Ecocomics: Vivid Worlds in Images and Text

Abstract

The essay acquaints readers with an ecocritical approach to comics by close reading three recent “ecocomics”: Richard McGuire’s Here (2014), Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s Aranyaka (2019), and Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed (2014). After familiarizing readers with the genesis of ecologically minded comics studies, I survey how the relation between humans and the more-than-human world appears in these works, how nonhuman agency takes shape, and to what degree climate change is at stake. Formally, too, the three comics invite classic ecocritical questions: From the experimental sequencing in Here, the colors in Aranyaka, to complex image-text relations in Climate Changed, comics materialize key environmental insights not just for specialists, but for all ecocritics.