Waiting for Godot meets South Park meets Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, Factory Bloke is a graphic novel set in a warehouse in the West Midlands. It follows Factory Bloke and his friend Stan as they attempt to navigate an increasingly fractured, isolated, isolating post-post-modern world. Initially bonding through a shared love of football and cigarettes, a combination of personal tragedy and the psychedelic experience instigates a journey through the history of philosophy and a quest for meaning, tackling some of the burning issues of our time, such as: Has relativism ruined art? The rise of the internet and its consequences American cultural hegemony and the legacy of empire The growing influence of China The colonisation of Mars Quantum physics Freedom. What is it? And, perhaps the most confounding conundrum of all, who - or what - is Hoodie Al? All within an existentialist framework: FB and Stan perform the same mundane tasks, trapped in a civilisational circumstance that requires them to clock in, move boxes, clock out. Locked into this sisyphian struggle, how best to realise a deeper self? Excerpt