“History textbooks are really dull, and they tend to be written in an impersonal way, and the illustrations tend to force you to think of historical figures as dead - which they are, but they weren’t when they were alive. “My motivation when he called me was I had been doing this sort of veiled form of history for a many years and also a number of science books. He was drawn to the idea of writing about capitalism after the work he had already done. “Cartoonists as a breed cower behind our drawing boards and throw these satirical bombs out into the world because we’re basically disgusted and furious,” he says. Gonick says Kasser had needed to find somebody who was angrier. “I do think that the book is very well timed and timely in that sense.”Īfter some attempts at writing, he approached Gonick - who was known for writing a long 30-volume comic about the history of the universe - to help.

“I would say about 10 years ago it was very difficult to utter the word capitalism without a lot of pushback, and I think that things have changed enough now that you can start to talk about capitalism and discuss that taboo topic and hopefully we did it in a way that will be interesting to people. Their long-form comic, Hypercapitalism: The Modern Economy, Its Values, and How to Change Them seeks a better system, based on better values. Kasser says he has been writing about materialism and consumerism since the early 1990s, and has been trying to write this book about Capitalism for at least the last 10 years.

Hypercapitalism by Larry Gonick