Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, how have US comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world? How do these representations manifest in different genres of comics like superheroes, biography, underground comix, and journalism? What resources unique to the comics medium do they bring to their tasks? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues raised by global conversations about the anthropogenic sixth mass extinction and climate change? How have comics mourned the loss of nature over the last five decades? Are comics ＂ecological objects,＂ in philosopher Timothy Morton’s parlance?

Weaving together insights from comics studies, environmental humanities, critical animal studies, and affect studies to answer these questions, Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature explores the representation of animals, pollution, mass extinctions, and climate change in the Anthropocene Era, our current geological age of human-induced environmental transformation around the globe.

Artists and works examined in Comics of the Anthropocene include R. Crumb, Don McGregor et al.’s Black Panther, Jack Kirby’s Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, the comics of the Pacific Northwest, and Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli’s landmark alternative series The Puma Blues. This book breaks new ground in confronting our most daunting modern crisis through a discussion of how graphic narrative has uniquely addressed the ecology issue.

José Alaniz is professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington-Seattle. He is author of Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia; Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond; and Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, the latter two published by University Press of Mississippi.