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

It is surely no coincidence that images too began to seep back into the textual world of the novel; then came the rise of the graphic novel – and it soon began to be taken seriously.

So if it is the case that the last, but perhaps most intransigent way that climate change resists literary fiction lies ultimately in its resistance to language itself, then it would seem to follow that new, hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again, as it has many times before (Ghosh 2016, 84).

 

Humanity’s fucked. (Morrison and Burnham 2015, n.p.)

 

At a time when visual culture appears particularly suited to the task of representing the Anthropocene, comics and graphic novels have become all the more important media for the contemporary environmental imagination. As Amitav Ghosh (2016) points out in The Great Derangement, the rise of the graphic novel coincides with increasing awareness of climate change in contemporary culture (84). In Ghosh’s terms, the comics medium itself can be understood as a ‘hybrid’ form better suited to representing climate change when literary fiction does not seem up to the task. As Ghosh has provocatively suggested, literary fiction has failed to represent climate change adequately due to its focus on interiority and individual human characters.¹ By contrast, the ‘generic outhouses’ (24) of speculative fiction have provided compelling narratives of climate change centering nonhuman actors in their fictional worlds. For Ghosh, the graphic novel is finally ‘taken seriously’ (84) at exactly this moment when the genres of speculative fiction are called upon to represent the entanglement of human and nonhuman natures in contemporary culture. Indeed, the speculative comics genres of superheroes, science fiction, fantasy and horror have for most of their history well exemplified the ‘generic outhouses’ that according to Ghosh have been the prominent forms for registering the effects of the Anthropocene in literature and culture.

What has come to be called the Anthropocene in environmental discourse refers to the era when human-driven processes have become detectable in the Earth’s geological record. Anthropocene discourses attempt to link the time scale of human history with the geological record, raising the question of how to visualize multiple, asynchronous spatiotemporal scales. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) has influentially described Anthropocene temporalities as ‘the collapsing of human and geological chronologies’ (34), which he also characterizes as ‘a problem of human and unhuman scales of time’ (49). Importantly, postcolonial and Indigenous theorists have challenged the Anthropocene narrative for its presumption of an undifferentiated humanity instead of overlapping systemic violences, including racial capitalism, colonialism and cisheteropatriarchy.² In response to these objections, numerous alternative -cenes haves emerged as names for the present: Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Plantationocene, Necrocene, Manthropocene, and so forth, each suggesting challenges or variations to the Anthropocene narrative. As Chakrabarty also points out, these many alternative names further emphazise the multiple time scales underlying the challenge to ‘thinking geological time’ (166) posed by Anthropocene discourses.

In this article, I consider how comics contribute to the visualization of the Anthropocene through their verbal-visual strategies for representing multiple scales of space and time. I am interested in reading speculative comics genres in combination with the spatiotemporal form of the comics medium to understand how the multiple scales of the Anthropocene have been visualized in graphic narratives. Though not typically foregrounded in accounts of Anthropocene literature, comics have developed numerous strategies for visually representing scales of space and time beyond the human.³ As I will argue, speculative comics are particularly suited to Anthropocene visualization through their representations of multiple scales of space and time beyond individual human experience. Not only superheroes but also horror, science fiction and fantasy comics imagine human and nonhuman entanglements across deep time and on a planetary scale. While autobiographical and documentary comics, like most literary fiction, tend to narrate on the scale of the individual human, speculative comics often feature nonhuman figures and cosmic beings from other spaces and times. As we will see, speculative comics overlay cosmic, planetary and allegorical times, using the spatial form of the medium to represent multiple scales of space and time on the comics page.⁴

As comics scholars tend to point out, the layout of the comics page and its verbal-visual narration allow for representations of multiple time lines, whether private or collective, individual or historical. In her article ‘Comics Form and Narrating Lives,’ Chute (2011) examines how autobiographical and documentary comics use the affordances of the medium to link biographical and historical time scales on the space of the page. Specifically, Chute describes, ‘[t]he ability to use the space of the page to interlace or overlay different temporalities’ (112) in comics by Alison Bechdel and Joe Sacco. Yet, the spatialization of time on the comics page can also lend itself to the representation of time scales beyond the individual human. To take one frequently cited example, Richard McGuire’s Here (1989/2014) uses cut-out panes within the panels to represent deep time in a single location extending from 500 million years in the past into the far future. As Laura Perry (2018) describes in her reading of Here, ‘when geologic time becomes neighbor to human time, a formal breakdown ensues and chronologies proliferate uneasily among a more-than-human visual inventory’ (14–15). McGuire’s experimental comic maximizes the ability of comics to represent multiple time scales, demonstrating the potential of the medium to narrate across deep time. As Ursula Heise (2019) points out (296–297), McGuire’s innovative use of the comics page can be compared with the representational strategies of science fiction to narrate nonhuman time scales.⁵ While McGuire’s experiments with visualizing multiple times on the comics page in Here have been highly influential, comics research has yet to consider in depth how speculative comics more broadly have used the form of comics to represent the time scales of the Anthropocene.

This article examines speculative comics as visualizations of the Anthropocene and its multiple spatiotemporal scales, from the individual human to the planetary and the cosmic. As I will argue in what follows, speculative comics can work as Anthropocene visualizations, in both their content and their formal representations of multiple scales of space and time on the page. With attention to speculative comics featuring Anthropocene narratives, my analysis focuses on three case studies drawn from contemporary Anglophone comics and graphic novels by influential and recognized creators: 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). These speculative comics call attention to different versions of the Anthropocene and its spatiotemporal scales in comics form through innovative page layouts and panel transitions. Rather than directly depicting anthropogenic climate change, these comics imagine planetary futures unfolding on multiple spatiotemporal scales. In this way, contemporary speculative comics, I argue, challenge the ‘human’ as the subject of Anthropocene narratives on the unfathomable scale of planetary and cosmic times.

To consider how contemporary comics take on the problem of Anthropocene visualization, I begin with a genealogy of speculative comics as a form and genre for representing spatiotemporal scales beyond the human.

Speculative Anthropocene comics

Anthropocene visualizations can be found in early superhero comics, from Miss Fury to Superman, comics that are filled with tales of ecological catastrophes and dying planets.⁶ In his reading of June Tarpé Mills’s Miss Fury (1941–1952), Glenn Willmott (2021) suggests how an ecocentric perspective emerges through Miss Fury’s global travel. Analyzing a strip from 1942 in which Miss Fury travels to Brazil to fight Nazis, Willmott argues, for example, that the comic’s seemingly anthropocentric ‘global allegory’ is challenged by the ‘spatial fragmentation’ of the comics page (167). As Willmott puts it, ‘Worldmaking in Miss Fury is more ecologically interesting than may be expected from a plot-driven action romance’ (167). Similarly, Chute (2016) points out in Disaster Drawn that comics from the period before the Comics Code of 1954 could react to disasters in ways not available to other visual media. She takes up the example of the 1946 cover of Action Comics #101 by Stan Kaye and Wayne Boring as a comic about the act of witnessing disaster itself (Disaster Drawn 12–14). Strikingly, Action Comics #101 shows Superman filming an atomic bomb explosion, contributing to the task of representing the otherwise unrepresentable force of the atomic bomb through the imagination of an extreme form of posthuman vision. These examples demonstrate how early superhero comics developed verbal-visual strategies for providing visual witness to the unfathomable scale of planetary crises.

Another early visualization of planetary space and time in comics form is provided by Jack Kirby’s collages for Fantastic Four. Kirby’s collages are noteworthy for the way they interrupt the comic’s sequence of drawn panels with photographic images that surprise the reader with their impossible immediacy. As Scott Bukatman (2019) describes, ‘Kirby’s collages also present interdimensional movement through the shift to another mode of production and perception’ (22). By juxtaposing different objects and modes of representation on the comics page, Kirby developed a powerful and influential technique for representing multiple times and spaces beyond the scale of ordinary human perception. In one such collage from Fantastic Four #48 (1966), the world-destroying Galactus is shown descending to earth with a speech bubble in the lower left corner pointing outside the page. Kirby’s collage consists of a yellow-tinted aerial photograph of a New York cityscape below a pink moon. A yellow sphere in the background is meant to represent Galactus’s starship, itself of planetary dimensions. In the foreground, a photocollage of descending spacecraft signal the impending destruction of the Earth as Galactus begins the process of stripping the planet of its material resources, exploding its core and leaving behind only lifeless ruins.

Another technique developed in speculative comics for approaching the otherwise unrepresentable temporalities of the planet is allegorical narrative spanning cosmic and historical time scales. In both The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1984–1987) and Promethea (1999–2005), Alan Moore includes allegorical narratives in which cosmic history unfolds through multi-layered, symbolic timelines, linking individual, subjective time with transhistorical, cosmic histories. As Mark Bould (2021) points out in his reading of Moore’s Swamp Thing in The Anthropocene Unconscious, ‘Swamp Thing is a plant elemental, with numerous iterations, all of which are both continuous with and distinct from each other’ (134). Frequently during his run, Moore invokes the timeline of the previous iterations of the earth elemental, of which Swamp Thing is only the most recent, to illustrate the unfathomable scale of time compared with the individual identity of Alec Holland. Moore’s allegorical narration would be further developed in his Promethea, whose main character is the latest of many iterations of Promethea throughout history, embarking on a multilayered allegorical journey through the cosmos in which multiple timelines are represented simultaneously on the page.⁷ In this sense, Moore’s allegorical narratives are exemplary of how speculative comics can work as visual allegories combining multiple temporal scales.

In science fiction and superhero comics, the layering of multiple times and spaces on the comics page are often literalized through narratives of multidimensional time travel, often with apocalyptic effects. For example, in DC Comics’s influential Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–1986), space and time are collapsed into a single site in a dramatic merging of the DC Comics multiverse. Four years before the first experimental version of McGuire’s Here was published, artist George Pérez illustrates the collapse of spatiotemporal scales by drawing a cityscape with visual elements of different times, from futuristic spaceships to World War I airplanes in the sky, and dinosaurs and volcanos next to skyscrapers and wooden houses.⁸ Though the 20^th century remains the starting point for the representation of multiple time scales in Crisis, Pérez’s surrealistic juxtapositions within the panel visually represent the collapse of linear time. Indeed, by the time of DC’s Crisis event, Anglophone speculative comics in different genres had developed numerous techniques for representing scales of space and time beyond the human.

Cosmic time in Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s Nameless (2015)

While speculative comics throughout their history have developed numerous formal strategies for representing multiple spatiotemporal scales, more recent comics creators have drawn on speculative comics genres to use comics form to represent the condition of the Anthropocene. Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s Nameless is a work of cosmic horror with a bewildering narrative unfolding across competing, parallel timelines in dreams, hallucinations, memories and visions. In this comic, an asteroid is thought to be on a collision course with Earth, and the nameless main character is called upon to use his occult abilities to make contact with an alien being presumed to be its inhabitant. Significantly, Nameless draws heavily on the work of H.P. Lovecraft without directly referencing the Cthulhu mythos.⁹ As Eugene Thacker (2011) has argued, contemporary supernatural horror can be understood as an expression for the awareness of what he calls the ‘unthinkable world,’ which is to say, ‘a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction’ (1). Translating Lovecraftian horror into a real-world setting with the looming threat of planetary disaster, Morrison and Burnham use cosmic horror to explore the increasingly uneasy situation of humanity in the time of the Anthropocene.¹⁰

In a dramatic twist in the comic’s last chapter, it is revealed that the nameless main character has hallucinated a space journey to the asteroid, which is named in the comic Xibalba, also the name of hell in Mayan mythology. Through its own syncretic mixture of Lovecraftian, occult and indigenous cosmologies, the comic depicts the asteroid Xibalba as a weapon in a cosmic war fought 65 million years ago in which the Earth was used as a planetary mine by an extraterrestrial civilization, the mythical 5th planet between Mars and Jupiter. As it turns out, ten years before the events of the narration, the main character was responsible for a mass killing after being possessed during an occult ritual organized by a self-styled ‘billionaut’ named Paul Darius to make contact with the alien on Xibalba. In an attempt to eliminate the alien presence from his mind, the main character undergoes a procedure to suppress his personality and become nameless. In the end, he is killed by Darius’s daughter, Sofia, to free him from his possession and bring about the apocalypse.

To represent the multiple spaces and times over which the narrative unfolds, the comic’s page layouts consist of cut-out panels pointing to different timelines. In the explanatory notes appended to the trade paperback publication, Morrison points to Brion Gysin’s cut-up ‘dream machine’ as the basis for this technique. (The dream machine is actually shown to the reader on the fifth page of the comic, as well as in the last chapter, implying that the entire narrative has actually been a hallucination of the main character.) The cut-up technique is also used as a formal device in the comic’s opening pages in which multiple perspectives are interwoven through the panels. On the third page, looking back on the Earth from the perspective of space, the Earth appears embedded in multiple spatial and temporal scales, appearing smaller at greater distances but increasingly engulfed by cosmic horror through the page’s panel layout. The main character sees a world over which shadowy tentacles gradually extend their reach, surrounded by speech bubbles announcing new horrors: ‘Massacres in Egypt,’ ‘Syrian bloodmath,’ ‘Acid attack victim!’ (n.p.). As the world is revealed to be entirely covered by tentacle shadow, the bottom of the page is filled by the repeated speech bubble: ‘Death Toll Horror!’ (Figure 1). Against this background, the page also contains a cut-out panel from a memory in which Nameless sees a magic symbol at the end of a corridor thought to be a ‘door to the anti-universe.’

Figure 1. From Morrison and Burnham, Nameless (2015). © Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham.

The cosmic war described in Nameless is narrated across competing timelines, overlaying geological time with the private time of dreams and hallucinations. In the timeline of the main character’s hallucination, the tech billionaire Darius directs a mission to the asteroid during which he and the rest of the crew are possessed by the cosmic being trapped there. Morrison and Burnham explicitly refer to the Hollywood asteroid apocalypse genre and other space exploration films, with the first issue’s cover referencing the film The Right Stuff (1983). At one point, the main character comments, ‘Planet Earth’s bravest and brightest. Here to save the world, just like a film’ (n.p.). In this way, Morrison and Burnham’s comic responds to the apocalyptic genre that has provided a basis for environmental science fiction’s imagination of Anthropocene futures.¹¹ Accompanying the mission to explore and divert the asteroid is the billionaire’s daughter Sofia, and an astronaut, Major Merritt, who is later revealed to be implicated in occult murders in the other timeline.

However, the multiple timelines introduced in the comic turn out to be irreconcilable. Darius organizes the ritual to make contact with the alien, but only the main character is responsible for the mass murder, for which he is in turn killed by Sofia. At another point in the comic, readers are reminded that the mythical 5^th planet never actually existed, and the cosmic war narrated at the beginning of chapter 6 through Tarot cards and the qabalistic Tree of Life takes place only on an allegorical register. The main character is revealed to be Sofia’s brother in the last pages, but more information about his identity or his past is not given. In one fragmentary panel, he appears on a tropical beach with Sofia, saying, ‘Ours is an overpopulated, under educated, shithole in the throes of mass extinctions – it’s a wonderful world’ (n.p.). Throughout the comic, the main character is asked repeatedly, ‘What is human?’, implying that the human itself is responsible for the violence committed against other humans and the Earth, and thus also inextricably bound up with the nonhuman. Through such examples, Nameless aligns with Morrison’s ecological vision expressed throughout his career in comics like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, and We3, among others.¹² As in Morrison’s other works, Nameless’s apocalyptic conclusion points to a more utopian alternative, in this case, the mystical union of dualities brought about by the asteroid’s potential collision with the moon in the final panel, and the death of the comic’s nameless hero.

Planetary time in Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees (2014–2016, 2020)

A number of comics written by Warren Ellis since the 1990s have been essential in developing techniques for planetary narration in comics form, including Planetary (1998–2009), Global Frequency (2002–2004), and Ultimate Extinction (2006, a reimagining of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original Galactus trilogy), among others. In the comic Trees, drawn by Jason Howard, gargantuan tree-like objects land suddenly on the Earth with devastating ecological consequences including pollution and flooding. In this way, Trees recasts anthropogenic climate change as an alien invasion, one from which human responsibility is completely evacuated. Indeed, it is here that the comic Trees is most recognizable as a cli fi narrative visualizing a future of environmental collapse.¹³

In the comic Trees, a planetary narration unfolds in comics form to represent the spatiotemporal scale of the planet.¹⁴ The three volumes of the comic follow several protagonists across the globe as they investigate the arrival of the Trees in different locations. The opening of the first issue of Trees shows the landing of the Trees in far-flung locations, from Svalbard and the Orkney Islands in the North to Somalia, Rio de Janeiro, China’s Sichuan province, Sicily and Manhattan. The Trees do not communicate with humans other than to occasionally release toxic waste that further contributes to the ecological devastation occuring in their wake. As in other alien invasion narratives, the arrival of the aliens occurs on a time scale beyond human comprehension and is entirely inexorable to human activity.¹⁵ In Trees, the invasion narrative places the origins of ecological devastation as the effect of an intentionality radically beyond human agency and understanding. In the face of this emptying out of human agency, the comic imagines human societies transformed by the ‘interzones’ (n.p.) that emerge in the areas surrounding the Trees. The enigmatic conclusion to the series suggests that the possibilities for survival glimpsed in the earlier issues are only temporary, as the Trees appear to function as electromagnetic transmitters, devastating their surroundings but preserving the data they have recorded in the form of electromagnetic ghosts.

The geographically disparate narrative arcs of the comic are connected by elliptical panel transitions in which black pansies appears at crucial moments to foreshadow impending destruction and a posthuman future (Figure 2). The comic reveals that the black pansy flowers that appear at the base of the Trees have the construction of radio-transmitters, preparing for a cataclysmically destructive release of energy and thereby signalling the deaths and posthuman rebirths of the characters. In the Manhattan narrative, a new mayor is elected on a platform of environmental justice in response to the arrival of the Trees. After a narrative arc in which the newly elected mayor is revealed to have cynically set police and protestors against each other in a violent confrontation, the arrival of a black pansy is shown in a panel filling the entire width of the page. The enlarged dimensions of the pansy contrast with the comparatively reduced size of the mayor and his reaction. By itself, the panel transition is incomprehensible but becomes legible in the context of the other narrative arcs in which the black pansies also enigmatically appear. In this way, the comic exemplifies the use of the comics form to narrate across planetary space through its elliptical panel transitions, which visually link narrative arcs spanning disparate geographical locations.

Figure 2. From Ellis and Howard, Trees (2014–2016, 2020). © Warren Ellis and Jason Howard.

One hypothesis for the functions of the black pansies comes from Dr Creasy, a researcher at a polar station on Svalbard, who explains that the Trees are preparing to send an electro-magnetic transmission to their home planet. Another explanation is given by an Orkney Islands archaeologist, Dr Greenaway, who postulates that the Trees descended on sites that would have been active centers of human civilization 5000 years in the past. Despite their remote locations, the Trees are thought to have arrived as observers, equipped to transmit their findings in the form of electromagnetic waves, but wiping out the human societies on which they have landed. Significantly, the Trees are thought to be uninterested in human life, and human life itself ‘feel[s]meaningless’ (n.p.) after their arrival, in the words of by Dr Marsh, a colleague of Dr Creasy. The search for meaning in the arrival of the Trees is itself seen as an act of human arrogance, as Dr Marsh, for example, dies after concealing the discovery of black pansy-like flowers at the Svalbard Tree’s base. In this way, the comic Trees functions as an Anthropocene narrative in which human and nonhuman life is depicted as data to be transmitted and received, meaningless on the scale of an individual lifespan.

While the first volume of 8 issues of Trees focuses on peripheral sites from the Global South, the second volume of 7 issues directs attention instead to the Global North. In Manhattan, the arrival of the Trees is shown to have caused dramatic scenes of flooding, resulting in atrocious police brutality as the NYPD shoot environmental refugees attempting to cross the waterline into Midtown. Jason Howard’s artwork for the comic portrays the arrival of the Trees through visual allusions to 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and Black Lives Matter. In this way, the political plot of Trees builds on the post-9/11 flood narrative of the earlier comic Transmetropolitan. Ultimately, Ellis and Howard’s Trees does not offer any resolution or final explanation for the purpose or significance of the Trees. Instead, the comic is composed through a planetary narrative using elliptical panel transitions to mark the gaps between characters and events.

Allegorical time in Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s the Many Deaths of Laila Starr (2021)

In the vein of the cosmic aesthetics of Anglophone science fiction and superhero comics, Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr is a graphic novel that uses the location of Mumbai to envision ecological futures in terms of a non-Western cosmology.¹⁶ As a comics creator, Ram V draws from and responds to the works of the ‘British Invasion’ associated with Moore, Morrison and Ellis. Like Moore’s Promethea, Ram V uses the character of Laila in The Many Deaths of Laila Starr as an allegorical figure for representing space and time beyond the scale of individual human life. In a narrative centerd on the South Asian subcontinent, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr depicts the human attempt to dominate nature alongside the cyclical time of death and rebirth represented by Laila. In the comic, Mumbai itself is identified with the main character, as in Andrade’s cover page for the first issue in which a giant-sized version of Laila is drawn with her body superimposed on the cityscape (Figure 3).

Figure 3. From Ram V and Andrade, the Many Deaths of Laila Starr (2021). © Ram V.

Throughout the comic, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr juxtaposes the linear time of a single human life with the cyclical time of death and rebirth. At the end of each of the comic’s chapters, the titular main character Laila Starr dies and returns, a cycle repeated at key moments in the life of a man born in Mumbai in the present of 2019 with whom Laila’s narrative is intertwined. Laila is revealed to be a mortal incarnation of the goddess of death engaged throughout the comic in an allegorical dialogue with the god of life. At the same time, Laila’s narrative is interwoven with the life of a scientist named Darius Shah who is said to be responsible for humanity’s scientific invention of eternal life. In the first chapter, the avatar of death is drawn to resemble the goddess Kali with dark blue skin and six arms and hands. The multiple allegorical timelines on which the narrative takes place are emphazised in the first chapter in which, after a brief prologue showing the city of Mumbai in the present, the comic shifts focus to death’s avatar, who has been called into the ‘top floor’ of a sterile office building described as ‘a high place, far beyond mortal clouds’ (n.p.). The goddess of death is then told by a three-headed god, ‘I’m afraid we’re letting you go … It’s not personal! We’re restricting the whole department.’ Here, the conquest of death is narrated sardonically as a consequence of the downsizing and restructuring typical of global capitalism. To ease her transition to the mortal world, death’s avatar is given a brochure advertising ‘a mortal world of possibilities’ in ‘an extraordinary life after godhood.’ Indeed, the corporate setting suggests a rationalized understanding of life and death, represented ironically by a three-headed god who bears resemblance to but is not named as the trimurti of South Asian religious traditions.

In this future, Laila and Darius’s narratives are interrupted by ecological catastrophes affecting the city of Mumbai, connecting the linear and cyclical times of the narrative with both planetary and historical time. The comic extends into the future of the late 21^st century, as Laila reappears at crucial moments in the life of Darius. The comic’s fourth chapter begins and ends with Laila’s serendipitous visit to the Kwang Kung Temple, the last remaining temple of Mumbai’s Chinatown, built in 1919 by Chinese workers who had come to work in the city’s textile industry. Here, Laila has a conversation with the temple’s god who relates the city’s forgotten history and provides her shelter during a devastating storm. ‘It’s raining quite … heavily outside, isn’t it?’ the temple god asks Laila (n.p.). The storm’s destructive force is indicated only by the pause indicated by the ellipsis in the speech bubble, followed by a newspaper headline presented on the following page, ‘Storm Kali Causes Devastation: Worst Flooding in Years Claims Last Chinese Temple in the City.’ Reading the newspaper, Laila remarks, ‘The article doesn’t even mention me. I was in there when the temple fell.’ (Figure 4) This juxtaposition is ironic since ‘Storm Kali’ can also be taken as referring to Laila herself as the Kali-like avatar of death. Maintaining the allegorical distance between Laila and the goddess Kali by separating them spatially, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr uses the comics page to juxtapose the time scales of individual, historical, planetary and cosmic times.

Figure 4. From Ram V and Andrade, the Many Deaths of Laila Starr (2021). © Ram V.

The comic’s ambiguous conclusion further emphazises the multiple spaces and times overlayed in the narrative. At the end of the comic, Darius has chosen to suppress his discovery of eternal life to maintain the necessary balance between life and death. Laila visits him a final time as an old man on the verge of his own death, no longer in Mumbai but in the coastal city in Goa. Laila finds that she is no longer interested in resuming her role as the goddess of death. As the narration box explains, ‘for time, a mortal construct, had changed her in ways she had not expected’ (n.p.). Having experienced death and rebirth herself, Laila understands human time itself as a ‘construct.’ For his part, Darius has fulfilled his role as a saver of lives as an amateur veterinarian who uses his skills to take in ‘hopeless cases’ and ‘keep them alive.’ Darius explains to Laila that he abandoned his invention because ‘Each heartbeat, every breath – is a rejection of death.’ Thus, the comic concludes with a rejection of the promise of overcoming death through science. The turn away from scientific progress is reflected in the change of locations from the hypermodern city of Mumbai to the beach in Goa, associated with a countercultural search for alternatives to Western modernity. The comic’s allegory of life and death concludes with a narrative caption asking, ‘Who is to say exactly how things end? If there is one thing we have learned, it is that life’s endings are bereft of answers.’ In this way, the comic’s allegory juxtaposes the scale of a single human life, marked by a beginning and an end, with other nonhuman scales.

As a postcolonial comic, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr responds to the predominantly Western allegories prevalent in Anglo-American comics. Rather than the narrative of an undifferentiated humanity operating on a cosmic or planetary scale, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr makes visible another Anthropocene narrative through the multiple time scales that intersect in the comic’s representation of Mumbai, its history and futures.

Conclusion

From early superhero comics to the present, speculative Anglophone comics provide numerous examples of strategies for representing the spatiotemporal scales of the Anthropocene. Though comics engaging with the Anthropocene in different forms and genres are too numerous for the scope of a single article, I have focused on speculative comics by well-known creators engaging with contemporary ecological discourses to describe how the spatiotemporal form of comics is used to represent Anthropocene scale in combination with speculative genres. As we have seen, the cosmic, planetary and allegorical times featured in speculative comics offer narrative forms for representing multiple temporalities through the spatial form of the comics page. Utilising the comics page as a spatial form in which different timelines and time scales can be embedded, speculative comics have throughout their history been able to develop strategies for representing spatiotemporal scales from the individual and historical to the cosmic and planetary. As we have seen, multiple spatiotemporal scales can be interwoven in speculative comics genres through numerous formal strategies, including the cut-out panels of Morrison and Burnham’s Nameless, the elliptical panel transitions of Ellis and Howard’s Trees, and the whole-page layouts of Ram V and Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr.

Science fiction, horror, fantasy and superhero comics exemplify the ‘speculative outhouses’ that Ghosh has described as characteristic for fictional representations of climate change. In particular, the verbal-visual techniques of the comics medium can link the time of the planet to individual human experience. If the Anthropocene constitutes a representational problem for what Ghosh calls ‘serious fiction’ (17), speculative comics genres offer representational strategies for visualizing the spatiotemporal scales of the ecological effects of human-driven processes in comics form. In particular, Ram V’s works draw from and respond to the allegorical form of speculative narrative prominent in many Anglophone comics, but through an allegory centerd on non-Western locations and cosmologies, calling into question an undifferentiated humanity responsible for ecological crises. Though not specifically identifying the characters of his comic with any specific South Asian religious traditions, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr uses allegorical storytelling in comics form to narrate the time scale of ecological breakdown in a future embedded with cyclical temporalities beyond the prevailing Eurocentrism of Anglo-American comics. Given the critique of Anthropocene narratives as reinscribing uneven and unjust hierarchies on a planetary scale, it would be better to speak of not one but many comics Anthropocenes to describe how the hybrid form of comics takes up the challenge of representing the multiple, asynchronous spatiotemporal scales of ecological crises.

Disclosure statement

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

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.”

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.’