Street Cop - Robert Coover and Art Spiegelman

Street Cop by Robert Coover and Art Spiegelman / ISBN 9781735075037 / 106-page softcover, 2.76 x 4.25 inches (tiny!), published by Isolarii

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Street Cop is the collaboration of two American greats: master of metafiction Robert Coover and graphic legend Art Spiegelman.

This illustrated tale—set in a dystopian world of infectious living dead, murderous robo-cops, aging street walkers, and walking streets—scrutinizes the arc of the American myth. Together, 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 illustrates the story as his singular response to the events of 2020 and COVID-19. Concerned with virality and entrapment in a world where time and space have lost their coordinates, Spiegelman draws on a vast cultural databank to construct a collage of comic history.

Street Cop is the first work in Coover's long career to be illustrated and Spiegelman's first original work in over a decade. The pair collaborated over Zoom during the 2020 lockdown, with Coover in Rhode Island and Spiegelman in Connecticut. While each had long admired the other's work, they had never spoken before—and are still yet to meet in person.