Industrial Revolution and World War collects a concentrated slice of Shintaro Kago’s visual logic: clean linework, abrupt violence, and a mechanical sense of repetition. Published by Hollow Press (September 2023), this is the eleventh printing, limited to 1,000 copies, produced in offset on 170g paper.
The format is deliberately direct. A4 size, 32 pages plus a full-colour cover, with a hybrid build: soft spine with hard front and back covers, finished as a German glued paperback. Industrial Revolution and World War reads quickly, but it lingers as an object—flat, rigid, and made to be handled without fragility.
A foreword by James Harvey frames the work as an indictment of mass production and the way it reduces both goods and people into repeatable units. In that context, Industrial Revolution and World War becomes a small, sharply manufactured artifact about manufactured life.
Shintaro Kago is a Japanese manga artist associated with ero guro and formal experimentation. His work often uses clean compositional systems—panels, grids, repeated motifs—to stage ruptures: slapstick brutality, anatomical distortion, and social satire. Across short works and longer projects, he treats the page as a device that can be broken, rewired, and used against itself.
