February 23, 2026
Paul Buhle
Who would expect a noted and prolific political-cultural comic artist to devote an entire, oversized volume to insect life?
Paul Buhle
Who would expect a noted and prolific political-cultural comic artist to devote an entire, oversized volume to insect life?
Credit this in part, I am sure,
to Peter Kuper, the cofounder of left-wing comics annual World War 3
Illustrated, seen these days in The Nation among other places, living a lot of
his time in semirural Mexico. Here and there, among his comics, the reality of
a humming, buzzing, sometimes biting context finds a way into the story—and it
is most unusual, at least for North American (or European), artists.
Credit, of course, the ecocrisis with which he and his World War 3 collaborators for over nearly fifty years have been steadily concerned, to which they produce polemical-artistic counterassaults upon the crimes of capitalism against nature.
This reviewer is taken back to early childhood reading or even pre-reading years, to what may have been a Time-Life book or an old-fashioned encyclopedia, as my mother or older sisters tried to explain something about the ferns in the garden—they were old, old, old, like the dinosaurs. I did not get much further with this thought, but as I plucked a frond, at age 5, I can remember thinking: old, old, old.
Time-Life illustrations were never like this. The book is also very much by and about Kuper’s art. Here, notable for him, it is a choice of naturalism, more actively creative than the old books I remember, from an era of magazines and books when illustrators had more prestige than later and did a lot more work by hand.
As a fictive brother and sister walk together chatting in today’s Manhattan, yesteryear’s traumas emerge. I can almost remember learning this, a lifetime ago: 25 million years ago, something—probably volcanic eruptions—burned and poisoned the landscape, wiping out 90 percent of the land-based vertebrates and nearly all the ocean dwellers. Sound like a possible tomorrow? It took 10 million years for life to return, at first thanks to burrowing reptiles.
Pretty soon, as these things go, Lepidoptera, moths and butterflies, were acting cooperatively, so to speak, with angiosperms, flowering plants. Larger animals found food sources or died out. Sure enough, before too long, we get to the dinosaurs, those great favorites, and the comet that wiped them out.
Here we come to a crucial moment, if millions of years can ever be a moment. Our more direct ancestors, anthropoids walking upright, utterly depended upon insects to eat. Maybe, maybe our primate ancestors even came out of the trees to gobble up more insects. Yum yum—although good taste was probably not the central concern for survival.
The human pair, struggling through Manhattan traffic toward a naturalism exhibit at the New York Public Library branch on Fifth Avenue, finds itself in a more recent history—notably, the site of a famed nineteenth-century water reservoir. Then, something happens as they walk along, chatting. Humanity disappears and the insects take over, most especially at the very exhibit to which they are traveling.
Dragonflies, beetles, moths, bees, and dozens of other arthropods fly or crawl around, giving explanations, with sidebars to admirable humans, including the Marxist naturalist J. B. S. Haldane and the poet W. B. Yeats, along with several scientists who made crucial contributions to entomology. This is, so to speak, a preparation for what follows.
Kuper’s protagonist, with the help of his sister, is going to take us on a gigantic journey of human engagement with insects, and vice versa. The insects do most of the talking, and they have a lot to say. They frequently refer to human authorities both benign and monstrous (in the latter case, for example, Adolf Hitler’s collaborator and ideologist, Heinrich Himmler, who regarded lethal antisemitism as a variety of “delousing”).
Most wonderfully, famed comic artist and sometime animator Windsor McCay devised a short film, How a Mosquito Operates, in 1912, in which a mosquito taps out a message on the keyboard of the computer. As it turns out, a disease borne by mosquitoes has killed half of Homo sapiens over the course of about 200,000 years and still kills a million or two each year. At the beginning, armies stopped fighting when kings and conquerors themselves fell sick. Mosquitoes also introduced malaria to the New World, halting the invasions of Charles Cornwallis and Napoleon Bonaparte alike.
Humor is a perpetual struggle in literature of any kind, and it is possible that dung beetle humor—aka fecal humor—is a stretch, until we learn that the dung beetle secretions have been processed endlessly during the past several centuries into record disks, cosmetics, and even the coating of medications. Kuper is teaching the readers humility, perhaps of the same kind as when I saw a documentary about atomic testing half a century ago, and learned that the survivors would (or will) be cockroaches.
As we begin to approach the end of Kuper’s tale, we must deal with ants. They are the most important family of the insect world in sheer number and variety alone. They are also, logically, a favorite of low-budget monster films with laughable plots and special effects, even those set in outer space, and most especially in science-fiction depictions across media, comics to film. In Insectopia, insects have soaring intellects. They are travelers through space in ships too complicated for mere humans to operate, and, in some cases, become friends with our future selves, helping the human race survive.
I am happier thinking about butterflies and moths, seen wonderfully here, that may recall fond childhood memories for readers. Kuper’s creatures fly across the New York Public Library Reading Room as Kuper offers reprints from illustrators whose work was published before he learned to make these flying things into veritable art objects.
The firefly saga Kuper saves for himself, perhaps because of what follows: the pesticide DDT. We are going to meet Alexander Humboldt (1769–1859), who might be regarded as the father of modern entomology. His successors include most prominently the hero of modern ecology, Rachel Carson. We still measure her heroism by the contempt expressed by businesspeople and politicians for her and her work. She told an unwilling world about the hazards posed, with DDT as the prime lesson of the unneeded mass poisoning of vast tracts of jungles and wetlands: a prediction of worse to come.
Along the way, we learn much about the unsung figures of environmental science: Charles Henry Turner, Margaret Collins, and Maria Sibylla Merian among others fought uphill battles. In one more way, this is a history learning book for young and not-so-young readers. A thick companion coloring book, with black-and-white outlines for filling in with color, accompanies Kuper’s full-color text—perfect for all ages.
Credit, of course, the ecocrisis with which he and his World War 3 collaborators for over nearly fifty years have been steadily concerned, to which they produce polemical-artistic counterassaults upon the crimes of capitalism against nature.
This reviewer is taken back to early childhood reading or even pre-reading years, to what may have been a Time-Life book or an old-fashioned encyclopedia, as my mother or older sisters tried to explain something about the ferns in the garden—they were old, old, old, like the dinosaurs. I did not get much further with this thought, but as I plucked a frond, at age 5, I can remember thinking: old, old, old.
Time-Life illustrations were never like this. The book is also very much by and about Kuper’s art. Here, notable for him, it is a choice of naturalism, more actively creative than the old books I remember, from an era of magazines and books when illustrators had more prestige than later and did a lot more work by hand.
As a fictive brother and sister walk together chatting in today’s Manhattan, yesteryear’s traumas emerge. I can almost remember learning this, a lifetime ago: 25 million years ago, something—probably volcanic eruptions—burned and poisoned the landscape, wiping out 90 percent of the land-based vertebrates and nearly all the ocean dwellers. Sound like a possible tomorrow? It took 10 million years for life to return, at first thanks to burrowing reptiles.
Pretty soon, as these things go, Lepidoptera, moths and butterflies, were acting cooperatively, so to speak, with angiosperms, flowering plants. Larger animals found food sources or died out. Sure enough, before too long, we get to the dinosaurs, those great favorites, and the comet that wiped them out.
Here we come to a crucial moment, if millions of years can ever be a moment. Our more direct ancestors, anthropoids walking upright, utterly depended upon insects to eat. Maybe, maybe our primate ancestors even came out of the trees to gobble up more insects. Yum yum—although good taste was probably not the central concern for survival.
The human pair, struggling through Manhattan traffic toward a naturalism exhibit at the New York Public Library branch on Fifth Avenue, finds itself in a more recent history—notably, the site of a famed nineteenth-century water reservoir. Then, something happens as they walk along, chatting. Humanity disappears and the insects take over, most especially at the very exhibit to which they are traveling.
Dragonflies, beetles, moths, bees, and dozens of other arthropods fly or crawl around, giving explanations, with sidebars to admirable humans, including the Marxist naturalist J. B. S. Haldane and the poet W. B. Yeats, along with several scientists who made crucial contributions to entomology. This is, so to speak, a preparation for what follows.
Kuper’s protagonist, with the help of his sister, is going to take us on a gigantic journey of human engagement with insects, and vice versa. The insects do most of the talking, and they have a lot to say. They frequently refer to human authorities both benign and monstrous (in the latter case, for example, Adolf Hitler’s collaborator and ideologist, Heinrich Himmler, who regarded lethal antisemitism as a variety of “delousing”).
Most wonderfully, famed comic artist and sometime animator Windsor McCay devised a short film, How a Mosquito Operates, in 1912, in which a mosquito taps out a message on the keyboard of the computer. As it turns out, a disease borne by mosquitoes has killed half of Homo sapiens over the course of about 200,000 years and still kills a million or two each year. At the beginning, armies stopped fighting when kings and conquerors themselves fell sick. Mosquitoes also introduced malaria to the New World, halting the invasions of Charles Cornwallis and Napoleon Bonaparte alike.
Humor is a perpetual struggle in literature of any kind, and it is possible that dung beetle humor—aka fecal humor—is a stretch, until we learn that the dung beetle secretions have been processed endlessly during the past several centuries into record disks, cosmetics, and even the coating of medications. Kuper is teaching the readers humility, perhaps of the same kind as when I saw a documentary about atomic testing half a century ago, and learned that the survivors would (or will) be cockroaches.
As we begin to approach the end of Kuper’s tale, we must deal with ants. They are the most important family of the insect world in sheer number and variety alone. They are also, logically, a favorite of low-budget monster films with laughable plots and special effects, even those set in outer space, and most especially in science-fiction depictions across media, comics to film. In Insectopia, insects have soaring intellects. They are travelers through space in ships too complicated for mere humans to operate, and, in some cases, become friends with our future selves, helping the human race survive.
I am happier thinking about butterflies and moths, seen wonderfully here, that may recall fond childhood memories for readers. Kuper’s creatures fly across the New York Public Library Reading Room as Kuper offers reprints from illustrators whose work was published before he learned to make these flying things into veritable art objects.
The firefly saga Kuper saves for himself, perhaps because of what follows: the pesticide DDT. We are going to meet Alexander Humboldt (1769–1859), who might be regarded as the father of modern entomology. His successors include most prominently the hero of modern ecology, Rachel Carson. We still measure her heroism by the contempt expressed by businesspeople and politicians for her and her work. She told an unwilling world about the hazards posed, with DDT as the prime lesson of the unneeded mass poisoning of vast tracts of jungles and wetlands: a prediction of worse to come.
Along the way, we learn much about the unsung figures of environmental science: Charles Henry Turner, Margaret Collins, and Maria Sibylla Merian among others fought uphill battles. In one more way, this is a history learning book for young and not-so-young readers. A thick companion coloring book, with black-and-white outlines for filling in with color, accompanies Kuper’s full-color text—perfect for all ages.
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