Event

José Alaniz

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

Weaving together insights from Critical Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Affect Studies and Comics Studies, Alaniz’s monograph-in-progress explores the representation of animals, mass extinctions and climate change in the era popularly known as the Anthropocene in (mostly) US comics, primarily since the first Earth Day in 1970.

How have comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world, how do these representations manifest in different genres (superheroes, biography, underground comix, journalism), and 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 Timothy Morton’s parlance?

Animated by these questions, the study aims to break new ground in confronting our most daunting modern crisis through an analysis of how graphic narrative has uniquely addressed the ecology issue.

The image comes from Frank Miller/Dave Gibbons’ Give Me Liberty #2 (September, 1990), published by Dark Horse Comics.

José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published three monographs, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022). He has also co-edited two essay collections, Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman, Leuven University Press, 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith, Penn State University Press, 2019). He formerly chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) and was a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society. He has published three comics/prose collections: The Phantom Zone & Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020), The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl, 2023) and Puro Pinche True Fictions (FlowerSong Press, 2023). His current scholarly book projects include Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature and a monograph on the representation of historical trauma in Czech graphic narrative.