The texts in this astonishing graphic novel are extracts from Milton, Hobbes, and Bacon in the introductory "Leviathanology" and, for epigrams to prologue, chapters, and epilogue, from Genesis (1:21, KJV) and Moby Dick, Harder's model for such presentation of quotations as well as for his subject. Like Melville's whale, Harder's is a destructive force, perhaps amoral. It is first sighted, at chapter 1's climax, terminating a long oceanic food chain. Subsequently, it courses through history, attacking a giant squid preying on a schooner but later turning on a nineteenth-century whaler and then one of that boat's harpoon-cannon-armed successors. It helps an animal-laden ark but harries a tourist-freighted cruiser. It guides a transoceanic liner to an iceberg, chomps a submarine in half, unmoors an offshore oil platform, sinks a tanker. Finally, it seems to have died, but the great marine food chain unreels again. Working in only black, gray, and white, Harder composes a grand pictorial fantasia that defies logic and chronology but enraptures the eye and engages the ecological-moral imagination. Ray Olson
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