José Alaniz w/ Megan Kelso, Leonard Rifas, & T Edward Bak

UW professor, translator, and writer José Alaniz visits the story to discuss his latest book, Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature, the first full-length monograph to explore how US comics artists have depicted environmental destruction, mass extinctions, and climate change. He will be joined in conversation by fellow artists Megan Kelso, Leonard Rifas, and T Edward Bak.

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, how have US comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world? How do these representations manifest in different genres of comics like superheroes, biography, underground comix, and journalism? What resources unique to the comics medium do they bring to their tasks? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues raised by global conversations about the anthropogenic sixth mass extinction and climate change? How have comics mourned the loss of nature over the last five decades? Are comics “ecological objects,” in philosopher Timothy Morton’s parlance?

Weaving together insights from comics studies, environmental humanities, critical animal studies, and affect studies to answer these questions, Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature explores the representation of animals, pollution, mass extinctions, and climate change in the Anthropocene Era, our current geological age of human-induced environmental transformation around the globe.

Artists and works examined in Comics of the Anthropocene include R. Crumb, McGregor et al.’s Black Panther, Jack Kirby’s Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, the comics of the Pacific Northwest and Murphy/Zulli’s landmark alternative series The Puma Blues. This book breaks new ground in confronting our most daunting modern crisis through a discussion of how graphic narrative has uniquely addressed the ecology issue.

José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published academic studies of Russian/Eastern European comics, cinema, disability and superheroes. He also translates, writes fiction and makes comics, including The Phantom Zone & Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020), The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl, 2023), Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023), Tales of Bart: A Novel in Three Acts (2025) and Moscow 93 (2025) (the latter three from FlowerSong Press).

In 1992, Megan Kelso was the first woman to receive funding from the Xeric Foundation for self publishing a comic, which she used to make Girlhero, which ran for six issues. In 2002, Kelso received two Ignatz awards for her graphic novel Artichoke Tales. In 2007, she was invited by The New York Times Magazine to serialize her Watergate Sue comic as part of a weekly Funny Pages feature. In 2019, she was selected for a public art commission, as part of the Climate Pledge Arena renovation in Seattle Center, an 85 foot long etched steel comics mural called Crow Commute. In October, 2022 Fantagraphics published Kelso’s fourth book, a collection of graphic short stories called, Who Will Make the Pancakes. It won an Ignatz in 2023 for Outstanding Collection.

Leonard Rifas is a cartoonist (Ground Zero Comics: Move Beyond Nuclear Weapons), comic book publisher (EduComics) and a comics historian (Korean War Comic Books).

T Edward Bak is a Portland-based cartoonist whose comics explore themes of labor and class at the crossroads of nature, folklore, and traditional ecological knowledge.