In 1952 the lead character in cartoonist Walk Kelly’s popular “Pogo” comic strip found himself in an ecosystem overtaken over by pollution and uttered the immortal words, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
More than 70 years later, comic books and graphic novels continue to tackle environmental issues, sometimes from Kelly’s satirical perspective, other times from a place of anger, and increasingly as an educational tool.
Here are our reviews of eight new or forthcoming graphic novels and comic-strip collections that tackle the Earth’s problems — from pollution and fossil fuels to extinction and climate change — as well as some of its marvels. You’ll find books for both adults and kids that will inspire you or make you angry (and then perhaps inspire you some more).
As always the title of each book is linked to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find most of these volumes through your local library, bookseller, or comic shop.
You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis by Madeleine Jubilee Saito
Intense, lovely, and dreamlike, this collection of poems in comics form embraces the pain of fire, flood, and capitalism-driven climate change. More importantly, it crystalizes our collective strife into a call for justice. The book’s 17 poems are presented in a series of painted images, mostly four panels to a page.
In addition to the emotional text, the poems use the visuals to set or continue the mood and narrative. Some sequences go on for several pages without a single word — poetry by way of image and imagination. It’s a powerful experience that deserves our attention while it attempts to heal our souls. (Available March 25.)
I’m a Dumbo Octopus! A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods by Anne Lambelet
What an utterly charming book for young readers — heck, even this jaded older guy enjoyed it. Lambelet walks, or swims, us through the amazing variety of cephalopod life, using an insecure dumbo octopus (a real species from the genus Grimpoteuthis) as our tour guide. This is a science-based book — it doesn’t shy away from big words like “chromatophores” — but it’s also narrative-driven, colorful (both in art and character), and full of humor. You can’t help but love the doubt-filled narrator (who gains some self-confidence by the end of the book), or the other octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and nautiluses we meet along the way.
Quite simply this is science comics done right, and it could help any young reader gain an appreciation for the ocean and everything that lives in it. It’s also apparently the first book in an intended series on marine life, although the subject of next title has not yet been announced. Whatever that one covers, you can guarantee we’ll be first in line to read it. (Available March 4.)
My Time Machine by Carol Lay
If you found yourself in possession of a time machine, would you travel to the past to kill Hitler before he started World War II and the Holocaust? Or would you go forward to better understand the pending threats of climate change — and then hopefully prevent them from happening?
Since this review is published in an environmental publication, I’m sure you can guess which path the protagonist takes in this entertaining (and occasionally tense) graphic novel.
Lay, best known for humorous and satirical efforts such as the “Story Minute” comic strip and the Simpsons comic book, takes a more serious turn here. Following cues from H.G. Wells’ most famous novel (presented in this context as nonfiction), our 67-year-old heroine (based on Lay herself) bounces forward in time, encountering autocracies, out-of-control heat, biodiversity loss, flooding, fire, civilizational collapse, and what may become Earth’s dominant form of … life?
That sounds bleak, but strong cartooning and stronger characters — and yes, an undercurrent of humor — make this a welcome exploration of both today and our potential tomorrows.
Traveling to Mars by Mark Russell and Roberto Meli
In the not-so-distant future of this melancholy and magnificent graphic novel, Earth has all but used up its energy supplies and civilization (if you can call it that) has started to collapse. In a last-ditch hail Mary, a dying loner (or is that “loser?”) finds himself recruited to make one-way race to Mars. If he becomes the first human to set foot on (occupy) the red planet, he can lay a claim to its mineral and fossil-fuel resources on behalf of his corporate fake-meat “benefactors” — who in turn promise to save humanity (and net a healthy profit).
The weightlessness of space, the company tells him, will slow his cancer’s growth, but his inevitable death remains part of the plan. He’s disposable — a human flag to plant in the soil, useless to his corporate masters after he completes his mission. As long as he gets there first and fast, extraction crews can follow, and the energy (and money) will flow.
If you’ve read anything else by Russell (God Is Disappointed in You, Not All Robots), you know he touches on climate change and other environmental problems in many of his graphic novels, which also dig deep into history, philosophy, social issues, and religion, usually with a satirical lens. This one is no different.
What is different in Traveling to Mars is the tone. The satire is subtler, while the introspection is ramped up to 11. This is a book about a man left alone on a spaceship for months with little more than his thoughts, and those thoughts dig deep. I don’t know if readers will come out of it with any insight into energy issues, but Russell’s character-driven ruminations on the state of the planet and humanity are sure to energize those who take the journey.
(Publisher Ablaze Comics doesn’t sell to readers directly, so here’s a link for Traveling to Mars on Bookshop.org.)
Animal Pound by Tom King and Peter Gross
Just as George Orwell’s Animal Farm took on Stalinism, this graphic novel uses domesticated animals — in this case dogs, cats, and rabbits living in a shelter — to satirize and warn about the rise of Trumpism.
It starts simply. The animals, tired of seeing their unadopted brethren euthanized, stage a revolution and take over the shelter. The cats and dogs form an unstable alliance and election system, with the rabbits going along mostly out of fear of being eaten. But hunger threatens them all — they drove off the humans who fed them, after all —until a kitten points out the shelter’s webcam, which the workers had used to promote animals up for adoption.
The animals soon start performing on the webcam for an eager audience around the world, earning donations and food to be delivered to the shelter.
That opens the door for a cartoonish, overweight buffoon of a bulldog named Piggy to rise to fame and power — with bloody, revenge-soaked repercussions.
Published as five issues starting in 2023, long before the election, this new collected edition packs an extra powerful wallop now that Trump is back in office. It’s not really an environmental book, although the early pages contain several strong messages about animal rights. It is, however, a brutal examination of our times and a cautionary tale of power and personality.
King, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, has a lot to say about fascism and cults. It’s a bit heavy-handed at times, and comes about six months too late, but perhaps it will serve a warning for all of us animals about who or what might follow. (Available April 1.)
Hi, Earth by Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz
This painfully funny collection of one-page comic strips from the “War and Peas” webcomic takes a hard-edged satirical razor to humanity’s follies, including climate change, deforestation, extinction, and all the other laugh riots of the 21st century.
Of course, the creators aren’t mocking climate change. They’re making fun of people, and I’m sure you’ll recognize a few of their characters’ actions. You might even find a few moments when reading the book feels like holding a mirror up to yourself.
Like many webcomics the art here is somewhat simple and the gags are occasionally crude. But Hi, Earth comes with a unique point of view: Nature is celebrated, Earth survives, and people get knocked down a few pegs — although at one point a tree acknowledges that it sure is nice to be hugged.
This is a short book — you can dive through it in half an hour — but it will leave you thinking (and maybe chuckling under your breath) long after you’ve finished reading it. (Available April 1.)
Blow Away by Zac Thompson and Nicola Izzo
An ambitious graphic novel that aims to read like a paranoid celluloid thriller. Alone on Canada’s Baffin Island in the Arctic, videographer Brynne Brautigan has spent months trying to get “the shot” of endangered red knots. She’s on deadline, feeling pressure from her bosses, and possibly starting to crack from extended isolation. In the first few pages, she courageously (if improbably) frees a wounded polar bear from a trapper’s snare, an act that’s supposed to illustrate … something about her, but which immediately puts the book on awkward footing.
Speaking of awkward footing, Brynne soon spies two mountain climbers through her camera. As they make their way up the icy, precarious peak, they turn on each other. Did Brynne just witness a murder?
It all twists and turns from there, getting ever-more paranoid and ever-more improbable. The book moves like a blizzard — fast, dark, and frigid — but ultimately falls flat and left me feeling cold. I’ll give it bonus points for the wildlife angle, but the humans never come to life on the page.
Squeak Chatter Bark: An Eco-Mystery by Ali Fitzgerald
Hazel McCrimlisk can talk to animals — but she’s no Dr. Doolittle. She’s an 11-year-old girl living in a science experiment gone wrong and learning to communicate with the genetically modified animals around her. She’s also on her own following the kidnapping of her scientist parents by a mysterious monster (a crime that’s been completely ignored by the people who run the Perfect Animals Worlds Biosphere). Hazel and her animal friends, including a pint-sized elephant named Nina, set off in search of her parents and journey through a man-made ecosystem that’s supposed to be an ecological wonderland but gets darker at every turn.
Fitzgerald, a frequent New Yorker and New York Times cartoonist, fills the pages of this book — her first foray into fiction — with lush brush strokes and an appreciation for nature (and some underlying, if softly spoken, contempt for what humans can do to it). She’s developed some interesting characters, especially Hazel, who is full of doubts and fears and makes mistakes but uses her brain and keeps moving forward. Her animal characters are both fully drawn and a little too convenient (Nina has a few abilities that further the plot but make little biological sense).
As for Fitzgerald’s villains — spoiler alert — I found them a bit shallow and not much of a mystery (despite the book’s title). The kidnapping and the entire ecosphere turn out to be a plot to rewild the planet with genetically modified animals — at base, a good intention, warped by anger, arrogance, twisted science, and capitalism.
But Hazel loves animals more truly and deeply than the eco-terrorist bad guy, so of course she wins in the end. It all adds up to a fun journey that may generate some conversation without being too heavy-handed. (Available April 1.)
That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations — including several more graphic novels — in the “Revelator Reads” archives.
Previously in The Revelator:
