EcoComix

Exploring image and imagination in conjunction with natural environments, the animal, and the human, this collection of essays turns the ecocritical and ecocompositional gaze upon comic studies. The comic form has a long tradition of representing environmental rhetoric. Through discussions of comics including A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, We3, Concrete, and Black Orchid, these essays bring the rich work of ecological criticism into dialogue with the multi-faceted landscape of comics, graphic novels, web-comics, cartoons, and animation. The contributors ask not only how nature and environment are portrayed in these texts but also how these textual forms inform how we come to know nature and environment–or what we understand those terms to represent. Interdisciplinary in approach, this collection welcomes diverse approaches that integrate not only ecocriticism and comics studies, but animal studies, posthumanism, ecofeminism, queer ecology, semiotics, visual rhetoric and communication, ecoseeing, image-text studies, space and spatial theories, writing studies, media ecology, ecomedia, and other methodological approaches.

Sidney I. Dobrin is a professor and chair in the English department at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is the founding director of the Trace Innovation Initiative, which includes the comic form journal Sequentials. He has written and edited more than 23 books about writing, ecology, and technology.

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 189
Bibliographic Info: 15 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2020
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6634-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3999-4
Imprint: McFarland

EcoComix: An Introduction (Sidney I. Dobrin) 1
The Threat of (Non)Normative Nature: Queer Ecology in H2O and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Ashley Holland) 11
The Middle Voice of EcoComix: Reading Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed (Terry Harpold) 29
Virtual Farmer, Real Activist? Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang’s In Real Life (Anastasia Salter) 52
The “GUD,” the “BAD” and the Biorg: Reading the Postanimal in We3 (Melissa Bianchi) 65
Follow the Concrete Submersible (Sidney I. Dobrin) 80
“Where You Create Life”: Monsters and Nature in Black Orchid (Spencer Chalifour) 97
How the Comic Book Store Became Ecological (Aaron Kashtan) 111
Trees, ­Anti-Advocacy and Visual Rhetoric in Truax (A Parody of The Lorax) (Madison Jones) 128
Treacherous Fields and Bunny Girls: Representations of Nature in Yuu Watase’s Alice 19th (Catherine Kyle) 146
Killing Oliver Queen: Environmentalist Meaning and Demeaning in Green Arrow (Eric C. Otto) 161
About the Contributors 175
Index 177