I grew up on Disney’s Duck Tales (1988–) comics, casually enraptured by the adventures of ducks, mice, and dogs. Later, I encountered the chilling kind of rapture that comes with Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1992), a Shoah family memoir in comics form and likewise a page-turner with mice and cat protagonists. Yet another foray took me into abstract comics where blobs and squiggly lines were the only “protagonist” available. In hindsight, I appreciate how normal it is for comics to feature nonhuman agents. Comics invite nonanthropocentric characters and stories with a certain nonchalance, and they do so arguably not despite, but because they’ve been a marginal medium for a long time: The cover of a lesser literature left much space for artistic liberty. Add to that comics’ inherent multimodal complexity, that is to say, the fact that they stitch together images and text. By nature, then, comics ask a lot of readers. It should therefore not surprise us that, thematically and structurally, comics are well suited for complex topics including those that pertain to the relation between humans and the environment—the genre critics have termed “environmental comics,” “ecocomix,” or, as I do here, “ecocomics.”

Scholars have begun to take full account of this comics subgenre, discovering ever more ways in which it enriches the environmental humanities. Its literary value may be the most obvious promise: Ecocomics are an addition to the canon, responding fruitfully to the same questions environmental writing and ecocinema do. Its educational value is likewise apparent. Whether individual creators tackle scientific issues or entire organizations commission campaigns in comics forms, ecocomics are a potent tool for knowledge communication. Less known, but no less intriguing, are comics that act as a vehicle for doing rather than just presenting research. “Comics-based research” is one name for this new mode of inquiry.¹ If dissertations and academic articles can take the form of comics, then we might very well see more environmental research with panels and speech bubbles. While my essay focuses on the first, the ecocritical angle of comics, I hope that it also creates a curiosity for the educational and research potential of (eco)comics.

Comics invite nonanthropocentric characters and stories with a certain nonchalance not despite but because they’ve been a marginal medium for a long time.

The corner of a living room. A lush jungle. The entirety of planet Earth. These are not just three points on a spatial scale, they are the settings of three comic books,² Richard McGuire’s Here (2014), Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s Aranyaka (2019), and Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed (2014).³ Place is key not just to these comics but to ecocriticism in general. As the environment that shapes characters and plots and can take on agency itself, place is the natural entry point for ecocriticism into literary texts. This is no different in comics, which is one reason why these three books lend themselves to an ecocritical interpretation.

Aside from this, Here, Aranyaka, and Climate Changed all are book-length efforts that demand the reader’s time and attention, thereby displaying the confidence with which comics authors step on the scene today. The three books also examine environmental issues in intriguingly diverse ways and represent critically acclaimed works from the United States, India, and France. Thus, they showcase the production inside and outside the traditional comics powerhouses, which are located in the United States, France/Belgium, and Japan. Lastly, the three comics are also representative of the ways in which artists publish comics today. While Aranyaka’s creative tandem consists of a visual artist and a storyteller, the other two works are single authored. It is likewise telling that among the four creators, there is only one woman.

It is widely accepted that comics operate with a different expressive logic than other media and that they therefore require their own tools of interpretation.

While not all comics are environmental comics or ecocomics, all comics can be read ecocritically.⁴ The three works at hand have produced their own flurry of scholarly responses. Scholars have commented, for example, on the narrative structure and generic belonging in Here, spatial metaphors in Aranyaka, and analogies with grammatical voice in Climate Changed.⁵ Such an approach is a relatively new phenomenon, which has to do with the parent discipline’s own emancipation. It took until the end of the twentieth century for comics studies to legitimize itself through its medium-sensitive ways of analysis—to mature methodologically and institutionally. Now, it is widely accepted that comics operate with a different expressive logic than other media and that they therefore require their own tools of interpretation. A still image makes for a different experience than a moving one; meaning born from the interaction of images and written text demands reading strategies unlike those that combine, say, sound and spoken text. At the same time, scholars and artists alike had to advocate for comics as a serious means of expression, one that could carry home the Pulitzer Prize (as did Spiegelman’s Maus) and proudly take its place as the “Ninth Art” in the artistic (read “highbrow” cultural) pantheon.⁶

Many comics scholars even argue that their medium offers unique resonances with current ecological issues. The fact that text and image appear in tandem, for example, can activate not only different but also conflicting channels of meaning. Used strategically, as I exemplify below, such an incongruency can parallel the confusion that arises from the onslaught of ecological problems or, more abstractly, the unwillingness to align knowledge and action. Another ecocritical resonance of the comics format lies in its page architecture: Most comics arrange multiple frames on the same side thus demanding both a sequential reading and a simultaneous perception of the page as a whole. These two temporal logics coexist, just like complex environmental phenomena such as climate change happen both in causal cascades and all at once. All of this to say: Comics are ripe for a full embrace by ecocriticism. In what follows, I provide a quick and dirty tour through three comics to demonstrate some touchstones of an ecocritical reading. My aim is to offer a start to readers who want to learn about those comics and how to appreciate them with an ecocritical mindset.

The entirety of Here takes place in the corner of one room of a house—or its spatial equivalent—within a vague North American locale. Over 150 pages and a whopping four million years, the comic takes readers on a rollercoaster through deep time. What ensues is not one story but a coil of interlocking narrative threads. One appeal lies in the experimental layering of millennia and the challenge of establishing throughlines from the discontinuous and nonlinear story crumbs the author drops in our path. Another appeal is the dizzying diversity of landscapes, dwellings, and room fashions that unfold in front of our eyes. While the room is the narrative starting point and focus for the time that the house exists, landscapes take its place before and after (figure 1 and 2). Thus, Here weaves the human into environmental upheavals: While it shuffles through generations of Indigenous peoples, settlers, and modern and future families, the comic’s anchor is the locale in its drastically fluctuating appearance. From icescapes to grassland, swamps to open water, flooding to radioactive poisoning, from birds to sharks to fantastic future megafauna—this place brims with life and death.

With its ecological kaleidoscope, Here exemplifies one of the core questions any thematic approach to ecocomics poses: What environments do we see, and how do they shape characters and plots? The environment is ever-changing, agentive, life giving as much as threatening, disastrous by natural and human design. Climate change and environmental pollution play a role without defining the narrative. Similarly, humans may drive much of Here’s subplots, but they are ultimately one (even though particularly entertaining) species among others. The lasting entity is the place itself with its mind- and eye-boggling transformations. By putting before the reader’s eyes those vastly different forms of what “here” looks like and by showing how these different environments affect their inhabitants, Here exploits the visual and narrative affordances of comics to the fullest extent.

Place is both more specific and stable in Aranyaka. The Sanskrit title translates to “in the forest,” and that indeed is where most of the comic unfolds. An ecofeminist revisioning of Vedic myths, it is the quasi-autobiographical account of Katyayani, an ostracized woman who is sent to the woods for not complying with her community’s social standards. Her forest is both beautiful and unmaliciously brutal, an environment where Katyayani discovers ecosystemic wisdom including the intricacies of food chains or the growing patterns of tree canopies. About the latter, she muses: “There [in the forest], I learned to find pleasure anew. . . . I saw the luxuriant tree cover I had seen countless times before. The first time, I noticed the care trees took to ensure their canopies didn’t touch one another. Each searching for the best light, but giving the others space” (figure 3).⁷

This passage also exemplifies the agentic quality the forest takes on in this comic and thereby gets at another guiding question for ecocritical comics readers: Who, aside from humans, is a character and how so? Here, agency is shared and reciprocal; together with the ecological literacy, and arguably enabled by it, Katyayani also discovers her own agency. Patil represents her protagonist’s “profound personal and spiritual transformation” by visually assimilating her to the colors and shapes of her environment, a mimicry one could call “forestomorphization.”⁸ After not merely surviving but thriving in the jungle, Katyayani clear-cuts a parcel within the forest and defies human expectations again, this time her newfound husband’s, when she defends her supposedly inferior identity as gardener and cook rather than following in his intellectual footsteps.

In the forest as much as in her marriage, Katyayani never fully blends in, remaining a liminal being. She is in the forest, as the title suggests, but not of it. This is where Vedic philosophy sprouts ecocritical offshoots. One can read Katyayani’s romantic epiphany, “He is not me, why do I punish him for being different,” and her eventual separation from her husband as an ecophilosophical metaphor (figure 4).⁹ Just like Katyayani lives off, yet is not identical with the forest, just like she is complementary to but separate from her husband, humans can be part of ecosystems without either dominating or naively identifying with them. Aranyaka’s forest is less background than spiritual catalyst. It is the sphere whose cross-species community and competition allow Katyayani to grow. While it does not gesture to contemporary life, not to mention Anthropocene crises, it sticks out its branches to modern sensibilities by portraying human existence as different from, yet productively dependent on, environmental literacy.

The third work, Climate Changed, addresses environmental issues head-on. As the subtitle announces, Squarzoni wants to take readers on “A Personal Journey Through the Science.” Thus, Climate Changed answers the common ecocritical question of whether a comic takes a direct stance on ecological crises. This one sure does! At almost five hundred pages, the volume is an informational tour de force about the state of climate science in 2012, coupled with the author’s essayistic reflections. Condensing insights by French climatologists, economists, and journalists, Squarzoni ties together the geophysical basics with a critique of political, economic, and cultural systems. For example, he provides a thorough review of the impact of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on global temperature. He also discusses the connection to energy demands and consumption, especially in Western countries. As a middle-class Frenchman, Squarzoni does not shy away from looking at his own implication in the socioeconomic system that fuels climate change; he even shares with the reader his misgivings about flying.

The more-than-human world occurs in a twofold manner here: On the one hand, it is the capital-E Environment of climatology, the threatened natural systems that sustain life. On the other hand, Squarzoni peppers his book with intimate scenes that highlight how important immediate connections with animals and environments are for him. Beloved dogs, past and present, are leitmotifs in the book, as are the surroundings of his rural French childhood or the forest through which he walks pensively while trying to digest his insights. Despite his ostentatious (self-)educational goal, Squarzoni lingers on soft melancholy by the end of the book. “Of course, we’ll make this transformation one day,” he writes, “we will accomplish this change under the worst conditions. Forced by circumstance. And way too late” (figure 5). Still, he defends his project: “Just because the answer is filled with gloom doesn’t mean the question was pointless. To care how these questions are being asked shows that we care about the future” (figure 6).¹⁰ Squarzoni thus shares a candid self-reflection with us, the very embodiment of which is his book.

As these observations about Here, Aranyaka, and Climate Changed indicate, ecocomics touch on debates that lie at the heart of the environmental humanities. Thus, this artform is not just for the “comics nerd,” but for anyone fascinated by the knotty problems of the Anthropocene. Even these three examples allude to the many connections between the medium and the environmental humanities. We could further investigate the status the environment and environmentalist issues take in any one ecocomic, a spectrum that goes from en passant backgrounds to educational or even activist approaches. Environmental issues also cover a range of topics from interactions between or across species in the most general sense (e.g., stories about animals or human-animal encounters)¹¹ to Anthropocene crisis communication (think climate change, biodiversity, pollution).¹² Put differently: There is an ecocomic on almost any topic.

Furthermore, agency beyond the human has found a place in comics. Whether it is a forest teaching human protagonists about dependence and kinship, flooding that extinguishes whole landscapes and their inhabitants, or the geophysical feedback systems of climate change—humans are no longer unchallenged masters: neither of “nature” nor of “their” stories. Ecocomics also tap into a web of adjacent concerns, including ecofeminist perspectives, postcolonial considerations, or questions of environmental justice.

Lastly, and in a way related to these earlier observations, the evolution of ecocomics has given us subgenres. Thus, ecocomics mix with folklore and myth, speculative fiction (e.g., dystopia and utopia, the latter especially in the form of solar punk),¹³ (auto)biography, and memoir.¹⁴ With superhero comics, ecological topics also animate a quintessential comics genre. It is therefore almost logical that superheroes started to not only fight vague villains but also combat ecological wrongdoing. Another genre-specific aspect of ecoheroes (and villains) is that they often come in the shape of hybrids, merging human with animal or even ecosystem forms (think Poison Ivy or Swamp Thing).¹⁵ Even though ecoheroes (and villains) were more prominent during the subgenre’s golden days in the 1930s through 1950s, they still cast a caped shadow onto current publications, often as visual metaphors. For instance, both Squarzoni’s Climate Changed and Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain’s Le monde sans fin (2021), introduce a hero avatar with (questionable) superpowers. In both cases, these superheroes represent humanity’s near-magical energy concentration with the help of fossil fuels and sophisticated technology. Powerful might just be the opposite of sustainable, these heroes intimate, and real heroism might lie in the return to the human scale.

On a formal level, Here exploits the affordance of sequence in extreme ways; this book is anything but linear. Its zigzagging sequence asks us to stitch together cataclysmic events on a human and planetary scale (figure 7). Challenged to hold the often reverse-ordered moments in mind, readers need to find narrative throughlines aided by time stamps and visual clues such as period fashion or similar environments. Sequence and its hiccups are central to readerly engagement. One narrative strand, for example, piques and puzzles the reader’s curiosity about when humans started inhabiting the eponymous “here.” While, sequentially, the first Native Americans appear in 1609, McGuire makes us revise this onset multiple times when we encounter Indigenous peoples in 1553, 1402, and 1352.¹⁶ In unraveling the panel connections, Here questions the power of the one-after-the-other. Sequence is what makes reading this comic pleasurable, even if, or precisely because, we must become sequential detectives. McGuire does not stop at presenting events out of chronological order and superimposes time slices on top of each other in the same panels. Such temporal stacking takes nonlinear storytelling to the next level, a quasi-three-dimensional growth of time that simulates motivic and causal reverberations across decades or even eons.

Turning to Aranyaka, let us zoom in on colors, both in terms of the type of material used and the hues in different parts of the book as they steer reader reception in subtle ways. The effect of using watercolors is one in which brush strokes and pigment gradations remain visible, imbuing the pages with a procedural, “just-for-now” quality. The book thus meets the reader’s eyes with a soft, blurred layering, which appears sensually unpolished—much like its protagonist and the forest that awakens her. The forest itself is a space in which the blues of pools and the greens of foliage dominate, clearly distinct from the ochres, browns, and yellows of the agricultural homestead the protagonist later establishes with her family. While Katyayani blends in with the forest and the brown of the settlement at various points, she discards both mimicry options when a character named “the Weaver” arrives and clothes her in luxurious purple, “the color of the most torrid flowers” (figure 8).¹⁷ Katyayani thus forgoes assimilation with either sphere and blends the blues of the forest springs with the ochre of her domesticated life to arrive at a color signature that is both natural and her very own.

Climate Changed offers a plethora of text-image relations ranging from congruency to images that tantalizingly talk past their captions. Squarzoni uses the instrument of an incongruency between text and image to create an experiential, cinematic effect: Text and image are deliberately out of sync. Take, for example, the scene in which Squarzoni ponders the chances that humanity will address climate change adequately and timely. “We are living in a strange time,” he writes, “at a period of our history where a page has turned, but we’re not really aware of it” (figure 9).¹⁸ Over six pages, he illustrates his musings about social and political dynamics with images of a walk in a wintry forest, which shifts from glimpses of the snowy path to shots of Squarzoni’s avatar staring into the landscape. Here, we see not so much an outright mismatch between text and image as an experiential yoking; presumably, Squarzoni had these thoughts during a walk in the forest. The effect is akin to a voice-over during an atmospheric film scene. It also gestures to a sense of immediacy and self-awareness, an almost documentary technique.

Similarly noteworthy is the direct clash between image and text, another of Squarzoni’s hallmark techniques. Reporting on a 2013 poll in the United States about global warming, Squarzoni writes, “28% were unsure it’s even occurring at all.”¹⁹ This statement sits atop a complex image: On the backdrop of a US flag, we see the contours of an iconic photo from the Vietnam War in which a police chief shoots a man in the streets (figure 10). The gruesome scene is faithfully reproduced with one exception: Rather than a gun, the shooter holds the nozzle of a gas pump to the victim’s head. This image is an association more than an illustration. Even if the image gestures to the deadly force of climate change or to the propaganda machinery around politically charged issues, the image is still in visually and emotionally stunning contrast to its caption.  

As with thematic resonances, the formal view on ecocomics also ties in vital debates in the environmental humanities. The question of sequence and linearity, for instance, is key to understanding the sociocultural sources of our ecological crises. That sequences matter, and ever more precariously, is an insight on which phenologists are sounding the alarm when they trace, say, the climate-induced misalignment between herring larvae and their prey. Linearity, in turn, comes into critical view through the treacherous narrative of eternal technical, economic, and societal progress. Today’s ecological predicaments not only stem from a belief in linear progress (and the human and environmental price we are willing to pay for it), but climate change itself operates on nonlinear feedback loops that explode simplistic arcs of linearity and causality.

Or think of the ways psychological mechanisms parallel the foundations of comics, for instance in the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. Defined as an internal collision between values and behavior, cognitive dissonance blooms, for example, when one’s professed environmentalist beliefs clash with incongruent actions (think Squarzoni or myself going on transatlantic flights despite knowing their disastrous carbon footprint). Contradictions between images and texts embody such split mentalities, just like Squarzoni uses deliberately incongruent captions and illustrations. In the “This Is Fine” meme, cognitive dissonance has found an emblem that is often evoked in climate activism and, incidentally, is a cartoon or comic itself (figure 11).²⁰

Eventually, an ecocritical approach to comics often holds that there is an ingrained analogy between comics and ecologies. Hence, scholars pay close attention to the way ecological patterns dovetail with sequence and panel transition, drawing style and color choices, text-image relations, or the overall narrative flow. Not only does each of these artistic choices harken back to ecological concepts, the interaction across these elements also parallels the intimate or troubled interdependence ecologists find off the page.

As Here, Aranyaka, and Climate Changed exemplify, ecocomics are driven by many of the same concerns that animate other ecomedia. At the same time, the conceptual lenses we need in order to bring ecocomics into focus also differ from movies, images, or purely verbal texts. Comics literally frame their questions in medium-specific ways, and they do so in ways that materialize ecocritical topics before the reader’s eyes: The unruly temporal sequence in Here reverberates with the theme of ecosystemic transformations; colors and materials in Aranyaka translate the protagonist’s spiritual approximation to the forest; image-text tensions make unnervingly visible the knowledge-behavior conflict at the heart of Climate Changed.

Because ecocomics tap into widely shared environmental concerns yet refract those through their medium-specific vantage point, everyone can benefit from reading them.

Comics have a history of being considered “light fare,” but their multimodal richness enables artists to reflect on vexing and taxing topics. This advantage holds true in what many see as the most vexing and taxing topic today: our relationship with the more-than-human world. Ecocomics offer a unique vessel to address these questions in images and words. Because ecocomics tap into widely shared environmental concerns yet refract those through their medium-specific vantage point, everyone can benefit from reading them. Whether your reading biography includes the Duck Tales, Maus, or no comics at all, whether you are a comics scholar, art historian, or sociologist—as long as you are interested in our most wicked problem today, ecocomics will have something to say and show to you.

1. See, for example, Paul Kuttner, Nick Sousanis, and Marcu Weaver‑Hightower, “How to Draw Comics the Scholarly Way: Creating Comics‑Based Research in the Academy,” in Handbook of Arts-Based Research, ed. Patricia Leavy (Guilford Press, 2018).
2. Because I regard the label “graphic novel” as a commercial one, I use the term “comics” throughout this essay.
3. Richard McGuire, Here (Pantheon, 2014); Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik, Aranyaka: Book of the Forest (Tranquebar, 2019); Philippe Squarzoni, Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science (Abrams ComicArts, 2014). Originally published as Saison brune (Éditions Delcourt, 2012).
4. To get a sense of recent ecocritical comics scholarship, see, for example, Adele Haverty Bealer, “Graphic Environments: Performing Ecocriticism at the Confluence of Image and Text” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2014), https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6x95kj3; Sidney Dobrin, ed., EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels (McFarland, 2020); and the 2020 special issue of the comics journal Closure: Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung, no. 7, “‘What Grows in the Gutter?’ Eco-Comics,” ed. Victoria Allen, Cord-Christian Casper, Constanze Groth, Kerstin Howaldt, Julia Ingold, Gerrit Lungershausen et al., https://www.closure.uni-kiel.de/data/pdf/closure7/closure7_editorial_en.pdf.
5. Philip Smith, “Rhyming Events: Contested Narratives and ‘Cli-Fi’ in Richard McGuire’s Here,” Inks 2, no. 1 (2018): 38–48, https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2018.0003; Amrutha Mohan and Nair Anup Chandrasekharan, “‘Inside This Membrane Is Us. Beyond the Membrane, Them’: Spatiality in Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s Aranyaka: Book of the Forest,” Studies in Comics 14, no. 1 (2023): 213–38, https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00108_1; Terry Harpold, “The Middle Voice of EcoComix: Reading Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed,” in EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Sidney Dobrin (McFarland, 2020), 29–51.
6. Sylvain Lesage, Ninth Art: Bande dessinée, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0.
7. Patil and Pattanaik, Aranyaka, 76.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 100.
10. Squarzoni, Climate Changed, 455–56.
11. See the examples in David Herman, ed., Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190850401.003.0005.
12. See Hanna Harms, Milch ohne Honig (Carlsen, 2022); Nick Hayes, The Rime of the Modern Mariner (Viking Press, 2012); Heta Nääs and Noémie Ross, “Frozen-Ground Cartoons,” accessed 1 August 2025, https://frozengroundcartooncom.wordpress.com/.
13. See Zac Thompson, Emily Horn, Alberto Jiménez Albuquerque, and Adrian F. Wassel, No One’s Rose (Vault Comics, 2020).
14. See Cyril Pedrosa, Autobio intégrale (Fluide glacial, 2014); and Emmanuel Lepage, Un printemps à Tchernobyl (Futuropolis, 2013).
15. Just two of many examples from the US tradition are the Captain Planet and the Planeteers series (Marvel Comics, 1991–1992) and the Swamp Thing series (DC Comics, 1972–1976).
16. Squarzoni, Climate Changed, 98.
17. Patil and Pattanaik, Aranyaka, 109.
18. Squarzoni, Climate Changed, 439.
19. Ibid., 420.
20. Cartoons are a single-panel phenomenon; everything longer than that is a comic.