Description

A Meditation on Light and Land by Coco Picard combines drawings based on photographic documentation of the Trinity Test -the United States’ first test of a nuclear bomb- and drawings of objects found after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The comic’s texts are direct quotes from Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel, Solaris, and accounts from witnesses of the Trinity Test.

A Meditation on Light and Land is an unsettling piece of comics poetry. Drawings alternate between the alien-like birth of an explosion and jarringly evidence of the atom bomb’s destructive force. The accounts of the power of the first atomic explosion juxtaposed with the philosophical narration of an inhuman being evokes the untamable threat nuclear proliferation places on our planet.