Cartoon history

Red Pepper cartoonist Tim Sanders reviews Speechless: World History Without Words by Polyp (New Internationalist and Friends of the Earth International, 2009)

I should declare an interest. As a cartoonist, I think the world would be a much better place with a lot more cartoons in it: in magazines, books, papers, on internet sites. I am also a fan of Polyp, whose work appears regularly in publications that champion the cause of the have-nots against the powerful. His latest offering, Speechless, is a hugely ambitious project, namely to present an entire history of the world, in cartoons, without (as the name implies) words. I think he pulls it off.

It's a tremendous piece of work simply in terms of the amount of drawing required. It's clever and well-researched, and is a truly original way of showing us our history and our possible future. The humour is biting. Though it can be a bit bleak at times, I suppose human history is not necessarily a laugh a minute.

Polyp covers a lot of ground, but, as is inevitable in a 99-page history of the world, without words, he misses some things out. There is no mention, for instance, of Cheryl Cole's sublime new single, or Simon Cowell's trousers. Apart from that it's pretty comprehensive. Religion, the industrial revolution, the spread of capitalism, war, famine, plague, environmental catastrophe and lots of other trivia gets a mention.

My only reservation about this is with the way Polyp gets around not using words, which, while mostly clever and inventive, occasionally falls into the trap of using symbols to replace words. If symbols are used as a way of expressing complex ideas in a non-visual language they run the risk of being almost the same as words but a little less decipherable, which defeats the object. So occasionally it takes a bit more effort to read certain passages than it should.

But it's a great little book and a really fresh look at an old problem. It would make a very good Christmas present for the lefties in your life.

Buy 'Speechless' here.