Eco Narratives

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and a wave of high profile environmental disasters in the United States and Japan raised awareness of the fragile nature of the planet and helped spark cohesive green movements. These concerns were echoed in the pages of the underground comics that emerged to escape the shadow of the Comics Code Authority. Free from the Code’s rules and eager to address social concerns, environmentalism took its place within the growing social justice direction of underground comics. As environmental themes caught on, mainstream comic books enlisted their heroes to battle polluters, while the origins of Poison Ivy were reworked to make the character an eco-terrorist. By the 2000s, independent comics showcased environmentalism from a variety of perspectives, moving away from pinning blame on fictional polluters to tell stories based on real world events to show the costs of living in a degraded world. IPD: 2043 (2013) and Rime of the Modern Mariner (2012) warn of impending disaster, pulling no punches in depicting the consequences of inaction. The books on display question the role of modern civilization in the downfall of the environment and examine the connection of humans to their natural surroundings, often from a point of no return where catastrophic environmental change has already overtaken the world.