Rapp: That was tricky because of the inherent paradox you mention. At the same time, you’re telling the story using the medium of comics, where economy of language is often a virtue. Paste: Many of the sympathetic characters in Decelerate Blue lament the loss of the richer language used by the likes of Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. That was a huge change and I wouldn’t have discovered it if Mark hadn’t pushed me to dig deeper and find more consequence. After speaking with Mark at length, I came up with the idea that Angela herself becomes so still at the end that she transforms into a kind of geological, unavoidable, inevitable fact (doing my best here to avoid a spoiler alert). Originally it wasn’t such a blunt tragedy. Urged by my editor, Mark Siegel, after the artist, Mike Cavallaro, had made a lot of progress realizing the visual world of the book, I re-tooled the ending. Rapp: The text was almost completely finished over ten years ago. How has the project evolved over time into its current form? Paste: The earliest mention I could find of Decelerate Blue was in an interview with you from 2006. To represent permanence and hope.ĭecelerate Blue Interior Art by Mike Cavallaro We read fiction, news, Twitter, engage with almost all forms of information on a digital format, whether it’s a smartphone, a pad or a laptop. I liked this idea because everything is on screens now. I was thinking specifically about how a novel, an actual bound artifact, could survive the world, even a world that no longer has a place for it. Were you drawing from specific moments in the history of samizdat as you showed the influence of this work, and the different ways in which it was encountered?Īdam Rapp: In all honesty, I never really thought of samizdat.

Paste: A suppressed book lies at the center of Decelerate Blue, and characters encounter it in different forms and editions. Paste chatted with Rapp-a Pulitzer finalist playwright and novelist-about the project’s long history, his rapport with artist Cavallaro and the setting’s development. In that avenue, an unlikely romance blossoms. Angela, the book’s protagonist, is a young woman who bristles at these constraints, and hears rumors of an alternative community that values quality over expediency.

In this society, efficiency and speed supersede all: classic novels are abridged, beds are forgotten in lieu of sleep-standing and the phrase “Go. Adam Rapp and Mike Cavallaro’s new graphic novel, Decelerate Blue, takes that distraction to extreme, uncomfortable levels-a dystopia that will slide from fiction to reality in a matter of time. Finding moments of balance, times to detach and pause, is getting more and more difficult. Humanity has officially crossed the threshold where the rate of information processed has exceeded the ability to digest it-we exist in a flurry of shifting screens and rotating tasks.

Decelerate blue