CLOSURE #7 (11/2020)

Cover CLOSURE #7  

›What Grows in the Gutter?‹ – About this Issue

The special section of CLOSURE #7 is dedicated to the exploration of ›Eco-comics‹. Our contributors ask how comics visualise, sequentialise, frame, and annotate relationships of nature and culture. How can sequential art convey our position in and against the nonhuman world? Do comics do justice to the perspective of others – microbes and trees, great apes and laboratory animals, terrestrials and extraterrestrials? Which forms enable graphic media to ›unflatten‹ (Sousanis) our view of the environment, offering multiple, skewed perspectives on the nonhuman in the process? Our authors trace the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman in real and imagined graphic natures relating to biospheres and animals, microorganisms and ecosystems, landscapes framed and unframed. However, even if no trees nor any conventionally ›natural‹ entities make an appearance whatsoever, the comics analysed in this issue still feature environmental imaginaries worth investigating. Please read on