From Indigenous testimonies about extraction economies to eco-dystopian manga, comics across the world function as powerful visual laboratories for engaging with the natural world. The graphic form—with its unique interplay of word and image, its use of framing, juxtaposition, and sequentiality—stages ecological questions in ways prose often cannot. By dramatizing the temporality of both sudden catastrophes and slow processes of degradation, comics enable us to see environmental crises unfolding across multiple scales of time and space. They ask us to imagine multispecies entanglements, toxic futures, and alternative modes of dwelling, while also foregrounding human complicity in environmental collapse.

As a cultural form, comics have long addressed issues of land, resource use, industrialization, and ecological disaster. Works such as Orijit Sen’s River of Stories (1994), often considered India’s first graphic novel, chart the contestations surrounding the Narmada dam project. Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) documents the struggles of the Dene Nation in Canada against the predations of extraction economies, while Derf Backderf’s Trashed (2015) draws attention to infrastructures of waste. In a very different register, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982–94) envisions a toxic post-apocalypse where survival depends on multispecies cooperation and environmental remediation. Across such diverse examples, the comics form emerges as a medium deeply attuned to ecological precarity and possibility.

Comics studies has provided us with critical tools for analyzing how image and sequence create meaning. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1994) and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007) remain foundational in theorizing sequential art, closure, and spatio-topical relations. Hillary Chute’s Disaster Drawn (2016) emphasizes the ethical role of comics in representing trauma and witnessing, a perspective that resonates strongly with ecological disaster narratives.

At the same time, the environmental humanities have furnished conceptual frameworks—Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013)—that illuminate how we think about temporality, scale, and interconnectedness. Sidney Dobrin’s edited volume EcoComix (2018) represents an explicit attempt to bridge these fields, offering a set of approaches for reading comics through environmental lenses. More recent surveys, such as BOMB Magazine’s “Environmental Comics” (2022) and The Revelator’s feature on new graphic novels for the planet (2025), highlight the growing vibrancy of this intersection. Building on this work, this collection seeks to expand the dialogue by emphasizing global perspectives, Indigenous and local ecologies, and new methodologies for ecocritical comics analysis.

 We welcome essays on (but not limited to) the following themes and topics for an edited volume:

1. 1. Panel ecologies and environmental time

       

      • Sequencing, closure, and page architecture as visualizations of ecological temporality, from sudden catastrophe to slow degradation.

      • Intersections of comics theory with concepts such as Nixon’s “slow violence” or Morton’s “hyperobjects.”

       

   2. Transnational and planetary scales

       

      • Tensions between local ecologies and planetary systems (e.g., Heise’s “sense of planet”).

      • Archipelagic, oceanic, or migratory perspectives in global comics traditions.

       

   3. Indigenous sovereignty and extraction economies

       

      • Reportage and testimonial comics addressing resource conflicts and dispossession (e.g., Sacco’s Paying the Land).

      • Questions of witnessing, ethics, and narrative authority in environmental graphic journalism.

       

   4. Waste, toxicity, and infrastructures

       

      • Garbage, sewage, petro-cultures, and industrial pollution in comics.

      • Didactic forms—infographics, data pages, and paratexts—as tools for shaping environmental publics.

       

   5. Global South and climate justice narratives

       

      • South Asian, African, Latin American, and Pacific comics on floods, droughts, cyclones, and desertification.

      • Eco-comics as tools of resistance by small presses and activist collectives.

       

   6. Manga, anime, and graphic narratives of ecology

       

      • Eco-manga (e.g., Nausicaä) read through multispecies survival, remediation, and post-apocalypse.

      • Pedagogical uses of manga in classrooms and climate activism.

       

   7. Eco-dystopia, speculative futures, and hopepunk

       

      • Alternative and independent comics imagining ecological collapse and recovery.

      • Genre work—satire, horror, memoir—that mediates ecological affect.

       

   8. Graphic medicine and environmental health

       

      • Intersections of climate change, zoonoses, pollution, and human health.

      • Comics as representations of environmental determinants of illness and survival.

       

   9. Methodologies of eco-comics

       

   • Developing frameworks for “ecocritiquing” comics beyond textual analysis.

   • Indigenous methodologies, oceanic and cryospheric ecologies, experimental or multimodal forms.

2.  Teaching ecocritical comics

    

 Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts: 300–350 words, plus a short bio (200 words).

• Full Papers: 6000 words maximum (including references).

• Style: MLA Handbook, 8th Edition.

• Notes: Please insert endnotes manually if required; avoid auto-generated footnotes.

• Format: Microsoft Word (.docx).

Dates for Submission: 

• Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2026
  

• Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2026
  

• Full paper deadline: July 31, 2026 

Please send abstracts and queries to ecographicsandcomics@gmail.com