Our hero is a social-justice lawyer. He also happens to be a monkey.
This is Caleb.
He is smart.
Successful.
About to become a father.
And increasingly pissed off.
Caleb works inside a system he once believed he understood.
His law firm represents powerful interests. Families are pushed from their homes. People become cases. Human consequences become paperwork.
Then one of Caleb’s own clients is taken by ICE outside a courtroom.
Another crack appears. And another.
Everywhere Caleb looks, he begins noticing something strange.
The individual systems surrounding him often appear perfectly rational when viewed one at a time. Put them together and the picture becomes much harder to defend.
Housing.
Justice.
Healthcare.
Economics.
Information.
Climate.
Culture.
Power.
Each has its own institutions, terminology and experts. But Caleb starts wondering whether separating them is part of the problem.
Then something happens in his family. Something devastating.
We’re not going to tell you exactly what. Not yet.
But it fundamentally changes the direction of his life.
For the first time, Caleb stops seeing the problems around him as isolated failures. He begins seeing a system of environments: overlapping, reinforcing and shaping one another.
What begins as anger becomes clarity. What begins as outrage becomes:
A way of seeing.
And once Caleb sees it, he can’t unsee it.
That becomes dangerous. Because seeing differently eventually creates another question:
What are you going to do about it?
Caleb is the central character of our forthcoming graphic novel, THE 13.
You’ll be seeing quite a bit more of him. Humanity may have mixed feelings about that.
