Changes

|title=Snowpiercer Vol.1 - The Escape

|author=Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette

|publisher=Titan Books

|date=January 2014

|summary=Class warfare as British Rail never had it, with the world's citizens mirroring society on one long train travelling endlessly through frigid wastes.

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All of humankind is living on a single train. I know British commuters feel that way at times, but this is a much different circumstance – it is a train miles long, running non-stop as a self-contained unit across tracks circling a desolately frozen Earth, moving on endlessly until, perhaps some time in the distant future, the planet can recover from the cataclysm that froze it. It's certainly been going on long enough for it to have a culture – a hierarchical society from the rich and leisured classes near the front, through the orgiasts, past the useful carriages set aside for producing food, to the underclass at the end. It's all set in its routine, set in motion. But there are two fishes out of water – a man from the rear who escaped, and a middle-class woman working with civil rights campaigners.

That episodic nature is of minor import, for the book does move almost as easily as the train (and fast enough almost for you to not ask where the equivalent of Network Rail are, maintaining the tracks). It has a history – it's thirty years old, but presented in this sterling new edition, for the first time ever in English, brings something worth visiting to the shelves. The symbolism of living in a container, moving endlessly through a frigid world, is not treated nearly as unsubtly as it could have been, and while this certainly makes me want to witness the cinema version that inspired its translation, I am also grateful I could read the actual book at last.

[[Revolver by Matt Kindt]] is a different kind of dystopian graphic novel, and one that will certainly open people's eyes.