Street Cop

Two literary masters joining forces to scrutinize the arc of the American myth.
Street Cop is the collaboration of two American greats: master of metafiction Robert Coover and graphic legend Art Spiegelman. This illustrated tale—set in a dystopian world of infectious living dead, murderous robocops, aging street walkers, and walking streets—scrutinizes the arc of the American myth. 
Together, Coover and Spiegelman bring their combined force to bear on technocracy and the police state. Street Cop challenges us to inhabit the mind of a bumbling policeman driven by a nostalgia for the gutter. Author, illustrator, and protagonist wade through the characters, tropes, messages, and genres—from noir and horror to the police procedural—that populate the fragmented American psyche. In doing so, Street Cop insists on the possibility of emergent empathy, even as it maps the malignant structures of our time. As Coover has argued, “in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.”
Written before the pandemic, Street Cop is both provocative and prophetic—injecting new Kafkaesque complexities into the unfolding news stream and interrogating the line between a condemnable system and a sympathetic individual. If Coover ventriloquized the seat of power and corruption in The Public Burning, here he speaks through the lowest, but still complicit, bureaucratic cog: an ineffectual protagonist stripped of agency.