1st 2022 136pp Rotland Press square paperback. Illustrated throughout. NM.
 
Ltd. ed. 1200 copies. Between the years 1960 and 1967, before developing Biomechanical figuration and the hybridization of grace and barbarity, before mastering the use of the airbrush, before the world-building design work for the film Alien, the artist H.R. Giger (1940-2014) created a series of absurd and satirical cartoons that appeared in a number of Swiss and German alternative and underground publications.
 
Of these published works, the Atomkinder or “Atomic Children,” proved to be a consequential artistic development. A cartoon cycle depicting the children of a nuclear war whose warped physiognomy compliments corrupted unethical behavior, the Atomkinder form the basis of a burgeoning artistic philosophy—the critique of an absurd capitalist-industrialist society overrun with rationalist death machinery and contaminated with irrational decline. Importantly, this early work is rife with an absurdist sensibility and a biting black humor that would take root throughout the artist’s remaining oeuvre.