Comics Anthropocenes: visualizing multiple space-times in Anglophone speculative comics

ABSTRACT

Comics and graphic novels have not typically been foregrounded in accounts of Anthropocene fictions. This article argues that speculative comics are particularly suited to visualizing the Anthropocene through their verbal-visual strategies for representing multiple scales of space and time. Defined as the era in which human-driven processes have become detectable in the Earth’s geological record, the concept of the Anthropocene has also been challenged by postcolonial and Indigenous theorists for presuming an undifferentiated humanity responsible for ecological crises. Speculative comics offer strategies for representing multiple scales of space and time that call into question the ‘human’ as a geological force. While autobiographical and documentary comics represent the scale of individual human experience, speculative comics feature nonhuman spaces and times on multiple, asynchronous scales. This article first contextualizes the representation of space and time in speculative Anglophone comics from early superhero comics to the contemporary period, then focusing on three case studies drawn from contemporary Anglophone comics: Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s Nameless (2015), Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees (2014–2016, 2020), and Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (2021).

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• speculative comics
• environmental comics
• South asian comics
• postcolonial comics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This argument is further elaborated by Timothy Clark (2015), who argues that the Anthropocene ‘enacts the demand to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time’ (13). Trexler (2015) also makes this point regarding the novel specifically; see Anthropocene Fictions 13.

2. By this point, criticisms of the Anthropocene concept are too numerous to cite, but see for example Kathryn Yusoff (2018), ‘Politics of the Anthropocene: Formation of the Commons as a Geologic Process,’ Nicholas Mirzoeff (2018), ‘It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene,’ and Zoe Todd (2015), ‘Indigenizing the Anthropocene.’

3. Despite numerous analyses of science fiction and ‘cli fi’ as Anthropocene fictions, comics are mostly absent from these discussions, or mentioned only cursorily. Significantly, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, edited by John Parham (2021), does not include the graphic novel among its list of ‘Anthropocene forms,’ despite the inclusion of ‘interspecies design’ and ‘digital games.’ Existing research on Anthropocene comics has tended to focus on the singular example of Richard McGuire’s experimental comic Here (1989/2014). Focusing more specifically on superhero comics as Anthropocene narratives, Ryan Poll (2022) has argued that DC’s Aquaman comic during the 2010s can be understood as a visual allegory seeking to make an activist intervention in dominant representations of the oceans in the era of the Anthropocene (19).

4. On cosmic narratives in superhero comics, see Scott Jeffery (2016), The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics 93–114. On Anthropocene allegories in contemporary comics, see Poll 33–35.

5. To the extent that the Anthropocene has received attention in comics studies, McGuire’s Here has been the focus of much of this research; in addition to Perry, ‘Anthropocenes,’ see also Menga and Davies (2019), ‘Apocalypse Yesterday’; Hegglund (2019), ‘A home for the Anthropocene’; Olsza (2022), ‘Comics in the Anthropocene.’

6. For a detailed ecological reading of Superman comics from the Golden Age to the New 52, see Justin Hart Crary (2017), ‘Planet Superman: An Ecocritical Analysis of the Man of Steel.’

7. On Moore’s allegorical narratives in Promethea specifically, see Sean Carney (2006), ‘The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision.’

8. On George Pérez’s visual narration, see Marc Singer (2020), ‘George Pérez and the Classical Narrative Style,’ for an overview of how Pérez’s art employs ‘a set of formal practices that adapt page and panel layouts to match their contents’ (288).

9. For a brief reading of Nameless as an Anthropocene narrative, see Gry Ulstein (2019), ‘“Age of Lovecraft”? – Anthropocene Monsters in (New) Weird Narrative.’

10. Morrison is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, though male pronouns are used in the author’s bio in Nameless. In the explanatory notes included in the trade paperback edition, Morrison describes their inspiration for the comic in cosmic pessimist philosophy. Another prominent comics writer who has credited Thacker’s cosmic pessimism as an influence is Warren Ellis.

11. Previous research on Anthropocene apocalypse is too extensive to summarize. Alexa Weik Von Messner argues that apocalypse has emerged as the genre of climate change narrative depicting the ‘tipping point’ at which human-driven processes actually result in catastrophe (84). In this context, Gerry Canavan (2021) has argued that science fiction film and literature offer the utopian promise that the ‘necrofutures’ of Anthropocene apocalypse can actually be stopped or averted (255).

12. To the extent that Morrison has received attention in comics studies research, it is primarily for his eco-comics. On Animal Man, see for example Jason Wallin (2020), ‘Evolve or Die!: Enmeshment and Extinction in DC’s Animal Man,’ and on We3, see Melissa Bianchi (2020), ‘The “GUD,” the “BAD,” and the Biorg: Reading the Postanimal in We3.’ On Morrison’s practice of magic as a ‘union of opposites,’ see Singer (2012), 9–15.

13. Indeed, the comic Trees meets nearly all the characteristics of climate change narrative identified in Astrid Bracke (2018), Climate Crisis and the 21^st-Century British Novel 8–10; specifically, environmental collapse, urban nature, and polar landscapes. As British comics authors, Morrison and Ellis have affinities with the context for 21^st century British climate fiction that Bracke charts.

14. On Ellis as an innovator in planetary aesthetics in the comics medium, see Jagoda (2016), 40.

15. See Rob Latham (2014), ‘Biotic Invasions,’ on Disch’s The Genocides as ecological narrative of reverse colonization. Bould compares Trees to Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life,’ but, in fact, Disch’s The Genocides is a much more obvious intertext for Ellis and Howard’s comic, similarly depicting unresponsive, indifferent alien trees that ultimately threaten human extinction. See also Higgins (2016), ‘Slow Weird Reverse Colonization: Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees.’

16. Kavita Daiya (2018) has described how accounts of Anglophone comics and graphic novels ignore South Asian and South Asian diasporic comics (3). Ritesh Babu (2022) has written about Ram V’s page layouts as a postcolonial strategy; see Ritesh Babu (2022), ‘Civilized Monsters.’

Additional information

Funding

Research time to write this article was provided by Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies under the project “Global and Postcolonial Comics.”