Something strange is afoot in Miasma City. Living computers of social control hurtle past their breaking point. The essence of Miasma’s inhabitants — dreams, ennui, paranoia — are fodder for uncanny machines. Traversing this dystopian wasteland, a mysteriously linked pair, Myron and Zinnia, follow a train-hopping resistance movement. Miasma Myopia skitters through graphic vignettes of walking skyscrapers, gatherings of cloud councils, featureless figures with typewritten speech, and a cryptic Giant’s Dream looming over everything in a stream of maximalist linework and multimedia collage. Floyd Tangeman’s feverishly focused pen creates panels that become open wounds, jail cells, alcoves-in-catacombs, passageways to understanding. This third-eye-opening work explores urban decay and the opioid epidemic, the psychic fallout of a generation left behind in the wake of American folly in the Middle East. Processing personal loss and spiritual ruin in tones ranging from elegiac and foreboding, to zany and punny, Tangeman’s work is a dispatch from the jungle seen through a poet’s eye. Evoking Anna Kavan’s avant garde Ice and Gary Panter’s punk rock Jimbo, this surreal odyssey confidently follows its own inner logic. And in a final twist on its title, Miasma Myopia is clear-eyed and divinatory.
