La collaboration de deux grands noms américains, le maître de la métafiction Robert Coover et la légende du dessin Art Spiegelman : ce récit illustré, qui se déroule dans un monde dystopique peuplé de morts-vivants infectieux, de robocops meurtriers, de vieillards ambulants, décortique le mythe américain, Coover et Spiegelman conjuguant leurs forces pour s'attaquer à la technocratie et à l'État policier.
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, in a return to his underground comix roots, illustrates the story as his response to the events of 2020 and COVID-19. Concerned with virality in a world where time and space have lost their coordinates, Spiegelman draws on a vast cultural databank to create a collage of comics history.
Street Cop is the first work in Coover's long career to be illustrated and Spiegelman's first book in over a decade. The pair collaborated 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.
Robert Lowell Coover (1932-2024) est un écrivain américain, célèbre pour ses romans de « métafiction ».
Art Spiegelman (né en 1948 à Stockholm) est un auteur de bande dessinée et illustrateur américain, figure phare de la bande dessinée underground américaine des années 1970-1980, auteur du célèbre Maus.
