Forecast: Nozone X
Ed. by Nicholas Blechman
Princeton Architectural Press

As humans, we have a collective obsession with predicting the future. From utopian and dystopian novels to doomsday movies to TV programs where families drive space ships instead of cars, our concerns about the government, technology, and the unknown territory of outer space have forever driven us to guess, predict, and resolve our way into the next century. But these days, as we expedite global warming with our bad habits and the planet increasingly goes to shit, it seems like an especially pertinent time to look into the future and try to predict what’s coming—for the sake of showing people that we must try to stop (or at the very least, delay) it.

Enter Forecast: Nozone X, the 10th and latest installment of Nozone, a graphic design and comics zine launched in 1998 by Nicholas Blechman. Blechman is an illustrator-designer and the art director of the New York Times Book Review, so Forecast is inevitably more design- than comics-focused. It also looks much more like a book than a magazine, or whatever you might expect from something called a “zine,” a word which conjures up images of DIY, stapled booklets in this writer’s mind.

Forecast is, predictably, about predicting the future, in light of the crappy way we treat our planet. It is filled with ideas that we’ve all heard before: In the future, we will be able to specify the eye color and foot size of our babies before we have them; most of New York, and the world for that matter, will be sunk below the rising sea level; and perhaps—just perhaps—the apocalypse, or the rapture (!), is upon us. None of this repetition is necessarily bad. Recycled ideas can be presented in new and refreshing ways, such as in John Fulbrook’s contribution, a spare and timely retelling of the story of Chicken Licken, who thinks the sky is falling.

Some of the book’s content, however, feels a bit stale or trite. Other contributions read as too preachy in the company of more subtle and wittier takes on the issues at hand. Still others just aren’t as funny as they hope to be. As can happen with design, Forecast struggles with the question of form versus function. The anthology looks fabulous and is fun to flip through, but when you sit down to actually read it, the content has trouble keeping pace with the presentation.

It does hit its full stride at certain moments, with a number of stand-out contributions that hammer home just how trapped we may really be. A two-page spread by Julia Hasting of black comics panels filled only with drops of falling rain is haunting; endpapers by Christoph Niemann that consist of funny flowcharts for the cycle of life will make you smile; a diagrammatic guide to pod living by Nick Kulish and Shi Yeon Kim will make you laugh; and meeting your maker, through the work of Christian Northeast, will kind of creep you out. Forecast will no doubt get you thinking about the future, but probably in a less constructive way than you might have hoped.

- Jillian Steinhauer