This was the question asked in 1980 by the editors of El Ecologista Comix, a special edition of the magazine El Ecologista, in a fictional interview with an imagined comics scholar opening the single issue of the comics collaboration, featuring well-known Spanish comics artists of the period, including Max and Xaquín Marín. Such a question hints not only at the medium’s fight for cultural legitimization but also at the innumerable possibilities afforded by the medium for initiating social change. Only some thirty years later would the question of comics’ capacity to engage with questions of environmental health, justice, and ethics receive sustained scholarly attention, despite the fact that the employment of comics for the purposes of environmental activism and literacy has a significant history. Within Spain, comics illustrate the concerns and proposals of early environmentalisms, often in ways that reflect the democratizing aesthetics of counterculture movements, as well as mobilizing resistance to neoliberal urbanization. Comics also reflect the mainstreaming of environmental concern and the exacerbation of environmental crises wrought by the globalization of consumer capitalism, and they employ graphic journalism and nonfiction to explore the destructive metabolism of Spanish cities or social justice concerns exacerbated by urban waste and development.

The ability of comics to develop an environmental politics and/or ecocritical approach to contemporary issues can be mapped onto two underlying concerns: first, the capacity of comics to influence and represent the subject’s “ethical orientation to the natural world,” which is not only developed through the graphic representation of ideas and icons but also through the simultaneous representation of subjects as objects, enmeshed within wider environments and ecologies of relation. This may also include the artist’s own self-representation within the comic, an ethical and stylistic choice that strengthens the reliability and sense of intimacy between artists and readers while emphasizing the constructed, contingent, and positional nature of narrative.

A second concern regards the ways in which comics artists present deeper ecocritical reflection and engage “ecological thought,” i.e., forms of inquiry, representation, and storytelling that emphasize the complex interrelations and interdependencies of multiple species and systems that make up planetary life.