Wenting Li's character witnesses the mother of all waves while waiting at a bus stop. Warren Craghead makes an Art Brut comic about a giant destroying the landscape, throwing a tantrum, and then collapsing-a portrait of America's psyche as a destructive brat. In two simple marker-colored pages, Tor Brandt's iceberg comic devastates, pointing out our folly in expecting ice and snow to return automatically like the rising sun.Ī situation beyond logical comprehension invites responses beyond language, without words. A match goes out, a sink overflows, footprints disappear, and our bleak relationship to the planet is confirmed. White's images invite us to make connections between the local and the global. It reads almost like a guided meditation. White contributes a contemplative and moving piece. Alyssa Berg and Catalina Jaramillo collaborate on an informative but perhaps too-brief story about a scientist studying the changing migration of humpback whales.Īn empathic connection is sought by a number of works here: Graeme Shorten Adams's tasty graphite drawings accompany text addressing the reader directly. Just as we can't help falling in love, we can't seem to stop killing and eating animals. In a visual jolt of gore, Ellie Schmidt's piece juxtaposes deer-skinning instructional photos with captions that form a run-on sentence about love and obsession.

In response, red ants swarm over his brain. 'Who will survive this millennia-long summer?' he wonders. Scribbly Photoshop drawings perfectly describe the narrator's move to Kansas City after 'the oppressive Texan heat muffled my mind.' But there's little escape. Will Cardini's comic is like a heatstroke-addled infographic. The post-collapse cartoonist might be employed to design insignias for new tribal groups, hand-letter signs for shantytown bars, create hagiographic tapestries celebrating the exploits of new self-designated messiahs, and so on.īut what sort of comics should be made right now, under the conditions of imminent ecological doom? A new anthology, edited by young cartoonists Madeleine Witt and Andrew White, attempts to respond to a crisis that is incomprehensibly enormous.Ī natural approach is to diagram the situation, to provide evidence and emulate the scientific method, albeit intercut with scrambled subjectivity. Unlike, for example, blue-chip video art, there may be a place for hand-drawn sequential graphics after floodwaters recede.

Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassinsby Hilary LeichterĬomics have a good chance of surviving ecological disaster. Mark Fosson's Solo Guitarby Daniel Bachman Mathieu Lindon's Learning What Love Meansby Andrew DurbinĮduardo Coutinho's Man Marked For Death/ Twenty Years Laterby Will Noah Warmer: A Collection of Comics About Climate Change for the Fearful & Hopefulby Matthew Thurber.

1-800-MICE by Matthew Thurber