirty Pair was a knockoff of Andy Sidaris’s “girls ‘n’ guns” movies. Wrong. The actual inspiration was Japanese “joshi puroresu” pro wrestling. This seems obvious in hindsight. Yuri and Kei are obviously meant to look like a wrestling tag team. And like pro wrestling, it’s unclear how seriously you have to take the story. If you don’t care at all, you’re lost. If you care too much, you’re a mark. Story isn’t the important thing here: it’s like a piece of string at Christmastime: it matters, but because it lets you hang shiny baubles off it.

In general, the worst thing a style-over-substance anime can do is double down on its story, and insist they have more logic than they do. NGE and Ghost in the Shell are a good examples, and Genocyber an even better one. It has a literally incomprehensible plot. That would be fine. Except it wants you to care about its incomprehensible plot. You come to Genocyber for gore and cyberpunk aesthetics, not word salad, and at least 80% of the anime is the verbal equivalent of kale. I will gladly listen to Timecube-esque schizobabble, but don’t make me take a quiz on it afterward, okay?

Dirty Pair stays. It’s not a masterclass in clarity or concision, but it’s archetypal enough (evil scientist, stock heavies, plucky gun molls…) to have a clear visual grammar. You can follow the story with a small part of your brain, while the rest bathes in the vibes.

I’d recommend Dirty Pair. Like I said, it’s easy enough to punch out if you don’t like it. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. It’s If you only know this style from fanart and Tiktok, it’s wild to see an actual example in the wild. Historic, even. Like 9/11, but you’re smiling. I don’t mean you’re literally smiling AT 9/11. That would be fucked up: it was a huge tragedy. But it’s like the good equivalent of 9/11. Imagine you saw a Boeing 757 fly over Lower Manhattan, build a brand-new skyscraper, then fly away. Or something. Yes, I thought this metaphor through before typing it. Why do you ask?

In 1972, Frank Frazetta painted the artwork below. It was for a book called The Silver Warriors.

The bears have no harnesses. They could not pull the sled.

HarnessGate became a minor scandal, and in an 1977 Esquire Frazetta defended his role in perpetuating this atrocity. “Harness? Ha! Who needs a harness. This is emotion; those bears are comin’ at you, you don’t have time to see a harness. I paint feelings! I thought of the harness, but it’d make a ridiculous clutter.”

There are three arguments here:

1. Harnesses are visually complicated and their presence might distract or confuse the viewer
2. The picture captures the emotional thrust of being charged at by a sled drawn by bears (an event we surely all relate to): you wouldn’t notice the harnesses in real life, so he didn’t draw them.
3. The picture is fundamentally unrealistic anyway. Adding harnesses would be like plugging a hole in a dike made entirely of water.

The first argument is interesting: an admission that art has to be legible. All other considerations—realism, logic—fall before the requirement that the audience understand the piece. The second argument is also interesting—what’s the point of view when we look at a painting? Is it our own, or is it a person within the world of the painting? Are we standing inside the image, or outside it? In Kurosawa’s acclaimed jidaigeki masterpiece Rashomon, each of the four witnesses face the camera while they give testimony. We don’t hear from the court…because we are the court. We (the viewer) are the ones giving judgment. This is a startlingly effective trick: you feel almost forced to watch the movie closely, because a guilty man might walk free if you don’t. Christian art heavily uses this trick: we are Pilate: we are the Roman centurions, we are Peter the denier, we are the thief on the cross who mocks him. We are The Guilty.

But then there’s the third argument: it doesn’t matter.

The image is full of unrealistic details. Why is the warrior using dangerous, untrainable animals to pull a sled in the first place? How does he stop these solitary apex predators from fighting each other? Why is he wearing such useless armor in the cold?

The answer is always the same: even if Frazetta came up logical answers for those questions (maybe they’re genetically engineered bears?), the fact that you’re asking them means the picture has failed. Either Frazetta has not engaged you, or you are a bad-on-purpose critic: a Cinema Sins type who counts “logical errors” and “plot holes”. Either way, there’s no point in bothering with the image after that.

But this is complicated by the fact that parts of the painting is realistic. Gravity exists. The man is having to grip the sled so he doesn’t get thrown off. How do we explain that? If some of the picture is realistic, shouldn’t it all be?

For me, the dividing line is intentionality.

Frazetta is able to defend his missing harness. He didn’t just forget to draw it. He made a conscious decision to not include it.

My view, when people complain about unrealism in fiction, they are really complaining about the author being sloppy. Our time is valuable. We want to feel like we’re reading a work by someone who cares. Frazetta was not sloppy.

Here is something Adam Cadre wrote:

I’m reminded of John Byrne complaining when Marvel declared, for the sake of realism, that dragons in the Marvel Universe communicated via telepathy rather than speech, “Cuz, you know, a 200 foot long telepathic dragon is so much more realistic than a 200 foot long talking dragon.” There is a school of thought that argues that you’re better off embracing a wild, impossible setting for stories like these, because the closer you get to the world outside your window, the more inherently ridiculous a billionaire ninja wearing pointy ears is going to seem. But, well, that’s not the school of thought I belong to. I say telepathic dragons are more realistic than dragons that speak English. So there.

The difference is that the dragons speaking English is pure plot convenience. The author is too lazy to come up a plausible reason for how they communicate despite having radically different larynxes and voiceboxes, etc. Even a fig leaf of telepathic powers is an improvement, because it shows the author put some thought into their fictional world. There is a world of difference between playing a “blue note” on mistake, vs doing it on purpose.