Peter Kuper's first book, New York, New York, was published by Fantagraphics in 1987. Since then, he has spun off comics collections and graphic novels at a rapid clip. Some of his better known titles include Give It Up! (1995), a collection of Franz Kafka comic-strip adaptations; Eye of the Beholder, (1996), based on his self-syndicated strip of the same name; and The System (1996), a critically acclaimed hit for DC/Vertigo. His work has been translated into several languages, including German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. He maintains a website (www.peterkuper.com), and in 1998 a Japanese company, Interlink, issued a CD-Rom based on his travel book ComicsTrips. From the standpoint of magazine and newspaper illustration he is almost ubiquitous. His work has appeared in Time, Business Week, Newsweek, the Baffler, Details, the Daily News, the Progressive, the Village Voice, the New York Times, the Stranger and the Oklahoma Gazette. For the past three-plus years he has been illustrating Spy Vs. Spy for Mad. And now, with his new Speechless out, we begin to get the picture that he must be fairly reliable about deadlines.

Yet the magazine he has been most closely associated with is World War 3 Illustrated, which he co-founded in 1979 with his childhood pal Seth Tobocman. In WW3's early days, when Kuper was rubbing shoulders with kindred visual militants Sue Coe, Eric Drooker, James Romberger and David Wojnarowicz, he was also inking Richie Rich for Harvey Comics. For years he has navigated New York City's cultural minefields without dissipating his core identity as a commercially successful, socially aware artist. Kuper is a do-it-all, get-it-done sort of guy.

While many of Kuper's strips and tales have an explicitly political edge, in that his targets are often polluters, rapists, politicians, bankers or brutal cops, it would be a mistake to write him off as a well-networked propagandist. His latest release, Speechless, provides the strongest case so far that Kuper is playing in the major leagues. By offering a kind of full-scale mid-career retrospective, Speechless shows off Kuper's unexpectedly rich palette of styles and motifs and reveals an underlying spirit of playful self-awareness and personal tenderness, even as it hoists the banner of mass mobilization. Most importantly, the book makes a strong case that political commitment can co-exist with -- and on occasion even nurture -- the creative flame. In squeezing its subject's multiple artistic emotions and ambitions into a single, thoughtfully designed package, Speechless points us toward a more integrated conception of Kuper's sometimes-political-sometimes-not art.

Kuper's ability to wander on and off the ideological reservation is complemented by his pragmatic use of art materials and his energetic search for revelatory subject matter. His book takes us from severe urban landscapes, rendered in unforgiving black inks, to magnificent jungle forests. It offers penciled drawings, watercolors, collage, and storyboards, as well as the artist's signature spray-paints and stencils. Some of the images in Speechless are infinitely delicate, while others shove the reader to one side. Thrown in the mix are one-panel cartoons and multi-layered travelogues, illuminated windows and carved wooden masks (both are quite beautiful). Sometimes a map appears in place of a head or body, confirming that his adventures in the third world have awakened him to cartography's graphic potential. All in all, Speechless is a high-speed repository of artistic pluralism. But just when you sense that Kuper has reinvented himself as restless experimentalist, he returns to his polemical forte -- the Kuperized graphic story, characterized by brisk narration, iconic images and a vengeful spirit of moral denunciation.

In an effort to contextualize Kuper's multifaceted career, Speechless is divided into eleven color-coded sections that highlight his roles as illustrator, editor, traveler, cartoonist, city resident, First Amendment spokesperson, and so on. Each opens with an informative essay. Interspersed between the sections are eight rat-tat-tat stories that skewer big money capitalism and mankind's assault on the global environment. Kuper labels these "tales from the system," and they are reminiscent of the seductive dystopia he labored over for a pre-AOL Time Warner.

The book's first strip, "Bird," neatly encapsulates several of Kuper's preoccupations -- the grit and bright colors of metropolitan life, the human interdependence on nature, the transcendental potential of art and music, and the extraordinary potential represented by panel-based story-telling. It celebrates both the comic-book format's ability to slice time into discrete pieces and the triumph of musical expression over drab uniformity. More concretely, "Bird" is a melodious but melancholy one-pager that features a lonely saxophonist at the end of another day. At first all we see is a backwater street of some kind. Within a couple of panels, a group of crows stare as the man pulls out his sax. In the final panel the musician's defiant notes merge with the crows as they rest on telephone wires. The wires themselves come to resemble sheet music.

"Bird," first published in Pulse, is formally simple, but full of ideas. In particular, the closing panel's euphoric visual blare provides a wonderful contrast with the plainness of the municipal backdrop. In the wordless, six-panel strip, Kuper sums up his attitude toward big-city living -- it's grim but entrancing; nature is everywhere, if you know where to look; music can offer redemption; and urban rhythms can be replicated within the comics framework.

Or, as Kuper himself observes in the blue-coded section on New York, "If I have a muse in my career, it would have to be this city. Perhaps siren is a better description, however, as the powerful calling that drew me here -- and continues to seduce me -- has always been just as likely to dash my head against the unforgiving pavement." And since the pavement is unforgiving, many of his comics, such as the immortal "Fuck the Fucking Fuckers," are just plain angry. "The fucking fuckers will fuck you every fucking time!" announces a raging-mad cat in a Malcolm X cap. Think about it: the fucking fuckers will fuck you every fucking time. This pretty much sums things up. But the interesting question is not whether we're getting fucked, but whether the fuckers will always fuck us. You know who I'm talking about -- "The fuckers [who] think they can fuck whoever the fuck they want!" Kuper, by which I mean the raging cat, has "fucking had it up to fuckin' here with fuckers who fucking think they're big fucks!" Which is why he wants to "teach the meaning of the word fuck... fuck the fucking fuckers!"

From the innocent standpoint of graphic design, Details made a mistake in not publishing "Fuck the Fucking Fuckers." Before reading the text, the editors would have seen an intense spray of oranges and reds as background for a highly agitated, and oddly compelling, stenciled cat. After scanning the words these same hipsters would have muttered "oh dear." Yet the interdependence of text and images in "Fuck the Fucking Fuckers" offers a splendid example of the verbal-visual meld that comics historian R.C. Harvey defines as central to the comics experience. Too bad the editors were fuckers, rather than fucker fuckers.

Another angry piece, also previously unpublished, features a Depression-era banker-type molesting an oversize dollar bill. At one point the plutocrat commits an act of unspeakable debauchery on Washington's mouth. Yikes! After that, the fact that he pokes out the pyramid's eye (on the back of the bill) hardly seems worth bothering with. As Mr. Wall Street walks away from the, er, debased currency, he smartly sets the thing on fire, turning the words "in God we trust" into "d...ust."

The sheer irresponsibility of our political and economic leaders is a recurrent trope in Kuper's work, but he doesn't let the masses off lightly. In one of his longer stories, "TKO," first published in Heavy Metal in 1992, a crowd of approving spectators watch as a muscle-bound, cigar-smoking boxer pummels planet Earth in a metaphorical boxing ring. As the fighter knocks the stuffing out of the sun's third planet, the mood of the crowd shifts. For a brief moment the boxer seems concerned about his opponent, whom he coaxes into one more round, but after another tough beating, the planet is down for the count. The crowd goes wild, but their joy is brief. Within the span of three eerie panels, their open mouths fade into nothingness. This only seems reasonable, given that their champion, the boxing-ring embodiment of global capitalism, has just annihilated the natural world.

Even more striking is a single-page comic that first appeared as a cover to the Village Voice in 1997. Here we see what appears to be a black teen-ager being shot in the back by a police revolver. Kuper approaches this overworked material by locating the teen inside the face of a watch, which injects a sense of even greater urgency and manic energy. At the same time, the watch is also a cog in a larger machine, which is an idea that works better as a graphic than as a sentence. Kuper's point, of course, is that in the world of capital and labor -- i.e., within The System -- clocks and cogs serve the same master. Using stencils to achieve a jagged, sharp-edged effect, Kuper portrays a social order out of balance. The effect of officially sanctioned violence is felt everywhere, especially in the picture's epicenter. Meanwhile, at the edge of the frame are collages of mid-town office towers. They are the headquarters of capitalism, the corporate control rooms that keep the machinery in motion. Rather than the overt political message -- which has merits but can't be described as original -- what may grab viewers is the page's graphic choreography, which underscores the same message but at a subliminal or pre-verbal level. For example, the composition highlights the bullet's trajectory as it tears across the center of the page. Rampant police violence, Kuper suggests, is in a sense ripping our cities apart, just as the bullet lacerates the image.

I would go so far as to say that his promiscuous use of forbidding reds and oranges, in the context of moving cogs and explosive violence, is meant to imply that for some our society is nothing more than a slaughterhouse. Furthermore, the picture's careful juxtaposition of curves and straight lines raises the question as to whether human beings, in their stubborn three-dimensionality, can ever be reconciled with a socioeconomic order premised on rationality, geometry and timepieces. This is a crafty piece, exceptionally sly and yet brazenly polemical.

I could go on but I believe I have made my point. When it comes time to identify the best comics of 2001, Speechless will be in the running. And I say this even though I don't particularly like the cover, which is polemical without being powerful. Surely we can all agree on the following: One, Kuper knows he was not put on this great Earth to putter in the back garden. Two, he is not to be underestimated (we only have to consider the two pages of astonishing watercolors, dashed off in the likes of Indonesia, Guatemala and Kenya: The watercolors conjure up an entirely different sensibility from the graphically savvy, politically committed crusader that we know and love). Third, while I would not call twenty bucks "cheap," I say you get value for your money.