Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

Bingham 5
Introduction
My project examines the educational function comics perform in aiding the
development of political awareness among readers through the presentation of violent
content. Specifically, I'm interested in how works which belong to the horror genre
express fears of inevitable social collapse. I believe that creating and engaging this
material reflects a preoccupation with political instability and power dynamics.
Furthermore, I argue that this dark content and its wide accessibility are especially
important for the populations of democratic societies where these types of stories are sold
since their aim is to expose potential dangers and provoke thought. Since human history
is a narrative punctuated by conflict and competition, and because social order exists only
if people agree to uphold it, it is necessary for the narratives recorded by people to
address issues of vulnerability.
In this paper, I explore how serial comics and other graphic narratives reflect
particular social moments and are therefore valuable tools for educational instruction and
consumptive entertainment. These works represent space and time differently than
narratives which are entirely constructed through language since they convey information
through images as well as text. As a result, the self-contained worlds of graphic
narratives can display different types of social critiques than their purely textual
equivalents because they engage the senses and emotions of readers in different ways.
By closely reading Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead and Alan Moore's Saga of the
Swamp Thing through the lens of possibilism, I want to explore the significance of
graphic narratives which imagine alternate realities in ecological crisis in relation to
American political consciousness. Both serial comics successfully interrogate traditional
perceptions of ontology by complicating where self-awareness appears; Moore places