Speechless: World History Without Words

Speechless is a never-before-attempted work of cartoon ingenuity, condensing the whole of world history into a graphic and completely wordless narrative.

Through this very simple, yet intriguing concept, the reader will experience the intensely real but often ignored political and environmental truths of our era. It’s funny, poignant, and painfully true. Tracking everything from the very beginning of evolution to the industrial revolution, from the Cold War to the oil wars, no aspect of world history is too challenging for Polyp.

He draws on cartoonists’ long tradition of rendering complex situations down to their essences, and adds subtle visual cues and plot structures lying below the main narrative. The viewer must engage with each episode, puzzling out what is going on down below, as if watching the Earth in miniature through a microscope.

Published in association with Friends of the Earth International, Speechless is a celebration of human resistance, ingenuity, and bravery in the face of war, greed, and environmental pillage. And the full-color cartoon novel contains a hidden internal book–a further distillation of world history into a penetrating parable.

Radical political cartoonist and activist Polyp has been working with campaigning organizations around the world for over fifteen years and is a regular cartoonist for the New Internationalist. He is the author of Big Bad World: Cartoon Molotovs in the Face of Corporate Rule. He lives and works within a large cooperative housing block in Manchester, United Kingdom.