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

Bingham 6
cognizance into the environment itself and Kirkman eliminates it from the flesh where we
expect to encounter it. Mainly, my analysis focuses upon the ways in which the
respective creators represent violence aesthetically and question interpersonal
relationships between its agents and opponents. Each challenges the stability of
prevailing political conditions through content but also provides evidence reinforcing the
perpetuation of cultural norms because of their success as mass-marketed commodities.
The art itself does not act to change circumstance; but reading a graphic narrative is a
performative process which enables an individual to reconsider experience from a new
perspective.
To put it another way, the spaces considered in both The Walking Dead and Saga
of the Swamp Thing are possible worlds. Although the graphic narratives themselves are
artifacts, material objects of bound printed pages which occupy physical space, the
characters contained within each story exist inside independent universes. We can
contemplate a world in which corpses become reanimated with cannibalistic hunger or
one where a sentient plant elemental controls all of the Earth's vegetation while
maintaining separate from those circumstances. This type of engagement differs from
total immersion within the possible world and is therefore distanced from actuality.
However, this distance is useful when looking to identify the conditions which determine
actuality and dictate apperception or how an individual perceives himself in relation to
the environment.
Ultimately, my project examines the potential of graphic narratives as works of art
and their limitations as commodities. I argue that graphic narratives are constructed in
such a way that they are inherently suited for possibilist consideration and promoting