Drawing Eco-sickness: Industrial disaster comics, Postmemory, and The Minamata Story: An Eco Tragedy

ABSTRACT

The shared trauma and slow violence caused by industrial disasters alter the collective environmental memory of the surviving population. The survivors and victims of mercury poisoning are a case in point that exist as memorial remains of eco-sickness. Industrial disaster comics galvanise such discussions as concerns of environmental, social, and biological damage. The Minamata Story: An Eco Tragedy, written by Sean Michael Wilson and Akiko Shimojima, visualises the chaotic memories of the mercury poisoning disaster that ravaged the Japanese village of Minamata in 1956. Mediated through witness accounts and the research expeditions of the protagonist Tomi, the comic portrays the spatial landscape of Minamata as a container of memories. The Minamata Story illustrates the psychosomatic damage of the eco-crime on human body, and the resultant social vulnerability of victims in their post-disaster lives. It exposes the typical portrayal of the victims as toxic embodiments and assumes an empathetic perspective which is pitted against the medicalisation of the identities of survivors. The long-lasting nature of the biological damage qualifies the text as a case for intergenerational trauma and postmemory. Taking these cues, the present article analyses the representation of environmental memory, and reviews the visualisation of eco-sickness in industrial disaster comics.

KEYWORDS:

• Minamata disease
• industrial disaster comics
• environmental memory
• postmemory
• ecosickness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Rob Nixon defines slow violence as a ‘gradual violence of delayed destruction, dispersed across time and space’. The incremental destruction caused by ‘climate change, toxic drift, bio magnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes’ are instances of slow violence (Nixon 2009, 2).

2. Bioaccumulation is a gradual ‘accumulation of chemicals’ (Chojnacka and Mikulewicz 2014, 456) and its (toxic) impact on plants and other organisms through food chain.

3. Astrid Erll defines mnemonic premediation as ‘the anticipation of, preparedness for and coping with future events on the basis of remembered experience’ (Erll 2020, 864).

4. According to Harriet Earle, bleed is a commonly used technique in comics, especially in manga and manhwa, to define an image that is printed to the edge of the page (Earle 2013).

5. The concept of risk society, developed by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, defines the modern society as threatened by technological hazards as well as by distribution of pollution, contamination, and so on. This affects the socio-economic contexts of a society and creates a ‘risk society’ (Baxter 2020, 304).

6. Adriana Petryna in Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (2002) defines biological citizenship, ‘as a massive demand for but selective access to a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that both acknowledge biological injury and compensate for it’ (Petryna 2003, 6).

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Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for this article’s research, authorship, and/or publication.