Ecocritiquing Graphic Narratives: Visual Representations of Nature in Global Comics [DEADLINE EXTENDED]
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.
