Catland Empire

By Keith Jones. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Softcover, 184 pages, Colour, 2010

Philip K. Dick comes to Saturday Morning TV

Catland Empire by Keith Jones is a graphic novel that is a melding of a Philip K. Dick novel and a Saturday morning cartoon. There will exist a future world where "human beings have become empty husks stripped of all memory when it comes to things like how to have fun and play games," or so says Mr. Space to his associate Mr. Time. The solution? Get the cats to teach humans how to have fun again. This is all the Cat People do with their lives. They are the fun and game masters.What follows is a tangled webof psychedelic science fiction blending anti-consumerist politics and intergalactic liaisons between cats and dogs—bitter enemies kept secret from each other to avoid a planetary race war. Victor Burg is plotting to wipe out all of mankind by having his brain-chipimplanted drones commit genocide.

“There is so much soul on these pages.” —SEAN MAXEY, Terminal City (Vancouver)

“Robots, blood, ice cream and hard liquor abound.” —Mirror (Montreal)

“His world is a candy-coloured land of excessive and obsessive repetition where things and words are discombobulated until they reach the plane of symbolic surrealism.” —ISA TOUSIGNANT, Hour (Montreal)