Pasternak's fortunes improve when he gets a big, juicy assignment: to embed with a Catskills community of weirdo sex-hippies who supply the most coveted organic produce in the NYC AST. They've been cloistered in an old summer camp since the 1970s, and when civilization collapsed, it barely touched them. Pasternak's mission is to chronicle the community and its strange ways for a billionaire's vanity-project museum of New York State.

3/

The meat of the action is set in Simplicity, the Catskills home of the Spiritual Association of Peers, where Pasternak struggles to gain the support and trust of the community, working their gardens by day and, eventually, attending their orgy/free-for-all nightly rituals, where the community members work out their tension and aggression through a mix of wild sex and punch-ups.

4/

But no matter how diligently Pasternak tries to fit in, he still finds himself at the community's margins, unable to win over their trust. Then, just as he starts to make some progress, members of the community start going missing, turning up horribly mutilated. The horror of this is compounded by the erotic, nightmarish visions that have haunted Pasternak since his arrival in Simplicity, of a many-tentacled, many-mawed, many-vulvaed monster.

5/

Pasternak's bosses abruptly recall him to the NYC AST, and that's when he learns the *true* nature of his mission to Simplicity, and the story moves into a thrilling, action-packed final act with an *extremely* satisfying conclusion.

This is such a tight little tale, speedily told in that way of the best graphic novels, which cram so much expressivity and atmosphere into the visual storytelling.

6/

It's got shades of Ellis's *Transmetropolitan* and Matt Bors's *Justice Warriors*:

pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/lib…

This is post-cyberpunk, ecosexual revolutionary storytelling at its finest. I know Lubchansky mostly from her absolutely amazing podcast, *No Gods, No Mayors* (co-hosted with Trashfuture's November Kelly and Riley Quinn), where she is incredibly charming, funny, and incisive:

patreon.com/nogodsnomayors

7/

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If you'd asked me to imagine what kind of science fiction graphic novel she would turn out, I probably wouldn't have guessed this one - but now that I've read it, I'm not surprised at all that it came from her.

8/