The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) Sports Area invites submissions for NEPCA’s annual conference to be held online October 3 – 5, 2024, and in person at Nichols College, MA. Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday morning via Zoom. In-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning with broadcast via Zoom.

The U.S. South is often a forgotten space within ecocritical discussions, yet it provides fruitful ground for thinking about environmental issues. In 2019, in the first edited collection of essays on the topic, Zachary Vernon notes that focusing attention on this bioregion might help “provide a way out of the limitations of thinking too locally or too globally,” and it might inspire a group of stakeholders to come to the table as well (7). One problem with ecocritical approaches is the long history of representing the U.S. South as an “internal other in the national imagination: colonized, subordinate, primitive, developmentally arrested, or even regressive” (Watson 254).

Delineations of apocalyptic non/alternative futures have been popular in the comic mode, irrespective of the approach to the formalistic manifestation: manga, graphic narratives, visual novels and so on. In the 20th century, wherein humanity has been torn apart by repeated belligerences of modern warfare and violence, doomsday sagas have garnered sustained attention; whether it is MARVEL’s ‘Apocalypse’, or the cyclopean ‘mecha’ robots of anime. The recent pandemic perhaps has augmented the darker side of imagination. However, the objective of the proposed volume is not to further the extant discourse of the cyberpunkish, post-apocalyptic dystopia.