Comics of the Anthropocene
Tuesday, October 28
12:30 – 2 PM
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre Level 3 Room 301 (Peña Room) & Online
Pizza will be served to in person attendees.
A Zoom link will be sent to virtual attendees closer to the event date to the email address provided during registration.
Abstract
Weaving together insights from Critical Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Comics Studies and Affect Studies, this presentation explores the representation of animals, mass extinctions and climate change of the era popularly known as the Anthropocene in (mostly) US comics, primarily since 1970. How have artists dealt with the human-caused destruction of the natural world in graphic narrative, how do these representations manifest in different genres (superheroes, biography, underground comix, journalism), and what resources unique to the comics medium do they bring to their tasks? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues raised by global conversations about the anthropogenic sixth mass extinction and climate change? How have comics mourned the loss of nature over the last five decades? Animated by these questions, the study aims to break new ground in confronting our most daunting modern crisis, through an analysis of how graphic narrative has uniquely addressed the ecology issue since the first Earth Day in 1970.
Speaker Bio
José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published the monographs Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022); and Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature (UPM, 2025). He has also co-edited two essay collections, Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman, Leuven University Press, 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith, Penn State University Press, 2019). He formerly chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) and was a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society. His published comics and fiction include The Phantom Zone & Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020), The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl, 2023), Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023), Tales of Bart: A Novel in Three Acts (2025) and Moscow 93 (2025) (the latter three from FlowerSong Press). His current scholarly projects include a monograph on the representation of historical trauma in Czech graphic narrative.