Reel Politik, comprising 172 stand-alone comic strips, is a guide to surviving the present age
Each of the 172 pages in this pocket-sized black-and-white publication is a stand-alone comic strip, set in a smalltown, single-screen cinema and drawn daily during the late Biden and early Trump presidencies. It’s also a guide to surviving the present age, sprinkled with more than a few teachings from the Communist Manifesto. I picture the setting as somewhere in the Upper Midwest (the writer is not above a corny pun or two). It’s populated by a duck; Sandra the witch; a popgoblin (‘conceived the day Vincent Gallo humped the [cinema’s] popcorn machine’); Skip the manager, whose backstory includes having been bullied for niche interests; and a dog in a turtleneck famed for his incisive film-criticism delivered in rap form. As stereotypes go, these are categorically not normies.
Radicalised by indifferent audiences (normies) and solid evidence that film is on the brink of oblivion as a meaningful artform, not to mention cinema’s lack of any real-world relevance whatsoever (small screens, social media, streamers, algorithms, Substack, podcasts and viral videos now reign), this motley crew decide to rise up and seize ‘the means of projection’. Storming the booth and ejecting the unionised projectionist while shouting ‘unions are a half-measure that ultimately maintains the status quo!’, they declare ‘a theater of the people’. Quickly realising they know neither how to operate a projector nor indeed what comes next along the path to revolution, noisy debate ensues, including discursions on Megalopolis vs Marvel. Fractious audience members are taken hostage.
Meanwhile the real world intrudes, and the tone sharpens: anxious, wordless pages in the days surrounding the 2024 US presidential election give way to a more trenchant humour and skewering of political pieties. Dematerialising herself in the light of the projector, newly dubbed a ‘machine for killing fascists’, Sandra the witch travels into space, returning with the news that ‘Every utopia across the galaxy is obsessed with movies!’ Film – which at this point we are perhaps encouraged to understand as art in its broader definition – as a revolutionary tool becomes a cri de coeur from those who identify as the not-normals. In this clever, absurdist tale, it is now a category intended to welcome us all.
Reel Politik by Nathan Gelgud. Drawn & Quarterly, $20 (softcover)
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
