Graphic environments: performing ecocriticism at the confluence of image and text

My dissertation focuses on an ecocritical evaluation of environmental representation in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Ecocriticism and the graphic narrative share disciplinary similarities; both are hybrid forms that commingle seemingly incommensurable components (literature and the land, text and image), and both continue to evolve in complex and exciting ways. Using the familiar rubric of animal, vegetable, and mineral, my dissertation explores the theoretical underpinnings of ecocriticism's contemporary moment as it is illustrated in the graphic environment. Ecocriticism today is marked by an increased interest in postcolonial theory and by a posthumanist turn that has culminated in various species of speculative realism and new materialist theory. Following an introduction designed to juxtapose the development of ecocriticism with the evolving graphic and narrative conventions of comics and graphic novels, I turn in my first chapter to a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the graphic novel. Given the confluence of aesthetics and politics in a postcolonial theory, I invoke the work of French theorist Jacques Rancière as a necessary component of my ecocritical analysis of three graphic narratives featuring animal protagonists. My second chapter provides close textual and visual readings of two graphic novels whose vegetable-human hybrid characters provide models for applying Deleuze's theory of the rhizome and Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory to environmental representation. This chapter introduces key concepts that ground much of new materialism and serves as a bridge to my third chapter. Here, I weave together the threads of feminist materialism and object-oriented ontology in an ecocritical reading of three graphic novels that consider things from a thing's point of view. My conclusion shifts forward to an ecocritical reading of two graphic novels that provide global and local perspectives on the critical issues concerning environmental writers and theorists today, the ecological, social, and economic consequences of hyperobjects like global climate change and global financial collapse. Graphic narratives provide a uniquely effective representational medium for locating the contemporary environmental imagination and for illustrating the theoretical complexities beneath its surface. I argue that there is much work to be done at the confluence of image and text in the graphic environment.

GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS: PERFORMING ECOCRITICISM AT THE CONFLUENCE OF IMAGE AND TEXT by Adele Haverty Bealer A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah May 2014 Copyright © Adele Haverty Bealer 2014 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The following faculty members served as the supervisory committee chair and members for the dissertation of Adele Haverty Bealer . Dates at right indicate the members' approval of the dissertation. Robert S. Tatum , Chair March 7, 2014 Date Approved Howard Horwitz , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved Stuart K. Culver , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved Mary S. Strine , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved Leonard C. Hawes , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved The dissertation has also been approved by Barry Weller , Chair of the Department/School/College of English and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT My dissertation focuses on an ecocritical evaluation of environmental representation in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Ecocriticism and the graphic narrative share disciplinary similarities; both are hybrid forms that commingle seemingly incommensurable components (literature and the land, text and image), and both continue to evolve in complex and exciting ways. Using the familiar rubric of animal, vegetable, and mineral, my dissertation explores the theoretical underpinnings of ecocriticism's contemporary moment as it is illustrated in the graphic environment. Ecocriticism today is marked by an increased interest in postcolonial theory and by a posthumanist turn that has culminated in various species of speculative realism and new materialist theory. Following an introduction designed to juxtapose the development of ecocriticism with the evolving graphic and narrative conventions of comics and graphic novels, I turn in my first chapter to a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the graphic novel. Given the confluence of aesthetics and politics in a postcolonial theory, I invoke the work of French theorist Jacques Rancière as a necessary component of my ecocritical analysis of three graphic narratives featuring animal protagonists. My second chapter provides close textual and visual readings of two graphic novels whose vegetable-human hybrid characters provide models for applying Deleuze's theory of the rhizome and Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory to environmental representation. This iv chapter introduces key concepts that ground much of new materialism and serves as a bridge to my third chapter. Here, I weave together the threads of feminist materialism and object-oriented ontology in an ecocritical reading of three graphic novels that consider things from a thing's point of view. My conclusion shifts forward to an ecocritical reading of two graphic novels that provide global and local perspectives on the critical issues concerning environmental writers and theorists today, the ecological, social, and economic consequences of hyperobjects like global climate change and global financial collapse. Graphic narratives provide a uniquely effective representational medium for locating the contemporary environmental imagination and for illustrating the theoretical complexities beneath its surface. I argue that there is much work to be done at the confluence of image and text in the graphic environment. For my superheroes, Katie and Steve TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION: GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS............................................ 1 Ecocriticism: An Evolving Discipline.................................................................. 6 The Graphic Novel: At the Confluence of Image and Text ................................. 13 GRAPHIC Novels: The Aesthetics of Cartoon Art.............................................. 22 Graphic NOVELS: Narrative as Aesthetic........................................................... 35 Chapters 1 ANIMAL: OVERLOOKING THE POST-OTHER ............................................ 49 Connecting Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism Through Jacques Rancière.......... 54 Welcome to the Postcolony: Unworking Animals in Wounded Animals............. 60 Can I Get a Witness? Fable and Figure in Pride of Baghdad .............................. 73 Telling Tales: Novel Voices and Impossible Identifications in WE3................... 89 2 VEGETABLE: EMERGING ENTANGLEMENTS............................................104 The Rhizome and the Assemblage .......................................................................106 Minor Literature and the Mossy Man-Brute: Saga of the Swamp Thing .............112 Flowers Have Their Own Agenda: Black Orchid ................................................127 3 MINERAL: DANCING LIKE A MOUNTAIN...................................................143 The New Materialisms .........................................................................................144 Those Mute Materials: Garfield Minus Garfield .................................................145 A World of Fleshy Beings: Trans-corporeality in Chew: Taster's Choice..........167 Material Memoir and the Ecological Body: Paul Chadwick's Concrete .............179 CONCLUSION: MAKING ECOCRITICISM MATTER...................................202 vii Performing Ecocriticism After the Narrative is Over: Chasing The Massive ......205 Something Darker: Practicing Dissensus in Dark Rain .......................................224 Coda: Looking Ahead, or I Need a Superhero .................................................237 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................245 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project like this represents the confluence of many creative and intellectual currents. I must express my deepest gratitude to Steve Tatum, whose mentorship has been extraordinarily valuable. His frank discussion and thoughtful critique have sustained me throughout my academic career, and I cannot adequately express my appreciation for the room to roam he has always afforded me. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee members for their guidance and support. Mary Strine first set me on the path to graphic narrative, and her fierce intellectual curiosity has been a beacon to me. Len Hawes has been my constant interlocutor and his influence is consciously reflected in my work. Howard Horwitz and Stuart Culver have indelibly marked my pedagogy. Several individuals provided invaluable suggestions about specific graphic texts to consider for this project. I am especially grateful to Katie Whitlock, Tracy Bealer, Tony Poulson, and Walter Biggins for their generous engagement with my obsession. And finally, I want to acknowledge the support of my personal assemblage, my two- and four-legged family and friends, absent and present, whose understanding and encouragement have helped me to achieve a cherished ambition. I am and continue to be deeply grateful for our messy and magnificent entanglement. INTRODUCTION: GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS Ecocriticism and the graphic novel share an overlapping (and little noted) coincidence of attributes and arguments. Both are what Bruno Latour designated as quasi-objects, hybrid combinations assembled in the middle ground between well-established polarities: nature and culture, image and text (We Have Never Been Modern 77). Broadly sketching the outlines of ecocriticism as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment," Cheryll Glotfelty envisioned a chimerical blend of literary criticism and scientific theory, an interdisciplinary superhero with "one foot in literature and the other on land," able to "negotiate between the human and the nonhuman" while exploring the nuances of their intersection as represented in literature (Glotfelty and Fromm xix). The graphic novel is likewise a shifting combination of authorial text and artistic image-"more alchemy than science" according to Scott McCloud-another kind of assemblage that relies on the tensions and affinities between its constituent arts to animate its content (161). Both are primarily concerned with representation; the graphic novel provides its creators with a medium for conceptual expression, while ecocriticism critically analyzes and evaluates the representational strategies of multiple media. In yet another display of similarity, the respective practitioners of each discipline appear to agree to disagree about preferred nomenclature. While yielding to the widespread and conventional use of the phrase ecocriticism by other ecocritics, Lawrence Buell argued that the description "environmental" criticism 2 "approximates better than ‘eco' the hybridity of the subject at issue...as well as the movement's increasingly heterogeneous foci" on a variety of environments represented within a far more interdisciplinary matrix (The Future of Environmental Criticism viii). Patrick D. Murphy also elaborates on the notion of disciplinary diversity, pointing out that there is an equal need to "distinguish between the terrain of ecological criticism...and the distinct terrain of the literature itself," between Glotfelty's ground rules and the multiplicity of texts and genres in which the representation of the human/nature relationship is centrifugally or centripetally present (Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature 1). The descriptor "graphic novel" is a similarly slippery term: when does a "graphic narrative" (Will Eisner's term for "any story that employs image to transmit an idea") become a graphic "novel" (Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative xvii)? Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven express a preference for Eisner's terminology because of its broader application: "We understand graphic narrative to encompass a range of types of narrative work in comics," they explain, and their interest is aimed squarely at the medium's visual and verbal narrative practices (767). Alan Moore suggests that "comic work of more than 40 pages is automatically equated with a novel," and Roger Sabin seems to concur that "lengthy comics in book form with a thematic unity" is an adequate description, yet Sabin and other authors also point to industry binding techniques as the defining characteristic distinguishing the graphic novel from comics (Moore, Writing for Comics 3; Sabin, Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels 165).1 Both ecocriticism and the graphic novel suffer from (or benefit from, depending upon your perspective) the competing demands of their practitioners regarding the 3 adequacy of their respective representational strategies: the challenges inherent in trying to image the so-called natural world in terms of both its human and other-than-human participants, the relative predominance of image and/or text as the engine driving the graphic novel machine, and the questionable question of anthropomorphism in any form of environmental representation. And yet despite these and other similarities, to date there has been no sustained ecocritical exploration of the graphic novel as one of what Patrick Murphy notes are the "many ways of representing human engagement with the rest of nature in literary forms that do not descend from natural history, that are not written in prose, that are not nonfiction [and] that are not rhetorically structured as essays" (Farther Afield 2). When Buell makes his distinction between the terms "ecocriticism" and "environmental criticism," he actually suggests that the "eco" prefix "still invokes in some quarters the cartoon image of a club of intellectually shallow nature worshippers," conflating an overly simplistic definition of ecocriticism with what he clearly perceives as an equally unsophisticated representational medium not likely to be included in Murphy's "literary forms" (Future of Environmental Criticism viii, emphasis added). Douglas Wolk suggests that comics "are sort of literary. But that's not all they are...They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its own genres and traps and liberties" (14). Wolk offers this qualified description in order to suggest that comics criticism cannot rely solely on the language of literary or film criticism to adequately evaluate a medium that is neither wholly one nor the other. His caveat echoes Murphy's, whose claim that "ecocriticism is very much a movement, however, rather than a method" celebrates the diversity inherent in an evolving critical 4 discipline that relies on multiple theoretical perspectives (and not a single prescribed and proscriptive stance) to respond to an equally multiple and heterogeneous mix of texts (17). Wolk also wants to distance himself from Eisner's use of the term "graphic narrative," noting that "graphic" has unfortunate ties to "sexuality" and "violence" (60- 62). Yet it is precisely these bodily (and embodied) graphic elements that I would argue make graphic novels more valuable to ecocriticism's purported study of the relationships between matters human and nonhuman, cultural and natural. Sex and violence are as materially present in ecosystems and in environmental writing as they are in the most graphic artifacts of popular culture. Leslie Fiedler, in an often-quoted article first published in 1955, suggested that for all their crudeness, comics "touch archetypal material...they remain close to the impulsive, subliminal life," and he readily concurs with critics who label comics and other "vulgar art" as "sadistic, fetishistic, brutal [and] full of terror" (126-127). Edward Abbey writes with avid detail about his encounter with mating gopher snakes in the (then) Arches National Monument; he describes himself as "a shameless voyeur" who crawls on his hands and knees to "to get a closer view" (Desert Solitaire 20). In The Anthropology of Turquoise, Ellen Meloy's chapter "A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry" celebrates the pulsing colors and sinuous shapes of desert plant life-"slickrotica" is her evocative neologism for the vibrant red flowers she describes as "visual aphrodisiacs" (224, 226). In Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape, author Terry Tempest Williams and artist Mary Frank explore the erotics of an elemental embeddedness in an unexpectedly lush desert space. Frank's suggestive line drawings and color panels provide visual stimulation as Williams exposes herself to the mind's eye. I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water 5 turns my body and touches me with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought. Simply here. (23-24) Whether recording the first acts or the final ones of the cycle of life and death, both ecocriticism and comics do something-Glotfelty's imagined ecocritic "negotiates" between literature and land; McCloud's words and images "go hand in hand...like partners in a dance" (155-156). Like Abbey's "living caduceus," ecocriticism and the graphic novel "intertwine and separate, glide side by side in perfect congruence, turn like mirror images of each other and glide back again, wind and unwind again" (Desert Solitaire 20). In a passage that has considerable strength for my approach to an ecocritical analysis of graphic novels, Bruno Latour emphasizes the power of a quasi-object to act as a creative mediator, functioning between terms to produce something new even as it also re-presents its constituents-the hybrid's transforming ability to make us see or hear or think about something we have not before (We Have Never Been Modern 77-78). Critical analysis that insists on teasing this partnership apart, that wants to evaluate each part using the conventions of either one or the other, runs the risk of neutering the power generated by their interweaving. "In this way," Latour notes, "the middle was simultaneously maintained and abolished, recognized and denied, specified and silenced" (78). Subordinated to its individual components, the hybrid's unique identity and powerful performance is cancelled out. Latour advocates instead that "we start from the middle," focus our analysis on the hybrid quasi-object and how its resonating complexity enhances its constituents' capacities as well as its own (81). His solution is to eliminate the borders or boundary markers between those dialectical poles, to identify the quasi-object in the fullness of its constituents: to abandon the impulse to 6 bracket off Nature from Culture because "[c]ultures-different or universal-do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison" (104). An ecocritical approach to the graphic novel should not begin by separating literature from land, human from nonhuman, image from text. Instead, the potential for each lies in the boundary blurring performance of these polyform, transgressive, mediating chimera. Where the graphic novel draws on the polysemic and heteroglossic synergies of image and text, ecocriticism, imagined as riding the gap between culture and nature, mediating between the represented and the real, likewise feeds on the productive dissensus among its assembled parts. Ecocriticism: An Evolving Discipline The time should come when we ask of any text, "What does this say about the environment?" (Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature 5) In their foundational 1996 collection, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Glotfelty and her co-editor, Harold Fromm, prompted by increasing concerns about the negative impacts of human activity on the natural world, assembled a montage of scholarly essays on fictional and dramatic literature to celebrate critical engagement with environmental representation. This early anthology was soon followed by other likeminded and increasingly heterogeneous collections. In 1998, Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells published Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism & Literature, a transatlantic anthology emphasizing the dialogic commingling of British and American authors "to see what old narrative forms made of environmentalism, and whether new ones are emerging" and valorizing boundary crossing between theoretical and textual practices ("Introduction" 5). Laurence Coupe's The Green Studies Reader: 7 From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, published in 2000, combined traditional literary critique with Marxist, structuralist, and cultural theory, while broadening the array of ecocritical textual objects under consideration to include fantasy fiction and film. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace's Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001) explicitly challenged ecocriticism to increase its textual sampling to include "texts that might seem unlikely subjects because they do not foreground the natural world or wilderness," texts from multiple genres set in urban environments and degraded landscapes ("Introduction" 5). At the same time, other ecocritical anthologies began to display a kind of specialized evolution; 1998 also saw the publication of Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy's edited collection, Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, and the next decade would see an invasion of anthologies that similarly exploited a more specific theoretical or thematic niche. Murphy's Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature (2000) brought narrative theory to bear on both multicultural and postmodern literatures. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy (2002) was a watershed collection, in which editors Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein engaged with a wide range of authors and texts "to examine the issues, events, cultural productions, and educational initiatives emerging from the environmental justice movement worldwide" ("Introduction" 4-5). Ursula Heise's Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) expanded the outer limits of ecocriticism, using prose fiction and science fiction to "point to ways of imagining the global that frame localism from a globalist environmental perspective" (9). In 2010, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin followed with 8 Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, a conjoining of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism designed to "demonstrate the knowledge of non-western (non-European) societies and cultures" by "reaching out across languages and cultures" to address global exploitation of human and nonhuman peoples and environments ("Introduction" 16). 2011's Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, added another dimension to ecocriticism's polyvocal and multihued aspect. With its examination of such disparate textual species as novels, television shows, political movements, and community parks, this anthology exemplifies the kinds of boundary-crossing and genre-blending only imagined in those early visions of ecocriticism as a manifestly hybrid discipline. Yet despite this optimistic portrait, ecocriticism's evolution has not followed a smoothly linear (and vertical) trajectory. Much like comics' Gold and Silver Ages, ecocriticism's evolution can be thought of in terms of thematic iterations or, as Lawrence Buell notes in his 2011 article, "Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends," imagined as a series of consecutive and yet overlapping waves. It is perhaps ironic that Buell, whose preference for the term "environmental criticism" over that of "ecocriticism" on the grounds that the "eco" prefix suggests a homogeneity of both content and intent not really in keeping with the diverse representational environments it critiques, would select such a monistic metaphor for his discussion of ecocriticism's thematic stages. The difficulty with using organic metaphors is precisely their tendency to smooth over the centripetal and centrifugal tensions that continuously animate (and agitate) ecocritical discussion; Grant Morrison's discussion of the various "ages" of the superhero comic recognizes more adequately the interpenetration of each aspect with those before and after it. 9 In its first flowering, ecocritical literary criticism (produced largely by Western authors and taking Western literature as its subject matter) focused on (predominantly nonfiction) texts in which nonhuman nature shared (and in some cases, overshadowed) the stage with human actors.2 Ecocritics utilized the tools of literary criticism to evaluate those representational strategies and worked to expand the literary canon to include neglected/overlooked works of nonfiction nature writing. At the same time, some practitioners demanded that ecocritics demonstrate an increased environmental literacy, turning to evolutionary biology and ecological science to help shape a more scientifically informed critique of the adequacy of literary representations of local and regional ecosystems. Second-wave ecocriticism reflected the impact of the theoretical turn in gender studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies on literary theory in general and on environmental representation in particular, as theoretically inclined ecocritics called attention to the social and cultural construction of a Nature too often concealed beneath Baroque layers of mimetic representation. This heightened awareness of social construction also prompted some ecocritics to engage more fully with the political implications of issues of environmental pollution, political policies, and potential social injustice. Buell's overview concludes with a speculative discussion of what he anticipates as ecocriticism's third wave, which he bifurcates into two trajectories: an extension of Western environmental justice initiatives into a more global postcolonial environmentalism, and the simultaneous growth of interest in a more materialist engagement with transgressive environmental pollution, as exemplified in ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo's work with "trans-corporeality" (Buell, "Ecocriticism" 88-97). More recently, in the January 2013 online issue of The Journal of Ecocriticism, Scott Slovic, 10 editor of ISLE, heralded "a new fourth wave of ecocriticism" that has emerged around "the theoretical and practical aspects" of "material ecocriticism" ("The Roots and Branches of ASLE" 5). Although Buell confidently asserts that from its inception, "most [ecocritics] would have granted readily enough that ecocritical work might comprehend any and all expressive media," collections of environmental representation only gradually diversified their content ("Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends" 89). Early anthologies of nature writing reflected a sort of local homogeneity, predominately featuring the work of mostly Western-male-authored nature-oriented fiction and nonfiction. The 1990 Norton Book of Nature Writing was edited in 2002 to include a wider range of gender and ethnicity in its authors, but featured only prose texts. Lorraine Anderson's Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose & Poetry About Nature (1991) attempted to balance this trend by featuring only female authors and by including poetry along with more traditional prose selections. Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O'Grady's Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture (1999) attempted a more diverse collection, using prose, poetry, personal narrative, essays, and cultural commentary to flesh out a thematic array of nature-oriented and environmental writing. Volumes of ecocriticism have followed along similar lines, concentrating first on explicitly nature-themed or oriented prose fiction, then expanding the field's coverage to embrace poetry, nonfiction, and a wider array of cultural voices and critical objects. Armbruster and Wallace's Beyond Nature Writing concluded with critical essays under the heading "Expanding Ecocriticism across Genres and Disciplines," evaluating works of science fiction, film, educational programming in our National Parks, and the virtual landscapes of online gaming. Ursula 11 Heise's Sense of Place and Sense of Planet specifically challenges "current U.S. environmentalist discourse, ecocriticism included" to adopt a more eco-cosmopolitan perspective (59). 2011's Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century is, in this respect, a far more ambitious attempt to address a much broader array of "missing links" in its coverage of expressive media and materials. Noticeably absent from the contemporary ecocritical scene, however, is a sustained engagement with the graphic novel as a platform for environmental representation, as an avatar of the various waves of ecocritical evolution, and as a compelling pedagogical vehicle. This is particularly surprising because comics seem to have responded to public concerns about environmental issues far sooner than ecocriticism's somewhat belated appearance in the 1990s. In Supergods, comics writer Grant Morrison points out that by the 1970s, "stories about Indian land rights, pollution, overcrowding, and women's lib...[t]he new anxieties of America and the West at the end of the sixties were stamped directly onto the pages of the comics" (152). By the 1980s, titles like Larry Marder's Tales of the Beanworld and Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot set the stage for Alan Moore's reboot of Swamp Thing, "an ecological fable" that resurrected its literally green hero as "a sort of ‘god of vegetation'" and "used the comic to comment upon US gun laws, feminism and multinational economics" (Roger Sabin, Adult Comics 76-77). Raymond Briggs's When the Wind Blows, a 1982 graphic novel that poignantly depicts the insufficiency of an elderly British couple's dutiful (and doomed) response to a nuclear attack ("Well, we survived the last one. We can do it again...Yes, we must always look on the bright side, ducks"), is as viscerally compelling as Rachel Carson's "Fable for Tomorrow" in 1962's Silent Spring. Patrick Murphy notes that "postmodernist forms and 12 media technology have also increased the frequency of the appearance of hybrid forms, such as mixed-genre books and combination art and text works, as well as video, film, and mixed-media presentations," and he urges ecocritics "to have a concept of aesthetic representations inclusive enough to be able to comment intelligently and critically on such works" (Farther Afield 54-55). Tim Morton, whose Ecology Without Nature is subtitled "Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics," points towards art's value as a critical environmental resource in his more recent book, The Ecological Thought: Ecocriticism has overlooked the way in which all art-not just explicitly ecological art-hardwires the environment into its form. Ecological art, and the ecological-ness of all art, isn't just about something (trees, mountains, animals, pollution, and so forth). Ecological art is something, or maybe it does something. Art is ecological insofar as it is made from materials and exists in the world...But there is more to its ecological quality than that...Ecology permeates all forms. (11) As a literal and material "combination of art and text," the graphic novel offers a doubled capacity for environmental representation and engagement. It can afford us a profoundly hybrid perspective on the world we share with multiple others. "What the mixing of the text and image often does," Linda Hutcheon notes, "is to underline, through the use of direct verbal address to a viewer, the fact that, as a signifying system, pictures too represent both a scene and the look of a viewer, both an object and a subject" (131). It is time, then, that we move on to explore more precisely how the graphic novel performs to engage us more intimately with what Morton would claim is our always already interdependence in an ecology that is "profoundly about coexistence" (The Ecological Thought 4). 13 The Graphic Novel: At the Confluence of Image and Text Put simply, art involves a new combination. (Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari 146) The graphic novel combines images and text to tell a story. Graphic novels come in a variety of lengths, formats, and genres, and, like ecocriticism, suffer from critical dissent over descriptions of precisely what constitutes this textual format.3 They are written for a variety of audiences, from juveniles to adults to "mature audiences only," and their content ranges from original stories to adaptations of other primary texts, movies, television programs, and video games. Graphic novels evolved from traditional comics, and their aesthetic structure combines the artistry of cartoon art with the narrative strategies of the novel. Where ecocriticism concerns itself with the representation of the intersection of human and nonhuman in a range of different environments, the emerging discipline of comics criticism focuses on comics "as a site where words and images intersect" (Varnum and Gibbons x). Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics represents a landmark in American comics criticism (much like the Glotfelty and Fromm anthology of ecocriticism), mounts an argument that echoes Latour's. McCloud lauds what he describes as comics' "silent dance of the seen and the unseen," their ability to "go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone" (92 italics original, 155-156). McCloud focuses his critical attention on the power of this assemblage of word and image as both a combination of distinct elements and as a functioning system in its own right; his impulse is to explore the power of this hybrid by emphasizing its collective functionality, rather than by redefining it in terms of its elemental constituents (92). Not all comics critics agree with McCloud's sentiments: Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons, in their introduction to the edited collection The Language of Comics: Word 14 and Image, specifically take issue with McCloud's both/and approach. They find his argument contradictory, and they suggest instead that comics must be viewed "either as a single, integral system of signification or as a hybrid (whether freakish or not) made up of the separate elements of painting and writing," and their useful collection presents essays that support each side (xi, my italics). I prefer McCloud's willingness to begin, as Latour does, "in the middle." His contention, that "no other artform gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well," suggests one of the reasons why graphic novels, as a representational medium, might well serve as a productive and provocative source for ecocritical analysis (92). Ecocriticism cannot evaluate the mere adequacy of environmental representation in the texts under its consideration, particularly now in the face of accelerating global warming, demands for corporate environmental stewardship and accountability, and dwindling nonrenewable resources. Ecocriticism also needs to consider how some texts reignite our environmental imagination, providing us with creative scenarios in which we actively rise to meet those challenges. Graphic novels do not simply invite their readers to observe their intricate dance of text and image, word and thing; comics readers become active participants, supplying what Will Eisner describes as "both visual and verbal interpretive skills" to connect multiple images and bits of text into a comprehensive whole (Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art 2). I have argued elsewhere that ecocriticism should incorporate some aspects of performance theory in its reading of textual artifacts in order to explore more fully the performances represented therein and to deconstruct the performative consequences of those representations.4 McCloud stresses that closure, the reader's compulsion to construct a whole from an observed series of fragments, to grasp 15 the narrative from a comic's juxtaposed sequences of pictorial panels and word balloons, is a critical component of comics' aesthetic experience. He believes that our capacity for closure is an evolved response to our embedding in an "incomplete world" where our survival (and that of our environment) is dependent upon our ability to make connections between actions and consequences-a kind of Darwinian instinct that demands that we actually get the picture rather than simply consume it passively (63). Douglas Wolk points to the "immersive experience of comics" as a key factor in the pleasure offered by this particular medium; comics readers actively enjoy "filling in all the blank spaces beyond each panel"-a kind of readerly wayfinding that maps performance onto text (132). Wolk provocatively offers walking as a metaphor for readers' engagement with the distinctive progression of comics' sequential panels: "each step is a fall that's caught by the next" (131). The potential for one panel's content to arrest the assumptions we read into the panel adjacent to it (clearly, unlike film projection, comics panels can be read in or out of sequence-but more about that later) is a critical component of this metaphor. Thoreau devotes the opening paragraphs of his essay "Walking" to a discussion of "the genius" (and the genus) "for sauntering," for "the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks" (Emerson and Thoreau 71). Thoreau prefers as the likely origin of the term the French expression for medieval pilgrims walking towards the Holy Land, "à la Sainte Terre," over the phrase "sans terre, without land or a home"-he emphasizes the grounded performance captured in the former over the unanchored aimlessness suggested by the latter (71-72). Thoreau's Saunterer is no Everyman with no particular place to go, always already at home regardless of his surroundings. "Every walk is a sort of crusade," 16 he argues, motivated by a need to "go forth and reconquer" the very specific and Holy ground beneath his feet: to renew and to re-know the environment as it reveals itself in the actual performance of walking (72). Readers of graphic novels find themselves in similar territory. Comics are "full of enticing blank spaces, in both space and time, for readers to decorate...but what they look and feel like when we flesh them out isn't the same way we perceive our own environments" (Wolk 133). The realistic specificity of some pictorial panels can be interrupted by the words that precede or follow them; the seemingly straightforward claim in a word balloon can be belied by the image it accompanies. What we see on the comics page is not our own immediate (and notice that I do not mean here "unmediated") perception of the world around us, but rather an overtly mediated representation of some world by some person or persons other than ourselves. We are not merely vagrants wandering a fully rendered imaginative world whose premises we accept without question, whose environment we fall into without pause. Instead, we are what French political, literary, and aesthetic theorist Jacques Rancière calls an emancipated spectator, able to "translate what she perceives in her own way" (The Emancipated Spectator 16). Comics readers go forth into these graphic environments and make them their own in an aesthetic and intellectual sense through their performance of closure; as a result of comics' specific representational tactics, we renew our acquaintance with what Wolk describes as "a metaphorical representation" of our own "image-world," one that can sometimes be more transformative than a more realistic, but perhaps more restrictive, presentation (134). "Images," Rancière notes, are "operations: relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to 17 meet them" (The Future of the Image 3). Rancière's aesthetic theory discloses how images and text sometimes produce moments of destabilizing dissemblance, engaging the viewer in a suddenly unfamiliar experience that opens the door for a productive reimaging of relationships, a suggestion of alternative futures. Take, for example, the graphic short story, "A Billion Conscious Acts," included in the fifth collected volume of writer/artist Paul Chadwick's long running series, Concrete (Think Like a Mountain 151-156). Chadwick's half-ton hybrid hero has a mortal mind inside an alien (in both senses: utterly unfamiliar and constructed by interplanetary visitors) body. As the series develops, Concrete presents an evolving eco-consciousness that makes him an appealing subject for my interest (he will be a feature attraction in Chapter 3, "Mineral"). Also useful here is the fact that Chadwick is both author and artist of this comics series; image and text go hand-in-hand, proceeding from the same hand, and Chadwick's comments on his own process and practice are often instructive. Concrete is an attentive and emancipated saunterer, whose alien-enhanced eyesight (he can see with extraordinary clarity, even from a great distance and at night) compensates for the sensory disabilities that come with his mineral-like exterior. Thoreau "would fain return to my senses" when he walks, but Concrete has no senses of taste, touch, or smell-along with great strength and endurance, his acute vision is his most valued almost-super power (Walking 78-79). Dislocated from his original human body, he sees everything anew...and we are invited to do so as well. In "A Billion Conscious Acts," we take a walk in Concrete's enormous shoes, seeing his oversized footprint on the ecological macro- and microverses in which we all coexist. Chadwick's opening panels deftly juxtapose the irony of our inadvertent impact on the natural world (in the 18 unconscious consequences of our billion conscious acts) with the billion interactions that go on beneath our notice (Think Like a Mountain 151). Directly beneath his enormous descending foot, Chadwick strategically positions a tiny Concrete on the gutter between two panels, one where we look down on the footprint to come and one at ground level, where we are suddenly inside that same footprint. Concrete's now tiny legs cross from the macro view to the micro perspective, and we are invited to consider ourselves as simultaneously having an enormous impact on the world and as being influenced by it; little Concrete is on equal footing with the acorn in the second panel. In the next series of panels, Concrete walks unheedingly away while Chadwick's graphic eye takes us deep inside the billion intersections and intra-actions that pay Concrete (and us) no attention whatsoever. Chadwick also calls attention to the very constructed nature of this representation; wasp larvae are growing inside that acorn, "springtails...as small as the crossbar of the ‘h' in this line," which "you will probably never see" (Think Like a Mountain 153). "Concrete walks on," Chadwick narrates, and steps into a puddle, an image poised at the lower right corner of the right-hand page, the point at which we will turn the page...and the point at which our ready anticipation that we will zoom into that puddle's ecosystem is fully arrested by the text and image of the succeeding panel. "But that's another story," the narrative cautions us, and the image is of some indistinguishable landscape, one where felled trees are burning and we can just make out tiny humans and tiny vehicles on tiny roadways (Think Like a Mountain 156). Chadwick artfully uses this moment to segue into an argument about the vanishing tropical rainforest, and the ultimate consequences to the global ecosystem from a billion conscious acts of deforestation and resource extraction. "Perspective is 19 everything," Concrete advises us elsewhere, because "we make decisions based on what we see around us" (The Human Dilemma 9). Perspective is an artistic choice, not a given; in a visual medium, it can shift quickly and radically as panel focus changes from the distanced third-person perspective of the traditional anonymous observer to close-up shots only available to one character's point of view. Illustrators Steve and John Totleben repeatedly interrupt and overlay individual panels in Alan Moore's The Saga of the Swamp Thing, embedding one character's viewpoint in that of another. They also experiment with the affective qualities of form, using diagonal panels rather than the linear and horizontal arrangements of traditional comics, to convey a sense of urgency and movement to reader consciousness and to the narrative situation.5 Constantly shifting points of view can produce a sensation of double consciousness in the reader, who must negotiate between seeing (and reading) a character as a subject in one panel, as an object in the next. Recall again Chadwick's deliberate perspective shifts, from above and below, from within and without, from the local viewpoint to the global perspective in "A Billion Conscious Acts." The reader sees the graphic environment in two different ways, as a participant and as a spectator, as a contributor to its ecological state of being and as the beneficiary (or victim) of those actions. In the briefest of spaces, only six pages, Chadwick has made the local unfamiliar, the global unsettlingly nearby. Using the power of image and text, he renders our consciousness a springboard for rethinking our relationships with the environment, and suggests that while saving the rainforests will not be a walk in the park, "it will be worth it"...for the environment's sake and for our own (Think Like a Mountain 156). This is the hybrid power that an ecocritical consciousness can locate in the environmental imagination of the graphic novel. 20 Graphic novels, like their more abbreviated progenitors, comics, rely not on photorealism but on drawn images to suggest (rather than to "capture") not "a direct representation of the world" but rather "an interpretation or transformation of the world, with aspects that are exaggerated, adapted, or invented" (Wolk 20). Tim Morton, writing specifically about environmental aesthetics and about ecocriticism's limited engagement with artistic practices, proposes that "art forms have something to tell us about the environment, because they can make us question reality" (The Ecological Thought 8). I believe that graphic narratives are an ideal art form for showing and telling us something more about our perceptions of our environments, our engagement with them and the extent of our impact on them-more, perhaps, than we consciously intuit from our actual day-to-day experiences. They would fain return us to consciousness; they invite us to pay attention to the billion tiny experiences we pass by unaware. They animate the very issues that Ursula Heise suggests must be interrogated in an ecocritical exploration of the "natural, urban [and] virtual" environments we encounter every day ("Unnatural Ecologies" 166). They vibrate with what Marion D. Perret identifies as "graphic liveliness"-that compelling urgency that flows out of graphic images set in motion by "the dialectic between word and image" when an artist "draws for the mind as well as the eye" (123). Like any pictorial medium, graphic novels are subject to the hazards often associated with images: the reductive consequences of using stereotypes, the naturalizing effect of deploying myth to convey meaning, and the depoliticizing result of relying on "recognizable reproductions of human conduct" that assume a common readership with a shared pictorial vocabulary and a common sense of the world reproduced in the 21 visual/textual environment (Eisner, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative 11). At the same time, however, some graphic novels attempt a more nuanced negotiation of the interstices between the image and the text, exploring the genre's capacity for transgressing its apparent limitations. These texts embrace the immanent ambiguity necessary to produce an aesthetic experience that promotes the play of disparate identities, active self-reflexivity, and heteroglossic dissensus-an experience where politics might flourish. The graphic novel's capacity for germinating this aesthetic and political ecology deserves ecocritical attention. Globalization's long reach and monologic narratives produce the appearance of a discursive unity that occludes multiple persons, places, and things in the rush to represent a world consensus. Graphic novels invite their readers to experience the world through not only other, but Other senses, a repositioning that radically destabilizes assumptions, re-presents a virtual present, and gestures towards an alternative future. This creative web of words and images affords a lively zone of continuous play for imaginative anthropomorphism that invites new voices to the contemporary global stage.6 "Art's ambiguous, vague qualities will help us think things that remain difficult to put into words," Morton claims, and "art can allow us to glimpse beings that exist beyond or between our normal categories" (The Ecological Thought 60). Part of ecocriticism's engagement with the graphic novel's particular power will be to consider more closely its aesthetic performance. GRAPHIC Novels: The Aesthetics of Cartoon Art Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time. (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 43) 22 Scott McCloud's classic exploration of the aesthetics of "sequential art," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, uses the comic book format to conduct an "examination of the art-form of comics, what it's capable of, how it works" (i). McCloud's text provides a useful starting point for an exploration of the graphic milieu with and against which the narrative is read. As the precursor to the graphic novel, comics provide "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" (9). Cartoon art's production of an aesthetic response depends in part on the degree of realism used in iconic resemblance; the more abstract an icon becomes, the less specific is its referent and vice versa (McCloud 27). McCloud suggests that the simplicity of comic characters is the source of their aesthetic power and that "the cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled" (36). This masking effect entices the reader to enter the comic story and to engage with the other elements represented in the sequential frames that depict the environment of the text. McCloud also contends that the juxtaposition of simplified cartoon characters with elaborate and realistic backgrounds creates an opportunity for identity, understood as self-awareness, to flow outward from the mind through the senses, extending that awareness to the body and to the enveloping environment (38-41). This somewhat simplified layering of Marshall McLuhan on Descartes nevertheless persuasively underpins McCloud's provocative notion that comics invite readers to inhabit a character-as-mask while "safely entering a sensually stimulating world" (43). Engaged both intellectually and sensually, we literally and physically experience the world of the graphic novel. 23 McCloud argues that cartooning is not "just a way of drawing, it's a way of seeing," a critical argument that I will return to repeatedly in my arguments (31). The graphic novel integrates the visual conventions of cartooning with its narrative forms to explore alternative ways of seeing and saying, surely a productive combination for environmental representation. Advocating the need for art forms that do more than simply re-present their subject matter, art theorist Simon O'Sullivan suggests, "We see only that which we are interested in. At stake with art might be an altering-a switching-of this register," and he goes on to reimagine an art that accomplishes more than simple reproduction, an "art [that] operates as a form of play," one "that takes the participant out of mundane consciousness" (47-48). The reader's immersion in the sensory world of the graphic novel can produce something like the transgressive experience of virtual identity, the performance of what Walter Benjamin considered "the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else" (qtd. in Taussig 19). Graphic novels depend upon our "mimetic faculty...the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other," and the writer/illustrator team provides the vehicles that accommodate these "Othering impulses" (Taussig xiii). The illustrator makes some characters available for role-play while denying that option for others; in the same way, some settings may be richly detailed, vital elements of the narrative, while others are merely sketches, reduced to backdrops foregrounding the actions of the graphic novel's protagonists. Some characters immediately offer themselves as avatars, while others are more realistically drawn, foreclosing viewer identification because of their specificity; it is also possible to use a greater degree of detail to suspend the reader between empathetic assimilation and 24 disidentification, to interrupt our seamless desire to inhabit a character by making that character both inviting and disturbing, both welcoming and uninhabitable. In Paul Chadwick's Concrete series, the title character is an anomalous hybrid, "one hapless rock-coated fellow," with whom the author (and the reader) wants to ask, "What might really happen to someone whose life was so changed...What would I do in his shoes?" (Depths 4). Chadwick's title character is rendered with deceptive simplicity and surprisingly rounded contours, given his rocky exterior. In a sense, Concrete is colorless, odorless, and tasteless; if he is not without gender, he is decidedly without genitalia. This is not realism-Concrete's appearance and carefully crafted origin story make him the perfect Everyman. Instead of being repelled by his alien exterior, we are drawn into the seeming openness of his black-and-white outlines-Chadwick invites us to enter his experience, to share his point of view, and frequently to find ourselves, like Concrete, the brunt of a gentle irony that challenges his (and our) habitual assumptions. Consider Chadwick's 1986 short story, "Under the Desert Stars" (Killer Smile 109-116). Concrete plans an overnight stay in a remote desert location, planning to use this time for contemplation (he is reinventing himself as an environmental writer and memoirist). In the opening panels we look over Concrete's shoulder (adopting at once his perspective) and then immediately shift perspectives to see him from a distance, waving goodbye to his human companions disappearing with the vanishing point. In the large title panel immediately below, however, Chadwick thrusts us outside of Concrete's consciousness. His diminished shape, too small for us to enter, approaches; he is wholly self-absorbed while we are invited to see in some detail the California desert. A condor soars overhead, and an iconic saguaro cactus anchors the panel, and if we look closely, 25 we can identify other iconic desert flora and fauna (the distinctive silhouette of the Joshua tree, rocky outcroppings, a road runner, a lizard, and a scorpion). One minute we see with Concrete, the next we look at him; Chadwick's drawings actively move us inside and outside the character, and we step into his body even as we remain aware of it. This is performance; like an actor donning a role, we are conscious that we are imaginatively performing as Concrete without actually becoming Concrete (Carlson 3). In this story, Concrete is consciously trying to perform as a writer, and much of his dialogue is concerned with thinking about himself performing a role he is not altogether successful in inhabiting. We do the same here-we are not Concrete, and yet again sometimes we are; sometimes we see through his eyes and at other times, we see with our own-and that sort of switching of perspectives performatively reinforces the graphic novel's value for thinking both ecocritically and environmentally. Concrete describes his trip to the desert as "transplantation to nowhere," immersion in an environment where he thinks there will be little to distract him from his writing (111). Chadwick deliberately juxtaposes perspectives; Concrete's alien eyesight may be superior to ours, but the irony is that we see what he fails to notice, the others populating this anything-but-empty space (111-112). Concrete's imagination runs away with him (and ultimately with us) in this story. He sees someone dump a large bag on the side of the distant highway, and we are carried away with his speculations. When his trembling hands reach towards what surely is a body bag, we are Concrete, inside his massive body, seeing with those piercing eyes. We turn the page...and we are again looking over his shoulder, seeing something neither of us expected. Chadwick's tour de force here demonstrates the ability of image and text to entangle us in role-play that is both conscious and unconscious, challenging our 26 assumptions and yet making us aware of them at the same time. "I find the desert stimulates my imagination," Concrete says self-consciously at the end of this story, and we know intimately what he means and how he feels. Contrast this approach with the hyperrealism of Grant Calof and Eric Eisner's H2O, a cautionary environmental graphic novel intended to dramatize the ultimate desertification of the Earth after years of global drought. Jeevan J. Kang's meticulously rendered color illustrations provide little more than scenery for an on-location action-hero story whose muscular-but-sensitive heroes and busty-but-brainy women enact "a new chapter, a new evolution-a new consciousness." One character offers a radical solution to the planetary water shortage whose potential side effects include planet-wide "volcanic winter." His proposal is appealing only because, as he says, "Our way of life is already finished." There's no deliberation, no hesitation: in the next panel, the deal is done. The reader experience here is cinematic: we watch these characters but do not enter into their consciousness; we empathize with their dilemma, but in the end it's their "new consciousness," not ours, and what counts is decisive action, not deliberation. At issue here, I think, is also something Chadwick says about the intra-action between image and text. In his introduction to the 2006 reissued Think Like a Mountain, he talks about his frequent use of what he calls "occasional silent panels," panels that achieve what he describes as "the quality of unique moments" in fiction, moments I would argue that invite that deductive and productive role-play. "Words tend to tie up the package with a neat bow," he argues. "You ‘get it,' so you don't contemplate it, as you would a painting" (5). In their zeal to convey a message about the need for changing consumption patterns to avert the kind of global crisis that motivates H2O, Calof and Eisner resort to didactic 27 dialogue that tells us exhaustively what their characters think, but leave us little room to let our own environmental imaginations flow out of their actions. Their chatty hero cites his own authority ("Like I said..."), abruptly ending further discussion and engaged consideration. Chadwick, on the other hand, is a master of using simple line drawings whose lack of detailed realism gives us room to think. At the conclusion of "Objects of Value," another Concrete short story included in the 2006 Think Like a Mountain, Concrete finds himself questioning the effectiveness of individual local recycling against the larger global scale of wasteful practices. In an image that is frequently repeated in Chadwick's various stories, Concrete reacts in exasperated despair and is then depicted sitting motionless on a hillside, carefully considering his own response in a series of silent panels. He sees someone else picking up discarded cans; he thinks to himself, "You're swimming upstream kid" (Think Like a Mountain 164). In the next panel, we see an aluminum can in the foreground, Concrete dragging a large sack in the background. Again, no dialogue, no narrative...he is thinking for himself, just as we are. In the final half panel, we see a hand (Concrete's? Ours?) reaching for that can. The text signals "The End," but the partial panel suggests that this is only a fraction of what must necessarily be a larger effort. No decision is made for us, but we certainly are invited to do our part. These "artistic practices" perform what Rancière names a "distribution of the sensible," the partitioning of what is seen and what is said, of who is included and who is excluded, in a specific time and space (Politics of Aesthetics 12 - 13). Rancière, whose aesthetic theory will animate much of my analysis in Chapter 1, implicitly distrusts consensus, which he defines as a mono-vocal overstatement ("Like I said") that silences multiple dissenting voices, and his topographical approach to aesthetic analysis focuses 28 on identifying the ways in which representations are designed to present either consensual or dissensual voices. One of the weaknesses, I think, of Calof and Eisner's artistic practice, is to imagine that an environmental problem, no matter how pressing, could be so easily dealt with by consensus, by a single, authoritative voice that presumes to speak for all. The effect of Kang's illustrations in H2O is to show perspective without giving voice to it. One of the strengths of Chadwick's imaginary is his frequent representation of Concrete dwelling in the middle of some contradictory moment. Concrete tends to approach environmental issues like recycling or consumer choices or issues of population growth from a position of uncertainty, and Chadwick illustrates these issues as difficult problems composed of multiple factors that demand multiple perspectives. The power of comics comes from the intra-action of word and image: in the interplay between their unique strengths and weaknesses and in their collectively dynamic capacity. An over-reliance on realistic character depiction closes off our access to that sort of dynamism, and places us on the sidelines in the graphic environment-a stance we may too often inhabit in the material environment of our actual world. Aesthetic practices that do more to exploit that ambivalent openness in the heart of the icon, to access the vacuum at its core (instead of prematurely foreclosing it at its outlines), invite us to cross character boundaries and to both see and speak from subject positions which were previously unavailable to us. We may even find ourselves seeing and hearing others whose presence we never expected. Michael Taussig suggests that there is yet another potential consequence of mimetic identification, an invitation to a further doubling. If I can inhabit the character as icon, it has also taken hold of me, and "now I too am part of the object of study" (Taussig 29 8). As the reader's gaze flickers from the level of participant to the level of observer, she experiences a kind of becoming-icon; she discovers that she is the object of her own gaze, an Other to herself. In moments like these, the graphic novel interpellates a subject position that is both co-performed and co-performative: neither one nor the other, the comics reader becomes hybrid, is chimera. Rancière notes the political and theatrical effect of this doubled framing of fictional subjectivities. He describes this recursive, twinned perspective as the "introduction of a visible into the field of experience, which then modifies the regime of the visible" (Disagreement 99). If politics emerges out of this startling visibility and audibility, what might this mean for readers who are made visible to themselves simultaneously as environmental object-subjects, as entangled subject-objects? I should point out here that Tim Morton, in Ecology Without Nature, mounts a very different argument about the ultimate failure of "ambience," an argument that seems to contradict Rancière's valorization of an artistic practice that confers visibility on the previously unseen. "Ambient poetics is about making the imperceptible perceptible, while retaining the form of its imperceptibility," he describes, "to make the invisible visible, the inaudible audible" (Ecology Without Nature 96). Discouraging the use of ambient poetics is part of Morton's larger aesthetic argument. His emphasis is on the idea of retention, on an artistic practice that brings something into the foreground while ensuring that we never forget that it is really always in the background. His argument is that ambient poetics is doomed to fail because even as it works so diligently "for a dissolving of difference between subject and object," it cannot help but reinforce it (Ecology Without Nature 63-64). I would argue that Rancière's interest in the political valence of aesthetic practice accomplishes something quite different. Rancière is not 30 invoking the materialization of a ghostly presence in order to posit some future equality of shared being; he is pointing to aesthetic practices that recall to our attention the visible we do not see, whose coexistence and ontological equality we have actively suppressed or unconsciously overlooked, the disappeared. Environmental aesthetics must restore our sense of the more-than-human collective of which we are a part and with whom our coexistence is inextricably entangled. The aesthetic vitality of graphic novels is also derived from the performative demands that their artistic practices make on their readers. Reader literacy affects interpretation and requires a material investment from those readers; we have to learn how to read the graphic text. Panel borders often challenge traditional Western left-to-right reading priorities, and the overarching demand is that readers find ways to read images and texts together rather than prioritizing one over the other (Gravett 11). Hegel advocated art that demanded observer participation, noting that "interest only occurs as a result of fresh activity" that continued to "work away on an object so long as it still contains something hidden, not manifest" (qtd. in Potts 56). Engagement with the graphic novel involves effort at both the intellectual and the sensual level; dramatic shifts in perspective challenge reader participation-sometimes, our eyes deceive us, and sometimes, that is precisely the effect that is intended. On multiple occasions, Chadwick shifts perspectives on Concrete's rough exterior to emphasize how easily we can be mislead artistically: up close, we see a boulder or the surface of the moon-look again, and we see his familiar stone face. Graphic art forms resemble film in this manipulation of perspectives from varying angles and standpoints, but they also differ from film in a key respect. Film relies on the 31 phenomenon of "the persistence of vision" to enable the viewer to read a series of discrete images as an uninterrupted "story of continuous motion" (McCloud 65). We apprehend film unfolding as a linear forward stream, unaware of our vision's contribution to its apparent seamlessness. Sequential art, on the other hand, by virtue of its aesthetic structure, allows us to read its images bidirectionally and assumes our active connection of those separate panels; while the narrative may incline us to a linear reading, our eyes move more selectively through the panels on a page. Because comics' sequential panels are all visible simultaneously, as McCloud points out, in comics the present, past, and future coexist on every page-a juxtaposition that can interrupt our assumptions about simple chains of cause and effect, or at least bring them more visibly to our attention (McCloud 104). On page after page, the graphic novel artist gives us a series of image panels separated by what is called "the gutter," the space between those panels (McCloud 66). The gutter marks an interval between the dramatic action depicted in one panel and that of the next, an apparently uncoded and unstructured gap that our imagination must either complete or cross over. Comics theorists do not agree on the gutter's functionality or its importance to the medium. McCloud suggests that there is "a kind of alchemy at work" in this empty space between panels, where our natural impulse towards closure prompts us to fill up the gutter with a kind of conceptual adhesive; closure refers to our almost irresistible impulse to sequence, to close the gap between sequential images, "endowing them with a single overriding identity" (73). Comics artists exploit our need for connection; they place possible disparate, random images side-by-side, clearly separated by this visual chasm, and "force the viewer to consider them as a whole. However different they had been, they now belong to a single organism" (McCloud 73). 32 Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen views the gutter as predominately a formal device that serves a separative function; he does not share McCloud's insistence that it "plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics" (McCloud 66). Groensteen argues instead that the gutter is merely a boundary line that indicates where one panel ends and another begins, a line of demarcation that can be literally just a line (112). McCloud argues that closure, "the agent of change, time and motion," can only occur in the invisible empty space between the panels, performed by the reading audience; his emphasis throughout is on the local effects of reader collaboration (65-73). In Groensteen's comics system, "the ultimate signification of a comics panel does not reside in itself but in the totality of relations in the network that it maintains with the interdependent panels" that make up the comic as a whole (53). The agency McCloud perceives in the juxtaposition of images, Groensteen attributes to what we might call the persistence of narrative. It is not the adjacency of images that engages my need for closure; instead, "it is the continuity attributed to the fictional world that allows me to effortlessly fill in the gaps of the narration" (11). My reading of the power that circulates at the heart of a hybrid suggests that they are both right; closure flows from (and is often interrupted by) both the graphic and the textual narratives. Groensteen also imagines another kind of continuity flowing across the comics system he has elaborately analyzed. Included in that totality of relations is what he calls "iconic solidarity...the central element of comics," a multiplicity of relationships between independent images that he terms "arthrology," from the Greek word for articulation (18- 21). In Groensteen's The System of Comics, comics "is not only an art of fragments, of scattering, of distribution; it is also an art of conjunction, of repetition, of linking together" 33 (22). Repetition of iconic motifs across a graphic novel is, for Groensteen, the foundation for the phenomenon of "braiding," which "manifests into consciousness the notion that the panels of a comic constitute a network, and even a system"; the effect of this repetition is that "images that the breakdown holds at a distance, physically and contextually independent, are suddenly revealed as communicating closely, in debt to one another" (Groensteen 158). He imagines comics as a kind of graphic ecosystem whose seemingly distinct and disparate fragments coexist in a complexly entangled mesh, dependent upon and impacted by each other's actions. Comics are made up of images, images whose first relationship is "the sharing of space" (Groensteen 28). Comics use space to convey the notion of change, to deploy memory in the service of time, to represent motion in an intrinsically static art (McCloud 115). When we read a series of comics panels, changes in environmental details can subtly convey to us the passage of time; when Chadwick shows us Concrete mulling over the recycling problem, he also gives us clues about the duration of his thinking time. In the four relevant panels, the background shading progressively darkens, and in the two central panels we see the sun dropping in the sky behind him. Concrete is immobile, but we know that time has passed (Think Like a Mountain 164). At the same time, there is something else present in this series of four small panels. Chadwick has woven into this specific and local story an image that resonates throughout his Concrete series. Look closely at Concrete's body here, and you will see in his immobility the repetition of a familiar position. His hunched, seated figure graphically recalls Rodin's "Thinker." Concrete's immobile mineral body could be read here as a metaphor for the mind/body dualism that has haunted our engagement with the natural 34 world since at least the time of Descartes. His body is alien-made; Concrete is an alien to himself. His mind is the only "human" thing left of his identity-it is only when he thinks that he therefore is still human. In this specific series of panels, Concrete is deliberating over his response to a very local problem, but I can argue that Chadwick is also deliberately linking us intertextually and intergraphically to multiple moments in the Concrete system; he uses the power of iconic solidarity to braid many discrete moments into a more global network of representation. "Braiding" can only occur if meaning does not stop at the borders of isolated panels (Groensteen 147). Groensteen's meticulously enumerated dissection of the components of this comics ecosystem begins with the panel (as a specific local site) and widens outward to the relations between framed panels on the page (which can be thought of as a larger frame or region), and finally to a broadly global view of the comic as a whole. At the same time, he argues that graphic motifs are both local (viewed independently in their individual panels and on a single page) and global (repeated iteratively or perhaps with significant differences across multiple panels on different nonadjacent pages). His arguments harness the local/global tension that animates much of contemporary environmental writing. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula Heise challenges ecocritics to embrace an environmental imagination that rethinks the global as "a kind of collage in which all the parts are connected but also lead lives of their own" (Sense of Place and Sense of Planet 64). Groensteen's braiding is both a visual aesthetic practice and "an essential dimension of the narrative project," one that "incites translinear and plurivectoral readings" (Groensteen 155). Graphic novels do not survive on image alone; their vitality depends on the work of a collage made possible by its distinctive components. "Graphic liveliness," Marion Perret argues, "does not come 35 solely from physicality, but is intrinsic to the dialectic between word and image" (123). In the graphic environment, it is the confluence of image and text that matters. Graphic NOVELS: Narrative as Aesthetic Images and text arrive together, work together, and should be read together. (Paul Gravett, Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know 11) Graphic novel theorists expressly acknowledge the importance of narrative to this particular medium of sequential art, many citing the cohesiveness of the story line and the unity of its plot structures as the features that most distinguish the graphic novel from its comic book cousins.7 I should stress, however, that while graphic novels may rely more heavily on narrative to generate "a composite, well-organized structure whose construction implies careful textual design on the part of the author(s)," the increased proportion of text to image does not necessarily translate into linear plot structure or a single perspective (Di Liddo 20). Textual design works with and against the artistic design of the graphic novel to produce a structure that is both contradictory and complimentary, one that encourages a playful ambiguity to circulate through its narrative environment. Narrative in this context is truly hybrid, at once visual and verbal. Tim Morton argues, "Art's ambiguous, vague qualities will help us think things that remain difficult to put into words," while Rancière speaks to the other half of my equation, asserting that "words deploy a visibility that can be blinding" (Morton, The Ecological Thought 60; Rancière, The Future of the Image 7). Words can, as we have already seen, foreclose the multiple potential that flowers in the heart of the icon. Rancière, however, also emphasizes the aesthetic power of what he calls "the sentence-image." Sentence and image together can also "undo the representative relationship" between the two, upsetting 36 our traditional assumptions about the power of the sentence to make visible the connections between actions, the power of the image to give "flesh and substance" to the actors (The Future of the Image 45-46). "When mute images begin to speak," W. J. T. Mitchell speculates, "words seem to become visible" and "media boundaries dissolve" ("Word and Image" 60). The hybrid graphic narrative captures this ambivalent power and uses it to give a new twist to the novel's heteroglossic potential. Heteroglossia (the term is Bakhtin's) often becomes visible in the graphic novel in narratives that are as historically and fictionally referential as the images that they accompany. Using intertextual references that link contemporary storylines with other graphic novels as well as with other texts, and with actual cultural and historic events, graphic narratives resonate with multiple voices. Grant Morrison's Animal Man is based on a little-known superhero from the 1960s, a character he chose to reinvent "as a mouthpiece against cruelty to animals and the general degradation of the environment"; the character is now undergoing yet another iteration in the Jeff Lemire/Travel Foreman contribution to DC Comics' "New 52" series of superhero reboots (Supergods 217). Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing had its genesis in a much earlier text, the original Swamp Thing series that first appeared in 1971, and Moore consciously deploys and distorts the earlier storyline in his reimagining of the classic monster comic (Di Liddo 50). Paul Chadwick's Concrete series is purposively referential, interweaving the voices of canonical nonfiction nature writers (most notably Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold) with his fictional hero's budding environmental activism. Many graphic novels feature a mix of human and nonhuman characters, commingling the images of their respective actions and perceptions with anthropomorphic voices that compel/repel reader identification-I 37 will explore both aspects of this graphic heteroglossia in Richard Starkings's Wounded Animals, one of the graphic novels featured in Chapter 1. In the uniquely blurred space occupied by animal protagonists, the human voice emanating from a nonhuman character is doubled; as Bakhtinian translator/scholar Michael Holquist points out, a human voice ostensibly "gives the illusion of unity" to what it says, but in reality it expresses "a plenitude of meanings, some intended, others of which [the speaker] is unaware" (xx). Readers may read this species discourse as "a ready-made symbolic economy" that is deployed in narrative to stand in for human issues like gender and race, but the same double consciousness that impacts our response to the graphic novel's visual shifts also plays with our participation in the narrative (Wolfe 8). A heteroglossic narrative structure allows species discourse to both function as metaphor and to stand on its own, both as our human voice and as a posthuman voice that can "serve to generate and keep open those very possibilities of difference" that a purely metaphoric reading might conceal (Wolfe 13). "Seeing yourself from another point of view is the beginning of ethics and politics," Morton asserts, and the graphic novel's play of images and texts simultaneously produces a heterogeneous focalization while keeping the reader aware of that very tactic (The Ecological Thought 14). Narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott's statement that "narrative, with all its powerful and distorting rhetoric, comes between us and the world" is not merely descriptive (154). Narrative organizes and directs our understanding of the actions and events in the world we inhabit: narrative is, by its nature, sequential. "All but the simplest narratives have some fairly complicated relationship between two kinds of sequentiality: the sequence of events happening (chronology) and the sequence in which 38 they are narrated (narrative line)"; yet the power of narrative is such that it can blind us to its construction of consequence as the "natural" outcome of some causal trigger (Bredehoft 872). It is narrative's conveyance of "blinding visibility" that Rancière has in mind when he warns against the complicity of consensus; it is why Barthes argues that narrative's "confusion of consecution and consequence" renders it no more than the "language" of Destiny (Image-Music-Text 94). Ecocritics in particular must be conscious of narrative's tendency to create seemingly "natural" networks of cause and effect, agent and object, when assessing the limitations (as well as the possibilities) structuring a text. The value of the graphic novel's particular aesthetics here is twofold: first, graphic novels make no secret of their representational strategies. "Graphic narratives...have the potential to be powerful precisely because they intervene against a culture of invisibility [or blinding visibility] by taking the risk of representation" (Chute and DeKoven 772). Secondly, graphic narratives disrupt the forward progress of the narrative by the simultaneous presence of multiple panels on the page. Reading can be haphazard and random; panels may be read with or against each other, and may present multiple perspectives on a single page. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, "placing elements of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in advance" (A Thousand Plateaus 97). "Fiction," Patrick Murphy notes, "can generate a story that provides intellectual equipment for living and display the effect that such information can have on human lives as represented by fictional characters" (Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature 25). Murphy labels as fiction those texts driven primarily by "narrative and its various aesthetic dimensions"-texts which are more interested in storytelling and 39 perhaps less driven by facts (or perhaps more willing not to be rigidly restricted by them) (Farther Afield 7). Concerned that "the nonfiction prejudice within the nature-writing critical tradition has impeded appreciation of representations of nonhuman nature and human-nonhuman ecosystemic interaction in literary works," Murphy suggests instead a broader inclusion of multiple kinds of literature that does not "stylistically conform to canonical expectations" (Farther Afield 62-63). Graphic narrative, whether comic book or graphic novel format, "does the work of narrative at least in part through drawing," and authors Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven emphasize that "the form's fundamental syntactical operation is the representation of time as space on the page" ("Introduction: Graphic Narrative" 767, 769). The images may support the textual narrative but this is not a given; Chute and DeKoven stress that the comics medium (and by extension, that of the graphic novel) "is composed of verbal and visual narratives that do not simply blend together," an aspect of this distinctively "cross-discursive" hybrid that I will pursue more specifically in my conclusion. There I take up the cognitive dissonance illustrated in the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina's impact on New Orleans and which resonates throughout Mat Johnson's graphic novel, Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story. Johnson and artist Simon Gane juxtapose official narrative ("Words no longer suffice") with telling images ("Symbolism is what matters") that clearly demonstrate the gap between them. Graphic narrative moves through and across time and space, both of key importance to an ecologically critical analysis.8 The evolution of environmental crisis and theories of risk assessment haunting the ecological discourse of our present moment places a premium on timelines; issues of environmental justice and global/local impacts 40 juxtapose notions of place that are both remote and close to home. Annalisa Di Liddo notes how McCloud's recognition of the ways that comics art visually "conflate space and time," critically connects to another of Bakhtin's theories, that of the chronotope (64). In fact, "the hybrid, verbal/visual nature of comics, and the fact that the narratives appear as sequential actions on the space of the page, make the space-time connection even more palpable than it appears in the prose novel" (Di Liddo 63). Bakhtin notes that time and space are inseparable; "space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history," becoming a sort of visible time that is as open (or as restricted) as the movement of time that constructs it (84-85). If time is viewed as contained, as a past epic moment that is always already completed, embodied, and fully performed, then there are no options left to be explored: what will be is only what has already been. Ecocriticism's contemporary engagement with the speculative realism of object-oriented ontology must address the very different apprehensions of time and space put forward by theorists whose environmental imagination is challenged by the looming hyperobject, global warming. In the contemporary graphic novel, the fluidity of a narrative that transgresses over and through time with its conflation of events both real and fictional, past and present, supplements an artistic rendering of time made visible on the page; their juxtaposition opens the existential present to the possibility of a future not fully inscribed by the past. It is toward this opening proffered by the graphic novel that ecocriticism must direct its analysis. "The study of iconoclastic representations of space and world recovers fresh ways of thinking and creating," Morton proposes, "demonstrating that there are, at least different sorts of fantasy images of the natural that would refresh environmental thinking" 41 (Ecology without Nature 18). His suggestion that it is the iconoclastic (rather than the referential) representation that can recover and refresh the environmental imagination restores the active nature of narrative representation and returns us to Rancière's theories of the politics of literature. Gerald Prince emphasizes narrative's recounting function; Latour describes a "good account as one that traces a network" (Prince, "On Narratology: Criteria, Corpus, Context" 75; Latour, Reassembling the Social 128-129). Rancière's notion of politics is critically grounded in "a way of framing...a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable" or in other words, a way of recounting that determines who counts at any given moment, a reordering out of which emerges momentary communities of sense that form networks of concern that disrupt the normative consensus ("The Politics of Literature" 10). Patrick Murphy suggests that one of the tasks of ecocriticism is to consider how to address and to encourage multiple ways of "negotiating the interanimating non-identity of humanity /nature," to highlight how those representations of the other-than-human "call on humans to perform in the world" (Literature, Nature, and Other 34, 24). Graphic novels have the ability to use text and image to disrupt those iconic pictures of environmental representation that have perhaps numbed us to the urgency of our present dilemma. Groensteen stresses that "comics admit all sorts of narrative strategies," providing a wealth of aesthetic resources for diegetic representation beyond simple mimetic display (117). Grant Morrison suggests that "the best comic stories never stopped delivering surprises," and notes that "writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read" (Supergods 224, 409). There is an ecological vision and environmental imagination embodied in the panels and pages of contemporary 42 graphic narratives, and it is to that distinctive medium that I intend to turn my ecocritical attention. Chapter 1, "Animal: Overlooking the Post-Other," explores the postcolonial turn in ecocriticism and uses it to read three very different graphic novels. Moving from the allegorical noir of Richard Starkings' Wounded Animals (Vol. 1 of Elephantmen), through the ripped-from-the-headlines topicality of Brian K. Vaughan's Pride of Baghdad, to Grant Morrison's deeply poignant and affective WE3, I explore the affinities and tensions between postcolonialism's commitment to exposing issues of social and cultural damage (racism, sexism) and the posthuman aspects that ecocriticism wishes to foreground in its analyses. I also turn to the aesthetic and political arguments of French theorist Jacques Rancière, in order to consider how his topographical analysis might inform an ecocritical approach to graphic texts that seek to represent the immediate and long-term consequences of colonial policies in contexts near and far. Rancière's lucid and compelling arguments about the powerful redistribution of the sensible that can result from imaginative representational practices makes a powerful addition to what I hope to demonstrate as a politically charged postcolonial ecocritical aesthetic. In Chapter 2, "Vegetable: Emerging Entanglements," I again use a theoretical armature to undergird my ecocritical analysis, this time focusing on graphic narratives which feature human/plant hybrids as their protagonists. My use of theory to espalier my analysis serves two purposes. First, in keeping with my interest in hybrid texts that commingle multiple components, I believe that ecocriticism can only benefit from the diversity that an engagement with contemporary critical theory can supply. Ecocriticism is an evolving discipline, one that cannot become the intellectual equivalent of a 43 monocrop without limiting its opportunities for long-term survival. Second, I also believe that graphic novels have real value as a pedagogical tool, effectively providing a compelling visual frame on which to display the ways in which theory can be grafted onto representations and in some cases, to be teased out of them. To that end, I frame my ecocritical readings of Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid in terms of yet another hybrid, Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory and its parent stock, the rhizome of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Assemblage theory, with its emphasis on the interactions of parts and wholes and on their individual and multiple agencies, provides a theoretical bridge between the concerns of postcolonial ecocriticism and the new materialism of ecocriticism's nominal fourth wave. Both Saga of the Swamp Thing and Black Orchid are reboots of older, less inventive series; in this chapter, the environmental imagination that fertilizes them both is exemplified in multiple aspects of the graphic novel's visual and verbal narrative. Chapter 3, "Mineral: Dancing Like a Mountain," directs the environmental imagination to consider what a material ecocriticism might look like in the wake of the collision between the Deleuzean/Spinozist new materialism of Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, and Jane Bennett, and the Heideggerian-grounded object-oriented ontology (or OOO) currently being developed by Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, and ecophilosopher Tim Morton, among others. After an attempt to tease out the nuanced differences between the vitalist process-oriented new materialism that is especially prevalent in contemporary ecofeminist discourse and the resolutely anti process speculative realist ontologies of the OOO philosophers, I turn to Dan Walsh's eliminative revisions of Jim Davis's classic Garfield cartoons, collected in Garfield Minus Garfield, 44 to illustrate the strange strangers and real objects imagined by OOO. From there, I look at how Taster's Choice, the first volume collecting John Layman and Rob Guillory's imaginatively appetizing comics series Chew, successfully visualizes the pervasive materiality of Stacy Alaimo's "trans-corporeality." Self-described material feminists are very focused on the smorgasbord of intra-actions involved in our body's ingestion of and interpenetration by the kinds of unseen and transformative unnatural elements in foodstuffs: chemical preservatives, genetically-modified crops, and a host of antibiotics and hormones in factory-farmed food animals bring issues of bioethics and biopolitics back to the table. Finally, I spend more time specifically considering Paul Chadwick's Concrete series, focusing particularly on Chadwick's ongoing development of Concrete's ecobiography, a material memoir that ponders in detail what it might be like to be a thing. My conclusion, "Making Ecocriticism Matter," extends my interest in material ecocriticism by articulating it with Ulrich Beck's risk theory and with William Connolly's attempts to craft an affirmative ethics of becoming in the face of what Tim Morton calls the Age of Asymmetry. Escalating neoliberal discourse demands a reduction in government agency (and a simultaneous increase in privatization) just as massively distributed self-organizing systems like global warming and global economic collapse threaten to swamp national boundaries and local controls. I explore two very recent graphic narratives that consider what might happen in a post-disaster world where laissez-faire reads more like laissez-fail. Brian Wood's ongoing series, The Massive, provides the perfect opportunity to explore how Beck's assessment of the cosmopolitan moment that emerges in risk society actually plays out after risk becomes all too real. Shifting from the global perspective of this heterogeneous mix of protagonists adrift in a 45 world made unrecognizable by multiple disasters, I turn then to Mat Johnson's Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story, which takes a fictional look at that most nonfictional event, 2005's Hurricane Katrina and its effect on the city of New Orleans and on our national imaginary. Johnson's thoughtful narrative and Simon Gane's evocative artwork provide a very local context in which to consider the performances of individuals who find themselves in the viscous embrace of the hyperobject. Finally, I conclude with a brief look ahead, one that considers how an emerging ecocriticism might take shape in the time of hyperobjects. My intention is to present a thoughtful and compelling case for the necessary ecocritical consideration of the graphic novel. Artifacts of popular culture reach a diverse and widespread audience who may not be the traditional readers of nature-oriented or environmental literature; at the same time, those artifacts can be invaluable resources for tracking how issues of the environment have penetrated the global imaginary. I am convinced that expanding the range of texts that ecocriticism addresses to include comics and graphic novels can only strengthen the analytical acuity of its tactics. Diversifying ecocriticism's engagement with a much broader range of theoretical voices also adds to its reach and prevents the too-narrow focus that has plagued our discipline in the past. Evaluating the material and discursive effects of the visual and verbal rhetoric that permeates our global coexistence might also help ecocritics to engage more thoughtfully with the artistic and representational strategies of other, non-Western cultures. Developing pedagogical strategies that engage a wider range of students in ways that disrupt old habits and suggest new alternatives for our environmental performances is surely a worthy goal for ecocritics and educators alike. At the confluence of image and 46 text, ecocriticism locates a medium that stages its own global and local entanglements and that illustrates for us the mesh of coexistence we cannot not be a part of-a performance I hope to have ushered onto a more public stage. 47 Notes 1 See Roger Sabin (Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels 165-167), Douglas Wolk (Reading Comics 60-64). I will be using the term to refer to square-bound volumes which may contain a single story or which may collect multiple comics issues under one cover. 2 And note my elaborate use here of parenthetical commentary and qualification-the textual equivalent, I would suggest, of the graphic "gutter" that separates the visual panels of the comics' page. That seemingly empty space will come to occupy a significant share of our attention...but that's another story. 3 For a more detailed discussion of the critical history of the graphic novel, including a discussion of the multiple genres that contribute to the medium as a whole, see Roger Sabin's Adult Comics, particularly Chapter 6, "‘Comics grow up!': dawn of the graphic novel," and Annalisa Di Liddo's introduction to Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Paul Gravett's Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know also offers a more detailed look at various subgenres of graphic novels, categorized by subject matter and linked to related texts. 4 See "Reading Out Loud: Performing Ecocriticism as a Practice of the Wild," in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.1 (Winter 2012): 5-23. 5 I will address Bissette and Totleben's remarkable graphic support of Moore's imaginative reboot of the original Swamp Thing comic series in Chapter 2, but for now it is important to note that their sophisticated use of perspective is both distinctive and increasingly absent in comics illustration; my sense is that the use of computer graphics in comics design has prompted a return to the boxy, grid-like page layouts of earlier comics. 6 Currently, graphic novel critics do not seem inclined to identify a specifically "environmental" genre, one that consists of graphic texts that meet something like Lawrence Buell's criteria for an "environmentally oriented work" where environmental issues and concerns are the central focus of the text and where issues of human accountability to and for the environment are also addressed (see The Environmental Imagination, pp. 6-8). I would argue that the heteroglossic nature of these graphic narratives actively resists the limitations of such a categorization. 7 Specifically see Will Eisner (xii), Paul Gravett (9), and Annalisa Di Liddo's textual analysis of Alan Moore's work. 8 Gotthold Lessing's conflation of the word with time and the image with space is a well-rehearsed argument that serves as background to all engagements with the graphic narrative as a conflation of image and text. For a concise summary of his work as it relates to comics criticism, see Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons' introduction to their edited collection, The Language of Comics (Jackson, MS: U P of Mississippi, 2001). 48 For an art-theoretical perspective, see "Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method" in W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). CHAPTER 1 ANIMAL: OVERLOOKING THE POST-OTHER I begin my exploration of the confluence of image and text (graphic and narrative) from the vantage point of another site of hybrid negotiation: that of the "overdue dialogue that is belatedly starting to emerge" between ecocriticism and postcolonial theory (Nixon 231). Lawrence Buell identifies this disciplinary commingling as a significant component of ecocriticism's third wave, and more recently, Ursula Heise succinctly notes that ecocriticism's "global turn in the last decade" is "no longer news" ("Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism" 637). Ecocriticism and postcolonialism share concerns with those issues of colonial conquest, including issues of racism, sexism, and cultural appropriation/deformation, which materially affect the lives of the colonized and the colonizer in the environmental present. The colonized, in turn, have been variously imagined as the indigent, persons of color, women, animals, plants, and/or the material resources that have long been reduced to objects, exploited by some predatory or colonizing other. Heise stresses ecocriticism's continued commitment to an inclusive theoretical perspective-one that "looks" at both human and nonhuman actors-and lauds its posthuman engagement with environmental and cultural alterity. "The question of difference in ecocriticism," she argues, "is never purely human," and therefore "the question of globality and difference plays itself out not only at the borders 50 of human communities but also at the interface of human and nonhuman systems ("Globality, Difference" 638). The issue of the posthuman-a vital term for new materialists, as we will see in Chapter 3-is also at stake in ecocriticism's turn to the postcolonial. Yet another heterogeneous term in the hybrid vocabulary I am invoking, posthumanism is the key word Cary Wolfe explored in 2010's What is Posthumanism? Noting that the term emerged most noticeably in critical discourse in the 1990s (at about the same moment when ecocriticism made its debut), Wolfe's posthumanism couples an appreciation for the multiple points of inter- and intrasection between the human and the "various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human' and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is" with a deep concern for "the problems of anthropocentrism and speciesism" (xxv, xix). This emphasis on the affective power of nonhuman agency that displaces the human as the sole actant in our world narratives animates what Rosi Braidotti refers to as "the post-human predicament," a state of uncertainty that troubles "our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet" in a time when human mastery of the environment is no longer accepted as a given (The Posthuman 1-2). Wolfe identifies "the profound ethical implication for our relations to nonhuman forms of life" opening within this troubling indeterminacy; in what would seem to be a related argument, postcolonial ecocritics Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin emphasize that postcolonialism's engagement with human exploitation of nonhuman nature under the guise of colonial governance provides an critical stage on which to examine "the very category of the human, in relation to animals and 51 environment" (What is Posthumanism? xxvi, Huggan and Tiffin 18). When the postcolonial invades the posthuman, then, ontological and epistemological boundaries begin to blur. Yet despite their affinities, ecocriticism and postcolonialism have been reluctant dance partners. In their introduction to 2010's Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, Huggan and Tiffin suggest that postcolonial theory, like ecocriticism, is a heterogeneous field whose practitioners do not always concur, either ideologically or methodologically (2). Rob Nixon, whose thoughtful engagements with environmental justice span the globe, identifies four major points of divergence in disciplinary perspective that separate postcolonial theory from ecocriticism, which might be rendered graphically as follows (236-243): Area of concern Postcolonialists Ecocritics Discursive focus Hybridity, cross-culturation Purity, wilderness, preservation Spatial focus Displacement, diaspora, migration Place-based, local loyalties Community focus Cosmopolitan, transnational National, bioregional Historical focus Recovery of fragmented, "minor" histories Transcendent, timeless, solipsistic These differences in emphasis are not trivial. Postcolonial theory is grounded in the humanist tradition; the potential for traditional human/nonhuman dualism to overflow any smooth intermingling of postcolonial theory with that of ecocriticism is manifest in their opposing perspectives. Heise succinctly names difference as the turbulent location where these fields converge. Tensions between the discourses of the local and the global, the loss of vernacular history submerged in more holistic narratives, the variable impacts of environmental damage on local fauna, flora, and folk-each of these material differences reflect the centrifugal and centripetal forces reshaping the global/local 52 imaginary today. What also surfaces in the ebb and flow of disciplinary overlap between postcolonial and ecocritical theory, however, is yet another territory of shared concern. As postcolonial literary scholar Laura Wright argues, "both modes of inquiry find themselves facing challenges based on the decidedly political and potentially activist nature of their focus" (3). Wright specifically notes the effects of "mechanisms of colonial silencing" on "the voices of marginalized peoples" (Wright 2). Nixon identifies "the challenge of visibility" that complicates representational strategies engaged with the nuanced and temporally viscous effects of "slow violence" on the environment (Nixon 5). Representation and its spectral other, the unrepresented, recur in the considerations of both postcolonial theory and of ecocriticism. Homi Bhabha suggests that "the postcolonial perspective forces us to rethink the profound limitations of a consensual and collusive ‘liberal' sense of cultural community," and emphasizes that "cultural and political identity are constructed through a process of alterity" that also demands representation (251). Nixon asks how, in the face of private, corporate, national, and international contributions to global climate change, we can "convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making," how to retell stories of "the long emergencies of slow violence" that will "rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention" in the contemporary era (3). The sense of political and representational urgency that subtends postcolonial ecocriticism requires an aesthetic attuned to what Huggan and Tiffin identify as its "utopian ambitions: to make exploitation and discrimination of all kinds, both human and nonhuman, visible in the world; and in so doing, to help make them obsolete" ("Introduction" 6, emphasis added). 53 A politically charged postcolonial ecocritical aesthetic, then, could effect a rethinking by mapping the ways we recount the stories that people our environmental imagination and that animate our reactions. Such an aesthetic demands of art and literature "not to render the visible, but to render visible," to return to visibility that which has been overlooked and underrepresented (Paul Klee qtd. in Deleuze, Francis Bacon 48). Huggan and Tiffin emphasize "the continuing centrality of the imagination and, more specifically, imaginative literature to the tasks of postcolonial ecocriticism" and stress, in a passage that Heise also quotes, that the "aesthetic choices" of this collaborative criticism "need to be understood as a particular way of reading," rather than as a species/canon of texts (Huggan and Tiffin 12-13, italics original). Recall also Scott McCloud's insistence that "cartooning isn't just a way of drawing, it's a way of seeing" (31, italics original). A postcolonial ecocriticism sufficient to the task of reading and seeing critically must be fully alert to the multiple aesthetic choices present in any work of literature or of art-or in that confluence of image and text, the graphic novel-and to the ways those choices function to either make visible or render invisible the constituents it choses either to represent or deny representation to.1 Tim Morton tentatively reimagines "unworking" the categories of human and animal as a step towards a "threshold that resisted the separation of human and animal," that would "resist their collapse into each other" while simultaneously resisting the siren call of "the ‘posthumanism' that all too readily dematerializes the nonhuman" ("Ecologocentrism" 79).2 Morton rightly points out that representation is simultaneously a technology of inclusion and exclusion. My purpose here is to explore how the graphic novel can serve as a kind of aesthetic threshold, an artistic overlook: a place from which 54 to observe how/if graphic representation of the nonhuman (and in this chapter, specifically the animal) in a postcolonial ecocritical frame retains its singularity-its specificity-while at the same time encouraging readers to overlook species differences in the face of cultural and environmental exploitation in productive and consequential ways. To do so, a postcolonial ecocritical aesthetic must negotiate between multiple territories: the human and the nonhuman, the posthuman and the postcolonial, space and time. It requires an aesthetic, I would argue, that draws heavily on the work of French theorist Jacques Rancière, whose mapping of the intersections of literature, art, and politics offers a specifically topographical analysis for my use. Connecting Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism Through Jacques Rancière Rancière's aesthetic-political theory has been decades in the making, and the texts with which he illustrates his evolving arguments range from literature to works of art, the static images of photography, and the moving images of cinema. Certain key terms or phrases ground his contentions, with the "distribution of the sensible" the most foundational, and certainly the most relevant for a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the graphic novel. "A distribution of the sensible...establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared" while also serving to exclude some other parts (Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics 12). Specific arrangements of things spoken and seen repeated across various cultural genres establish social and sensory consensus. Rancière defines consensus as that heavily guarded common "sense" whose exclusive borders are maintained through a variety of what he calls "police operations"-practices and prescriptives that would include "the selective framing of issues by mainstream news 55 operations; the management of economic, cultural, and existential insecurity" and other similar activities designed to "limit political participation" (Tanke 45). The goal of politics, and the event of its occurrence, is "dissensus," "the process of making manifest the gap between the sensible and itself," between what is authorized by the policed distribution of the sensible and what is excluded from it (Tanke 4). "Politics," Rancière reiterates in much of his work, "revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time" (Politics of Aesthetics 13). Those in power determine the outlines of these distributions: these "apportionment[s] of parts and positions" that determine what is understood by public and private space and that delineate cultural order and social hierarchies, who can do what, when, and where (Politics of Aesthetics 12). Politics, then, "is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable...It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking" (Rancière, "Politics of Literature" 10). Politics, in the sense that Rancière intends, is both a doing and a happening; the event of politics occurs when something unexpected appears, disrupting the normal/normative order of the everyday-politics is not, in this sense, business as usual: that is the work of the police. In Rancière's aesthetic theory, art and literature have the capacity to create political opportunities by altering "the distribution of the sensible through the creation of experiences that are opposed to it," by countering the ways that dominant orders determine who or what "counts" as participants in the social order (Tanke 73). 56 Artistic and literary dissensus "reconfigure[s] the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought" in order "to alter the field of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities" and by so doing, to restore the notion of equality to the field of the possible (Rancière, Emancipated Spectator 49). In his extremely useful introduction to Rancière's diffuse theoretical work, Joseph Tanke notes that in this context, "politics is the process of disrupting the distribution of parts and roles through a claim about the equality of anyone with everyone" (43). Equality, in Rancière's philosophy, is that originary ground from which every distribution of the sensible departs; dissensus reopens the "natural" order of things to the possibility of equality in order to prompt a new sense of self and of the Other, to demand a recount of bodies and voices and capacities. "Equality," he writes, "ought to be thought as wholly horizontal" (Rancière, "Politics of the Spider" 245). Eric Méchoulan's perceptive reading of Rancière's definition of equality is illuminating. "Equality is characterized not by universal unification (everything is equal to everything else), but by a way of unlinking ‘natural' orders...Far from reducing everyone to the One, Rancière's move is in the opposite direction-to multiply the One in each one" (Méchoulan 4). Equality, in these terms, is about singularity, not sameness. While Rancière's own work is resolutely focused on the human, I have no hesitation in extending it to a postcolonial ecocritical aesthetic. "Aesthetics is political because it introduces dissensus into the world of shared appearances and meanings," Tanke explains, and globalization's long reach and monologic narratives often produce a fiction of discursive unity that effectively silences dissenting local voices in the rush to represent a world consensus (85). Rancière counters this fiction of global consensus with 57 the political potential in dissensus, the appearance of the previously uncounted, unseen, and unheard either in eventful performance or in representational forms like art and literature. The manifestation of these Others ruptures dominant discourses and can even perturb our quotidian sense of the world in which we find ourselves; literature and art in this sense offer precisely the ground whereupon our naturalized, habitual responses are suddenly made intensely unnatural. Narrative recounting of a tale told countless times before suddenly shifts into a re-counting of Other actants; imagining a world filled with nonhuman Others can cause the previously unseen to strangely appear in provocative new ways. Graphic novels "have the potential to be powerful precisely because they intervene against a culture of invisibility by taking the risk of representation," a risk that often means foregrounding animal as well as human protagonists (Chute and DeKoven 772). "The ‘aesthetics of politics' consists above all," Rancière insists, "in the framing of a ‘we'"(Dissensus 141). Dissensus prompts us to rethink the constitution of community, to refigure our understanding of who "we" are in an increasingly global world, and it challenges the idea that our embeddedness in place is our only starting point for community identity. Ecocritic Patrick Murphy proposed a new kind of environmental community when he advocated adopting "a ‘we and another' rather than an ‘I and other' orientation toward all life"-a post-Other image of coexistence that celebrates diversity without the very conflation or collapse of difference that Tim Morton decries (Farther Afield 88). Murphy advocates substituting the concepts of "relational difference and anotherness" for the notions of alienation and Otherness in our "human-human and human-nature interaction[s]," a radical shift that dissensus can make possible in the gaps it introduces in normative consensual discourse (Literature, Nature, and Other 35). 58 Expanding Rancière's aesthetic and political arguments to an explicitly postcolonial context, Ranjana Khanna investigates the consequences of globalization on a specifically national or local sense of community. Rancière, in "Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics," the essay which opens the edited collection which is the site of Khanna's essay, is quite specific about what he means by a community of sense: not an imagined community "shaped by some common feeling," but rather "a frame of visibility and intelligibility that puts things or practices together under the same meaning;" it is a "certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility," an aesthetic, an artistic production, a "partition of the sensible" (33). In "Technologies of Belonging: Sensus Communis, Disidentification," Khanna argues that modernism's key trope of exile, with its ready-made identifications linked to an originary, if now distant, homeplace, has been supplanted in the wake of globalization by the postmodern figure of asylum-a condition that "foregrounds not only the loss of one's sense of belonging to a homeland (exile) but, in fact, also the loss of belief in the possibility of an idea of community" (125). This wholesale loss of imaginary renders traditional (and normative) metaphors of community equally untenable; the simultaneous inability to relinquish an identity invested in the logic of community and the inability to see one's self otherwise (and Other-wise?) induces the nostalgic perspective Khanna identifies as "postcolonial melancholia" (111). Globalization has weakened the ability of local and national metaphors to produce a sense of community drawn as one body, one family, earth as mother, place as home. Instead, it has produced dismemberment and disenfranchisement-a dislocation that is at the heart of "the geography of difference" that Heise suggests dominates postcolonial 59 ecocriticism ("Globality, Difference" 639). This sense of disorientation is not limited to those victims of diaspora forced to seek asylum in unfamiliar environments; Rob Nixon extends what he describes as "a more radical notion of displacement" to "the loss of the land and resources...a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable," characteristics that in many ways defined those communities (Slow Violence 19). Rather than conflating the notion of sensus communis with similar bodies united through shared space, Khanna suggests that a common ground could form around a sense of disidentification. The excluded could find common voice through their "de-metaphorization," defined as the unraveling or untangling of the meta-myths that bind us, that suture over the dissenting ideas that might otherwise propel us into political engagement-in Rancièrian terms, a new community might realize its identification through dissensus (Khanna 130). Acknowledging the power of the novel to reimagine (and to re-image) the way readers perceive a world filled with multiple actants, Rancière notes that "fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales, and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective" (Dissensus 141). The aesthetics of the graphic novel, with its unapologetic mix of nonhuman and human protagonists, its montage of perspectives and its heteroglossic intertextuality, potentially gestures towards an alternative community by unworking some familiar metaphors, by using familiar literary forms (allegory and fable) to complicate the spatial forms that dominate our postcolonial ecocritical imaginary (the global, the national, the local). 60 Welcome to the Postcolony: Unworking Animals in Wounded Animals I'm an animal, always you're bleating. I'm an animal, I don't have to do like the rest of you, laws of society don't apply to me because I'm such a fucking animal. (Indra Sinha, Animal's People 87) While it is possible to read Richard Starkings' Wounded Animals superficially as a straightforward postcolonial animal allegory, a topographical analysis of this powerful collection reveals multiple ways in which the graphic novel challenges globalization's colonization of persons, places, and species while simultaneously perturbing the unconscious parochialism that sometimes inhabits regionalist imaginaries. Volume 1 of the Elephantmen series, Wounded Animals collects the first seven comics issues of what a Publishers Weekly reviewer described as a "superior dystopian sci-fi tale" about a group of weaponized animal-human hybrids decommissioned into a uneasy human society- "the setting," as the review goes on, "for plenty of metaphor about racism, xenophobia and globalism" (http://www.amazon.com/Elephantmen-Vol-1-Richard-Starkings). While author Richard Starkings' own characterization of his series filled with "implausible ideas and impossible characters" is that of "Pulp Science Fiction," I believe his breezy introduction to this unpaginated volume underestimates the powerful postcolonial ecocritical valence of his imaginary.3 Extolling the narrative potential of graphic novels "to figure ...differences of experience," David Herman proposes a sliding scale along which to rank the degree of anthropomorphic versus zoomorphic representation in comics and/or graphic novels featuring animal protagonists ("Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives"). Certainly, Starkings' graphic narrative can be read as little more than allegory, in which, as Herman makes clear, "nonhuman animals function as virtual stand-ins for humans, by way of cultural associations that have 61 accrued around particular species" (167). It is possible, however, that dismissing allegory because of its inherent anthropomorphism overlooks the ways in which the relation between these particular human AND nonhuman creatures (for they are, in fact, genetically both) is visually and verbally troubled in this text. This play between human and animal tends to destabilize the boundaries between them. Cary Wolfe describes a similar effect, which he attributes specifically to "iterative technologies" like "thinking, writing, speech" that seek to close the human/nonhuman gap. "The relation between the human and nonhuman animals is constantly opened anew and, as it were, permanently. It is a wound, if you will, that can never be healed" (What is Posthumanism 91). Wounded Animals' overt use of allegory can also be analyzed as a kind of demetaphorizing wounding that holds those contestable constructions open for a curious and indelicate probing. Ursula Heise's call for "aesthetic forms...that deploy allegory in larger formal frameworks of dynamic and interactive collage or montage," seems to me to speak directly to the creative power at work in this graphic novel (Sense of Place and Sense of Planet 10). Graphic novel illustrators shatter the linear trajectory of traditional narrative, layering multiple character viewpoints on a single page in dynamically shifting panels. Their writers are thereby freed from the normal constraints of expository time and space. This fluid narrative that transgresses scripted timelines with its conflation of events and characters both real and fictional, past and present, supplements an artistic rendering of time made visible on the page; their juxtaposition produces an excess that opens the existential present to its underlying historical currents and to the possibilities of a future not wholly dictated by the past-to an affective postcommunity no longer hide-bound by traditional associations. 62 The setting for Elephantmen is a fictional, yet recognizably urban and dystopian, future; in Volume 1's four-page prologue readers are plunged immediately into the streets of Santa Monica, California, in the year 2259: a familiar/utterly unfamiliar world fragmented by difference and desire. A disembodied voice ironically advises a lone human pedestrian, "Don't think about how the world changed...Don't think about the way they look at you...Think about something else, Joe...Don't think of an Elephantman" ("Just Another Guy Named Joe"). Moritat's somber color palette, gritty rain-streaked urbanscape, and distorted perspective make it clear that these are the words of the Rancièrian police order; in the block captioning typically reserved for an external narrator, our visual sense is preframed by an authoritarian voice that visually talks down to us while simultaneously hailing us into the tiny, huddled figure at the bottom of the opening panel. On the following two-page spread, we are assaulted by a barrage of images that carefully construct our experience: monstrous hybrids roam the city streets, an elephant, a rhinoceros, a hippo, all dressed in human clothing yet barely discernable against the glare of neon lights and blatant billboard hypersexuality. Wounded Animals plunges us immediately into a postcolonial nightmare where we cannot be certain of the place "we" occupy, where no character invites our identification, and where we are radica