EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels

by Sidney I. Dobrin (Editor)

Overview

Exploring image and imagination in conjunction with natural environments, the animal, and the human, this collection of essays turns the ecocritical and ecocompositional gaze upon comic studies. The comic form has a long tradition of representing environmental rhetoric. Through discussions of comics including A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, We3, Concrete, and Black Orchid, these essays bring the rich work of ecological criticism into dialogue with the multi-faceted landscape of comics, graphic novels, web-comics, cartoons, and animation. The contributors ask not only how nature and environment are portrayed in these texts but also how these textual forms inform how we come to know nature and environment--or what we understand those terms to represent. Interdisciplinary in approach, this collection welcomes diverse approaches that integrate not only ecocriticism and comics studies, but animal studies, posthumanism, ecofeminism, queer ecology, semiotics, visual rhetoric and communication, ecoseeing, image-text studies, space and spatial theories, writing studies, media ecology, ecomedia, and other methodological approaches.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476666341
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	10/02/2020
Pages:	189
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sidney I. Dobrin is a professor and chair in the English department at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is the founding director of the Trace Innovation Initiative, which includes the comic form journal Sequentials. He has written and edited more than 23 books about writing, ecology, and technology.

Table of Contents

EcoComix: An Introduction Sidney I. Dobrin 1

The Threat of (Non)Normative Nature: Queer Ecology in H2O and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge Ashley Holland 11

The Middle Voice of EcoComix: Reading Philippe Squarzoni's Climate Changed Terry Harpold 29

Virtual Farmer, Real Activist? Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang's In Real Life Anastasia Salter 52

The "GUD," the "BAD" and the Biorg: Reading the Postanimal in We3 Melissa Bianchi 65

Follow the Concrete Submersible Sidney I. Dobrin 80

"Where You Create Life": Monsters and Nature in Black Orchid Spencer Chalifour 97

How the Comic Book Store Became Ecological Aaron Kashtan 111

Trees, Anti-Advocacy and Visual Rhetoric in Truax (A Parody of The Lorax) Madison Jones 128

Treacherous Fields and Bunny Girls: Representations of Nature in Yuu Watase's Alice 19th Catherine Kyle 146

Killing Oliver Queen: Environmentalist Meaning and Demeaning in Green Arrow Eric C. Otto 161

About the Contributors 175

Index 177