Crash Course by Woodrow Phoenix is a painfully shocking indictment of driving which comes as less of a shock to those of us who spend significant amounts of time on two wheels. The British graphic novelist applies a not at all conventional medium for this kind of societal review in a thought-provoking and effective way.

Phoenix opens the novel with an analogy, that anytime you drive there’s a grand piano dangling from a flimsy attachment above your head. It’s a powerful image, and certainly a feeling I’ve had while riding on the 18-inch, gravel covered strip of road allotted me alongside careless drivers.

Crash Course then moves to the real-world with examples of people who were run down, by accident or purpose, and the perpetrators went free. Again, this is all too familiar. Any cyclist who spends enough time in the community will encounter someone who’s been hit by a motorist and maimed or killed. Seldom, however, is a motorist truly held to account. The word accident used to abdicate motorist’s duty to ensure safety to those around them, implying the crash was not preventable, despite the fact that a majority of collisions are caused by human negligence or error.

The top causes for road crashes are poor street conditions, distracted driving, drunk or impaired driving, excessive speed, and negligence on the part of the drivers. All of these causes are preventable.

Along the way, Phoenix weaves in the psychology of driving, institutional racism, and road rage “an indulgent, doting term, dignifying and excusing behavior that has no dignity and no excuse.” He also explores the many absurd rules of the road which increase danger and examines the vehicle as a weapon as in its use against activist Heather Heyer, who was struck by a car and killed during the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

What resonates throughout is the way in which vehicles enhance the worst of human behaviors (and driverless cars programmed by them). The primal need to be first and fastest when applied to a gas pedal controlling a heavy metal box is deadly, especially when other road goers are pedestrians and cyclists. Phoenix says, “I wrote this book to make you mad.” I suppose that’s true, but more accurately it makes me sad.

It’s a stark reminder that “a car” has never hit anyone. Motorists hit people.

This urgent treatise by Phoenix (Rumble Strip) decries the mortal threat posed by errant drivers and a dysfunctional automobile-centric society. The graphic essay is composed of declarations (“the causal link between action and consequence is unhooked in a way that would be considered psychotic in any other area of our lives”) spooled over empty street scenes and repetitive sequences of white roadway arrows painted on highways.

Phoenix rails against the arrogance of consumers, carmakers, and government leaders who protect drivers over pedestrians; the dangers of self-driving cars; and the inequity in risk to drivers, themselves, exposed in the deadly police shootings of African-Americans during traffic stops. Accusations are punctuated by alarming statistics, such as a rise in bike fatalities in New York City, despite recent changes in urban planning to make the city more foot- and bike-friendly.

The reliance on blacktop visuals can become as monotonous as a long drive, though rarer spreads—such as of a pedestrian fatality depicted with stick figures—or a sobering rendering of a makeshift memorial on a curbside where a cyclist was killed, lend emotional impact. The psychoanalysis of narcissistic drivers sometimes loses sight of larger societal forces and counter arguments (did urban sprawl outpace mass transit expansion, for example).

This is a resolute protest against vehicular deaths as a silent epidemic, though its impact is ironically buckled-in by static visuals.

The author's probing commentary, combined with its stark visuals, effectively stokes the complicated emotions its author intended to instill in his readers. A keen and unapologetic consideration of how driving often brings out the worst in us. (Rumble Strip is published as Crash Course in North America by Street Noise Books 2020)

I’ve just read Rumblestrip by Woodrow Phoenix, a monochrome graphic book all about what happens when we get behind a steering wheel.  And as you read, you feel as if you are in fact on a virtual car journey.  The book provides alarming statistics about deaths caused by driving and is thought-provoking.  I sometimes dream about driving a car, and when I drive at night, I sometimes wonder if I am dreaming.  Woodrow Phoenix describes it perfectly:

'There is a dreamlike quality built into the experience of driving.  A car windshield is a big window.  And also a screen… locations unwind on the other side of this rectangular glass almost as they do on a movie screen… you sit cocooned in your cabin… everything outside your windows is contained, the rest of the world an arm’s length away… you glide through location after location as if they were erected just for you to drive past.  Every journey is a narrative with you at the centre.'

I love that last line.

Every so often a book like this comes along, one which allows fresh vision, even a change of mindset. Brilliant... Rumble Strip is a crucial revelation.

Woodrow Phoenix’s message is all the more forceful for using a graphic novel format. He wants to warn of the damage and death that can result from car accidents. The author also rails against the injustice of the penalty system for deaths caused by cars, the arms race with people investing more and more in ridiculously huge SUV’s and the like. The damage all this does to people and the land goes unquestioned by the majority but Woodrow Phoenix articulates - and illustrates the devastating combination of human and machine on our roads.

Phoenix, who attained an MA in narrative illustration at the University of Brighton, show[s] the comic as the ultimate creation of narrative meaning.

Simply astounding... It’s important though to express how natural this book feels, how timely and how key to our ongoing national conversation... one of the most original, impressive and essential British comics of the last ten years.

Compulsory reading for people who carp on about rising fuel prices, lack of parking and how cyclists are the scum of the earth.

A unique addition to the transport policy debate.

This is a timely, well researched and fascinating novel and one which Jeremy Clarkson would probably hate. Surely yet another reason for getting out there and buying a copy.

Congratulations to Woodrow Phoenix for making such a difficult subject readable and entertaining in a thought provoking way. Once you start reading, you can't stop turning the pages... This is an emotional horror story told with a perfect symbiosis of text and image.

A gripping narrative – he just presents the hard facts and they stay imprinted on your mind.

A darkly dazzling graphic book... a disturbing indictment of the culture of the car presented in a simple, shocking and brilliant way.

I love your book. I think it's a really interesting take on ‘the road’... wonderfully controversial... phenomenal and very original.

In thrall to the vivid iconography of the roadside – the signs, the arrows, the unfolding motorway landscape – and vividly sketches the ways cars can isolate us from each other.

One utterly original work of genius. It should be made mandatory reading for everyone, everywhere.

For a graphic work that doesn’t show a single human being, this is an extraordinarily human book. Its ideas and questions about how the car impacts on your life will echo in your mind long after you’ve finished reading it, whether you’re a driver, or a pedestrian, or both.

Brilliant. Angry, articulate, bewildered, and beautifully drawn; a visceral blast of truth-telling against the cult of the road. They should be giving it away with new driving licences.