Graphic Novel Review: Bob Fingerman’s PRINTOPIA bounces today’s issues off the ’90s

Printopia

Cartoonist: Bob Fingerman
Publisher: Cosmic Lion
Publication Date: January 2025

Cartoonist Bob Fingerman’s new graphic novel, Printopia, felt familiar to me in a comforting way. It’s comics, so you bring your own intonation to it, but it reminded me of mumblecore ’00s and ’90s auteur indie movies where people (usually in their 20s) would mostly just hang out and talk, movies like Clerks, Slackers, and even Stranger Than Paradise. We get a lot of that in Printopia, of characters talking in their bad apartments or while working their menial jobs. 

And I think the book is doubly evocative of this sort of throwback vibe because it’s built on physical media. Indeed, in Printopia, our lead character works at a print shop and nearly everyone we meet is trying to make something, themselves, without, you know, new junk tech. It’s very much the 2020s in this book, but our hero is holding onto a job from another era. That’s the framework we start with before quickly going to more fantastical places.

Cosmic Lion Productions

Within a well-built house of listless young people just kind of hanging out, Printopia pivots into the type of absurdist storytelling you can’t do in those aforementioned, reality-based indie movies, but you can absolutely nail in a medium like comics. And nail it, Fingerman does. The book quickly has a pivot, and that pivot is simply that many of the people we meet in this world hallucinate floating conversation partners that only they can see, ranging from demons who interrupt a metalhead poet’s “creativity recharge” (masturbation), to Lovecraft abominations that wage debates about Trump with a racist who gets thrown out of the main character’s print shop for — you guessed it — being racist.

This is the type of thing that is very hard to pull off in film but instantly elevates a comic, making for visually interesting situations within which the book’s many intricate conversations are waged. And Fingerman writes and draws it all so well, giving his characters the exact funniest hallucinations for them while also letting the subsequent conversations dictate where each of these scenes go. I’d be shocked if this book involved much outlining (complimentary).

Cosmic Lion Productions

One of the things I enjoyed most about Printopia was the way these two qualities — the hang out indie setup in tandem with the absurdist hallucinations — let Fingerman take the book so directly into the heart of the issues that our driving our present day, from the transformation of media creation/consumption to time-tested problematic ideologies that some folks have tried to make new. And it’s all layered with the cartoonist’s great absurdist sense of humor (did I mention that one of the hallucinations is just a straight up poop emoji? or, rather, maybe it’s just a straight up poop?). 

Cosmic Lion Productions

All in all, Bob Fingerman’s new book Printopia is a dense, contemplative, and deeply funny read. There’s an air of creative improvisation to it, along with a direct lineage to a lot of the just-off-the-main culture that has driven some of the most interesting storytelling experiments of the past 40 years. Printopia is a book that is rich with sharp banter, lush backgrounds, and a singular sense of humor that just might make you laugh out loud.

Printopia is available now in your local comic shop and via Cosmic Lion

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