At the end of Planet of the Apes (accept no imitations: I mean the 1968 version), Charlton Heston, who plays an astronaut called Taylor, rides off into the distance. “What will he find out there?” wonders one ape. “His destiny,” replies another. In the next moment, we see the actor in shadow, on a bleak-looking shoreline. “Oh my God,” he says, recognition clouding his face. “I’m back. I’m home.” His voice cracks. He falls to his knees. The planet of the apes, he has realised, is Earth, destroyed in a nuclear war while he was off in space – and he is one of the last humans to walk its surface.
I thought of this scene more than once as I read Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This, a weird and restless book preoccupied with decaying and destroyed landscapes. We tend to imagine that when we gaze on ruins, we’re in search of the past. But the truth is we’re also contemplating the future. Why are we here, we ask ourselves, as we lift up our cameras. And what, if anything, will we leave behind? Radtke’s obsession with ruins has its roots in the loss of a dear uncle from congenital heart disease, a condition she may have inherited; the fragility of life is a daily lived experience for her.
Nevertheless, as she crosses America and then the world in search of abandoned places, more universal ideas come into play. By the time her story ends, Radtke is living in New York, the city Charlton Heston recognises as lost in Planet of the Apes (the shadow that falls on him, you may recall, is cast by a crumbling Statue of Liberty). “The news tells me [it] might one day be underwater,” she writes of her new home, picturing a shark cruising Fifth Avenue, a torrent consuming a subway carriage.
Radtke is an art student in Chicago when we first meet her, studying at “the kind of school where puppetry was a major”. One day, she and her boyfriend, Andrew, drive to nearby Gary, Indiana, a once thriving city with much of its downtown now derelict. In its empty cathedral, they find a series of dusty photographs, images she takes home to incorporate into her latest installation. Only later does she discover that these pictures are in fact a memorial to a young photographer, who fell under a train at the age of 23.
From here, her narrative sprawls outwards, taking in 19th-century ruin lust and 21st-century ruin porn; the war-ravaged buildings on Corregidor Islandcorrect off the Philippines; a ghost town in Colorado; an Icelandic community destroyed by volcanic ash. I was never quite sure that the whole added up. Radtke has a grand theme, but not much by way of what you might call a narrative arc. But her writing is never less than lovely, and her black-and-white drawings are masterfully eloquent: at once vivid and faded. Think Shelley’s Ozymandias, with light top notes of Alison Bechdel and Adrian Tomine.
• Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
