INTRODUCTION TO
ENVIRONMENTAL COMICS:

The intention of environmental comics is to position and support the environment as a significant character in our lives and stories rather than backdrop within sequential visual narratives.
Environmental comics considers eco-criticism, land-based art practices, folk memory, fairy tales, post-humanism, and intersectional environmentalism.

Five foundational facets of environmental comics are: observation, position, perspective, collaboration, and integration. These strategies ground dialogue around how sequential visual narratives examine their environments. These are simply points to build from and explore. 

Collaborative Stories

COMICS & STORYTELLING

In the most fundamental sense, comics are basically images read in sequence. The images are perceived to be in relation to one another, extending the narrative or material content beyond a single focal point. When text is included, text and image interplay and describe different aspects of the story. Comics are activated by relationality. Comics describe change and the spaces between conversations, beings, movement, time, and environment, by showing snapshots of moments in relation. The reader is asked to connect these relations.

Given this time of accelerated ecologic devestation, it is necessary to explore how cultural modes of production and storytelling impact and influence behavior and attitudes. Comics have long operated as a populist mode of communication, woven into the fabric of culture through American newspaper funnies, Japanese manga, and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées. They are an intimate, reader experience, and a global phenomenon, drawing upon the human ability to see and think in relation.

Environmental Comics proposes investigating how this medium can support narratives which sensitize audiences to this living planet and activate learning and responding accordingly to promote change.

This site exists as one response. Its goal is to pose questions and inspire the ongoing search for answers. It exists as an act of faith in the medium of sequential-narrative-art to be an agent in the world of ideas.