Anthroposcenes: Towards an Environmental Graphic Novel

Abstract

In this article, I consider how two contemporary graphic novels, Richard McGuire’s Here (2015) and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive (2010), take up the challenge posed by the Anthropocene to represent both geologic and human scales. I argue that graphic novels prove a fruitful site for investigating the capacities of both visual art and literature to respond to such a refiguring of the boundaries of the human subject and narrative. While the most commercially popular and frequently studied texts in climate fiction tend to be novels or films, I turn from considering the patterns of genre fiction to the affordances of form. I explore how the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of the graphic novel form encompass environmental phenomena that are often difficult to visualize elsewhere, stretching beyond human perspectives. In particular, I show how the aesthetics of temporality, or visual time, in graphic novels encourages readings that take notice of the nonhuman presence in plots and narrative events. In arguing for the environmental, more-than-human implications of visual time in the graphic novel form, I focus on how representations of domestic habits and daily routines in Here and Radioactive are articulated within and implicated by unruly scales of time and space (too small and too large to contain). I argue that the aesthetics of time in the form of the graphic novel address representational challenges central to the Anthropocene, environmental justice, and slow violence, in particular, the mediation between the planetary and the domestic.