What role do comics have to play in cultural conversations about and in the face of environmental collapse and mass extinction? This article takes bande dessinée as a case study to propose the concept of ecological storylines as part of an ecographics that recognises the specificities of comics as a drawn and narrative medium as well as its shifting place in culture. This is developed with reference to a range of graphic texts and along three axes. The article first explores drawing as material practice in ecographic engagements with radioactivity, gender and landscape. It then turns to redrawing as a mode of contestation as well as repair on a postcolonial planet, before closing with a discussion of flowlines across panels, pages, human and non-human bodies and across cityscapes, seascapes and petroscapes.
Armelle Blin-Rolland is Head of French and Francophone Studies at Bangor University (Wales, UK). Her research specialties include text-image and bande dessinée studies; French and Francophone ecocriticism and environmental humanities; postcolonial and ecocritical approaches to Breton Francophone comic art; and adaptation, audio-visuality and intermediality studies. She has published in edited volumes and journals including European Comic Art, Studies in Comics, Modern and Contemporary France, Nottingham French Studies and Modern Languages Open. A chapter on entanglements of gender, nature and nation in bande dessinée from Brittany is forthcoming in Drawing (in) the Feminine (The Ohio State University Press). She has co-edited special issues of European Comic Art on ‘Comics and Adaptation’ and of Studies in Comics on ‘Comics and Nation’. Her monograph, Adapted Voices, was published by Legenda in 2015. E-mail: a.blin-rolland@bangor.ac.uk. ORCID: