Letter to Survivors

In the blasted ruins of what was once a picture-perfect suburb, nothing stirs—except the postman. Clad in a hazmat suit and mounted on a bicycle, he is still delivering the mail, nuclear apocalypse or no nuclear apocalypse. One family has taken refuge in an underground fallout shelter, and to them he brings—or, rather, shouts through the air vent—a series of odd, anonymous letters. They describe the family’s prosperous past life, and then begin to get stranger. . . .

This pioneering graphic novel was created in 1981 by famed French cartoonist Gébé, a longtime contributor to Charlie Hebdo, and has never before been available in English. Letter to Survivors is a blackhearted delight, at once a witty metafictional game of stories within stories and a scathing, urgent send-up of consumerist excess and nuclear peril: funnier, and scarier, than ever.