Review of Year Zero #1: A Chapo Trap House Anthology by Chapo Trap House (Bad Egg Publishing, 2025)
This March marks the ten-year anniversary of Chapo Trap House, the wildly irreverent and surprisingly influential podcast. Hosted by Will Menaker, Felix Beiderman, Matt Christman, and Amber A’Lee Frost, and produced by Chris Wade, the podcast embodied a new political tendency that Frost dubbed the “dirtbag left.” The Chapos have now published Year Zero #1: A Chapo Trap House Anthology, the first of a projected three-part comic book series.
The character of the dirtbag left has been more aesthetic than programmatic: anti-moralist, hostile to professional-class liberalism, contemptuous of institutional respectability, and comfortable treating American capitalism not as a policy failure but as a civilizational pathology . . . yet always believing that a better world is possible. While reveling in vulgar and scatological humor, the Chapos remain deeply committed to meaningful mutual aid, supporting social democratic campaigns such as those of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and platforming critically engaged journalists.
Year Zero #1 crystallizes a moment in the development of the American left when irony, vulgarity, and genre excess fused into a coherent political sensibility. The anthology’s five comics do not merely reference that discourse; they translate it into narrative form, using horror, science fiction, folklore, and historical vignette to dramatize the core dirtbag intuition that liberal modernity is incapable of governing the forces it has unleashed.
The dirtbag left emerged in the wreckage of the Barack Obama years and the shock of 2016, when the managerial liberal consensus revealed itself as politically impotent and structurally incurious about class power. Its critique was not subtle: the Democratic Party was a graveyard of movements, the professional-managerial class functioned as capitalism’s cultural immune system, and the language of…
Auteur: Michael G. Vann
