stanley_ac.jpg

Features

Stanley Donwood: ‘I don’t know why people think I’m a paranoid recluse’

Bad Island

'Bad Island is an extraordinary, unsettling document: a silent species-history in eighty frames, a mute future archive. I can imagine it discovered in the remnants of a civilisation; a set of runes found amid the ruins. Stark in its lines and dark in its vision, Bad Island reads you more than you read it' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'I've read lots of Stanley's stuff and it's always good and I am in no way biased' Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead 
 
From cult graphic designer and long-time Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood comes a starkly beautiful graphic novel about the end of the world. 
 
A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and things do not go well for the island. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke, choking the undergrowth and the creatures who once moved through it. This is not a happy story and it will not have a happy ending. 
 
Working in his distinctive, monochromatic lino-cut style, Stanley Donwood carves out a mesmerizing, stark parable on environmentalism and the history of humankind.

Bad Island is an extraordinary, unsettling document: a silent species-history in eighty frames, a mute future archive. I can imagine it discovered in the remnants of a civilisation; a set of runes found amid the ruins. Stark in its lines and dark in its vision, Bad Island reads you more than you read it.

Stanley Donwood is a graphic designer, artist and writer. He has worked with the British band Radiohead since 1994, producing the artwork for all their albums and promotional materials. He is also the author of numerous books including Catacombs of Terror!, Slowly Downward and Small Thoughts. His collaboration with Robert Macfarlane, Ness, will be published in November 2019.

A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and things do not go well for the island. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke, choking the undergrowth and the creatures who once moved through it. This is not a happy story and it will not have a happy ending. 
 
Working in his distinctive, monochromatic linocut style, Stanley Donwood carves out a mesmerising, stark parable on environmentalism and the history of humankind.

Robert Macfarlane

Stanley Donwood

Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb - it is an aftertime song. It is dark, ever so dark, nimble and lethal. It is a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age. Ness is something else, and feels like it always has been.

What happens when the land comes to life? 
 
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a concrete-and-iron structure called The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a black mass. He plans to detonate a thermonuclear missile. But something is coming to stop him. 
 
Five more-than-human figures - or forms, or forces - are traversing the landscape, moving steadily towards a point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness is the land awakened. Ness is lichen skin and willow-bones, condensing mist and tidal drift. Ness has hagstones for eyes and Ness speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.

Stanley Donwood

Books by Stanley Donwood

Articles featuring Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood: ‘I don’t know why people think I’m a paranoid recluse’

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter