Ready America, last year’s outing from German indie mainstay Anna Haifisch, published by Rotopol in Germany and Fantagraphics Underground in America, was conceptualized and crafted during a two-month residency in the United States in 2022. 2022, of course, was a precarious time — two years into the pandemic, two boosters into the vaccination program, the overwhelming collective tendency was toward an affected nothing ever really happened normalcy — and it is this precise façade that Haifisch’s book appears to bristle against.

On a pure definitional level, Ready America is compelling because I cannot, for the life of me, decide whether or not it fits the definition of ‘a comic.’ I have written in the past about the dangers of seeking a rigid one-size-fits-all definition, and yet Haifisch compellingly walks the outer reaches of the art-form in such a way that just about any arguments both for and against would be valid. Certainly, compared to Haifisch’s ‘proper’ comics work, Ready America is distinctly loose — its pages are organized in a fixed two-panel grid (top and bottom), but its imagery, though easily organized into several categories, does not follow any evident rhythmic or sequential mechanism. On occasion, there will be a connection between a page’s two images, whether straightforward (for instance, seals in an enclosure, alongside the sign that stands outside the enclosure) or ironic (packages of Cheetos alongside emergency kits); more often the images appear, at least to me, unrelated to one another. 

One of the main categories of image in Ready America is the exterior structure shot. Although some residential buildings and houses do appear on occasion, more often than not Haifisch chooses to focus on businesses or other public institutions. Being a fundamentally two-dimensional artist, there’s an interesting façade nature to these buildings — they are perfectly articulated, yet they nonetheless feel flat, almost artificial. These are complemented by a second strain of image, being recreations of signage, from earthquake-awareness posters to business and political adverts, be these hand-lettered or mass-printed. 

Crucially, at no point does Ready America feature any human beings, only these signifiers of humankind. These replications are not Warhol or Lichtenstein—which is to say, not the fuck-you satire of sublimating mass-production back into the realm of art—so much as the human element of Mondrian; the artist disappears into the labor of painstakingly-faithful replication, leaving her viewer to ‘seek out’ humanity through closer inspection — in lines that go a millimeter beyond the corner, in subtle shifts of color-value and gravity-of-line between pencil-strokes.

Immediately, what comes to mind is Martin Vaughn-James’ The Cage, with its simultaneous depictions of an erstwhile human existence alongside clear indications of present human absence, as well as the from-the-outside-looking-in approach of Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi; yet where Vaughn-James cleaves to archetypal structures (the city, the palace, the ziggurat, the titular barb-wire cage), and where Koyaanisqatsi purposefully alienates viewers with its overpowering music and its rapid-fire cuts, refusing to linger on any one face, structure, or scene for longer than a few seconds, Haifisch revels in the slow and the particular. Through these caring depictions of signage, the cartoonist inundates her reader with information that, implicitly, is no longer applicable; in the absence of a society, there is no real significance to the local Travelodge, or the Michelle & Barack Obama Center for Inquiry & Exploration. 

Importantly, just because humanity is absent from Ready America’s haunted vision of California doesn’t mean all life is. Haifisch’s representation of the living is divided into two: the actual living and the simulacrum. In the first category, we find animals; in the latter, we find media representations: Sesame Street and Looney Tunes (the inclusion of the latter evidently inspired by the earthquake training course Haifisch underwent as part of her residency; in her afterword, she writes, “crawling under the precious piano in the salon felt looney-toon-ish [sic]”). It’s not for nothing that the two categories are given more or less equal footing within Haifisch’s rigidly-gridded pages; although Wile E. Coyote and Big Bird are human creations in the most obvious sense, the real-life animals nonetheless have to exist within our own hand-wrought aftermath: seals in a zoo enclosure; pelicans on the lawn outside a Royal Business Bank. 

Artistically, the project sees Haifisch depart from her usual tools—rich lines of ink, applied with a charmingly-tremulous pen, with flat digital coloring—in favor of colored pencils; the result is a warmer, more tender texture, less easily qualified as ‘cartoonish’ than the baseline Haifisch work. This operates particularly in her favor in the few instances where animals are depicted. In her more comedic work, Haifisch is a clear proponent of deadpan-anthropomorphism in the vein of Michael DeForge or Norway’s Jason; even when her characters are nominally human, they are given spindly bodies and birdlike faces. Here, however, there is no semblance of the anthropomorphic, no projection of human whims or neuroses, no cogent inner monologues. For the first time, the animals and the reader are mutually estranged from one another. 

“The American Dream has run out of gas,” J.G. Ballard memorably said in a 1983 interview. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.” Ballard, of course, engaged with America through the lens of a foreigner, party to the European tendency to view American decadence at a remove, as a unique ideology that we couldn’t possibly relate to (see, similarly, Tintin in America, or Judge Dredd, or any Western comic made by non-Americans). 

Part of me, I admit, cannot help but ascribe that same caveat to Ready America as well, both given the circumstances of its creation and its specific synonymization of California with that same sort of Debordian spectacle (it’s almost a given that Haifisch should conclude her afterword with a brief overview of celebrities she saw in L.A.). 

And yet, in the face of the work itself, these reservations readily melt away. Haifisch’s imagery is haunting precisely because it is not droll or sweeping. Her animals appear meek; her buildings belong to small businesses more often than they do to hyper-corporations. She is not interested in peddling Ballard’s sheen of the nouveau riche, but in the more eye-level, more recognizably human. 

In early 2020 I was unemployed, fresh out of my national civic service (having been exempted from army service), and I received an invitation from my cousin in California to come and stay with him and his wife around late February or early March. I’d recently come back from a trip to the UK, only my second time out of my home country, and I was immediately excited by the prospect – I had a lot of online friends in California, and entering a more ‘travel-heavy’ period of my life was immensely appealing to me. Ultimately, this plan did not pan out; I found a job before I could toy with the idea enough to make it happen (I didn’t know at the time that I’d wind up quitting this job a week in after finding out it was a lot more ethically dubious than I’d been initially told), and then immediately after that we went into lockdown, at which point I obviously wouldn’t travel anywhere, certainly not more than halfway across the world. 

For all intents and purposes, this is a non-story; as far as what-ifs go, it’s a pretty minor one. And yet time and time again I find myself revisiting it in my mind, wondering what it would’ve been like, finding myself in a part of the world I’d never been to while any and all semblances of ‘routine life’ began to disintegrate all around me. 

With Anna Haifisch’s Ready America, I feel, on a very human, visceral level, transported into that scenario. It moves me, and scares me. It saddens me, more than anything. And if that’s not an artistic triumph I don’t know what is.