Copyright

Susan M. Squier

Published On

2022-10-11

Page Range

pp. 299–322

Language

  • English

11. The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics

Chapter of: Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance (pp. 299–322)

How do we get the news about climate change to readers resistant to it? As a hyperobject, climate change is too big to think about, too traumatic to envision. Both imagination and reason recoil from this wicked problem. In this chapter, I survey a range of recent graphic narratives about climate change, showing how they address the narrative and aesthetic challenges posed by climate change by drawing on strategies specific to the comics medium. These climate change comics feature a narrative structure which see-saws between large scale non-fiction reporting and small-scale fictional interludes and an aesthetic strategy which toggles between a focus on the individual life course and attention to expansively scaled complexities. Presenting an affectively charged picture of the present while incorporating the biological discourses of ecology, epigenetics, and extinction, these climate change comics challenge our climate denial and offer a template for deep adaptation.

Contributors

Susan Squier

(author)
Brill Professor Emerita of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0061-8201
https://www.susanmerrillsquier.com/

Susan Squier is Brill Professor Emerita of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. From 2017-2021 she was Einstein Visiting Fellow, Freie Universität, Berlin. She is the co-author of Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015) and co-editor of PathoGraphics: Narrative, Aesthetic, Contention, Community (2020). Among her other works, she is the author of Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor (2017), Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontier of Biomedicine (2004), and Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994). Squier is co-editor of the Graphic medicine book series at Penn State University Press, and past president of the Graphic Medicine International Collective, whose mission is to guide and support the uses of comics in health. She is currently collaborating on a book on Comics and One Health.