This Colossive Cartography, my third submission for the imprint, is an imaginary fold-out instruction manual for the new digital showers in the Astorial Hotel.
By way of background – I came up with a story called ‘The Cold Shower’ which I drew in summer 2024. It’s going to end up, I expect, published in a projected new collection called Astorial Feature Fables. In it, I imagine what happens when the hotel management decide to refit all the shower units, hoping to preserve the original elegant 1960s designs while still deploying all the benefits of digital technology. The ensuing problems transform the showers into hostile zones, potentially life-threatening for the guests.
Part of this fantasy included the notion of an app on a smartphone that the guest would use to control their shower in some way. What I wanted was a series of confusing diagnostics, represented as icons or symbols. Such an app appears fleetingly in ‘The Cold Shower’, but in order to say more about it I thought fit to push it in the direction of a Colossive Cartography.
At first it was going to be rows of familiar icons with mismatched captions – simply to express confusion and miscommunication. Then I wondered about drawing a grid of smartphone “frames”, to make the context a bit more explicit. Finally I settled for a mashup of various icons, easily found online; some of them are genuine, used for instance in a health & safety context or for COSHH. Some are copied from commercial products. Some are derived from the many sites that offer free clipart.
Then came the captions – compacted to be as short as possible. Each one depicts a menace more hideous than the last, confirming the Astorial Shower as a deadly place. I found that most current apps use the Roboto font, so I typed out my captions in Libre Office first, but then traced the lettering by hand. I did likewise with the icon art; it would have been possible to download and collage, but I wanted to maintain a hand-drawn aesthetic. I don’t have the draughting skills to do it perfectly, but the imperfections are part of it. That said, I do have a stencil that enables me to draw neat circles – or at least attempt it.
Lastly I could see how to use the verso of the Cartography to turn this item into a parody of an instruction manual. The text here makes absolutely no sense, but there’s an underlying hint of compulsion that is slightly sinister. I knew I had to include something about in-app purchases, surely the bane of anyone who visits the Google Play Store.

The original ‘The Cold Shower’ story has what I consider to be a few bleak and desolate images, but Astorial Shower App has proven to be an equally effective way to express my pessimism, through a kind of clinical detachment in the clean images and white space. Underpinning it all is my exasperation with smartphone technology and inability to use it effectively. Oddly enough, it began with my central heating at home, whose diagnostics and warning symbols are beyond my ken; to this day I remain unable to set a simple program for automated heating on my thermostat. My prognosis is that all technology will destroy us eventually, its owners doing things to us that we don’t want to happen, continually changing the way they do it, and expressing it in a language we’re unable to understand. And we’ll have to pay them for it, too.
Photo of the comic for this post is provided by the publishers. Once again my thanks to Tom and Jane for continuing to publish my work.