The Environmental Comics Database was created by Brianna Anderson, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida, as the first chapter of her dissertation, Greening the Gutters: Visualizing Environmental Disaster and Youth Eco-Activism in Children’s Comics. The project argues that argues that the unique multimodal properties of comics, graphic novels, and zines enable these texts to serve as powerful eco-pedagogical tools that can empower youth to grapple intellectually and politically with large-scale environmental catastrophes and environmental injustice. This digital project investigates how comics—and, by extension, visual popular culture and other forms of imagetexts—can disseminate knowledge about environmental problems and imagine potential solutions in accessible narratives that appeal to more diverse audiences than those reached by technical scientific research alone. (Source)

This is a navigable database wherein teachers, parents, and students can browse over 90 catalogued titles of environmentally-related comics (some of which have also been included on our database). Each entry includes a thoughtful description of the resource as well as logistical information like reading level, author, and publisher. Entries also include information on environmental themes and issues present and identities of characters as well as their levels of environmental agency. This would be a fantastic resource for teachers looking to expand their collection of graphic novels, comics, and zines. It might also be useful for students learning about the processes and different types of research.

Creator: Brianna Anderson

Brianna Anderson is the Program Coordinator for the Andrew W. Mellon Intersections program. She is a Ph.D. student in the English department. Her scholarly interests include comics studies, children’s literature, ecocriticism, narrative theory, and visual rhetoric. Her dissertation project examines representations of environmental crisis in comics for children and young adults. She has also served as the Coordinator for the University of Florida’s Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, where she created Recess Media, an online archive of Recess Radio! programs. Brianna earned her M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky in 2018, and she completed a B.A. in English from Lake Erie College in 2015. (Source)