ENVIRONMENTAL COMICS:
Sequential Storytelling as Tool and Teacher Amid Ecological Precarity
By
Aidan Koch
BFA, Pacific NW College of Art, 2009

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2022

© Aidan Koch, 2022

ABSTRACT

This body of work is a response to the question of how to adapt as an artist amid ecological crisis
and failure. Using a multidisciplinary approach, I explore environmental comics as a concept,
practice, and teaching method. Following Scott McCloud and Sean Carelton’s definitions of
comics as a medium based in visual relationality, I examine how its rich history of exploring
other than human perspectives, nontraditional storytelling methods and populist readership,
provide a unique format for this time. The manifestation of this research has included a published
essay surveying contemporary works; place-based comic workshops in the model of
ecopedagogy and Lynda Barry’s instructional book Making Comics (2019); an online resource
center outlining artistic strategies for environmental comics, functioning similarly to Lisa
Jevbratt’s student hub for her former Interspecies Collaboration class; and an autobiographical
webcomic. Though not offered as a political solution, by placing myself in the role of facilitator,
researcher, and artist, I am trying to deepen my engagement and responsibilities to my human
and nonhuman communities.

2

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………2
Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………….3
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..4
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..5
1
2

3

4

5

CHAPTER 1 Adapting to Failure ………………………………………………………...6
Responding to Ecologic Crisis as an Artist
CHAPTER 2 Generalist Species………………………………………………………….9
The Definition and Versatility of Comics
2.1 Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World……………………17
Bomb Magazine Spring 2022 and Eliva Wilk for Artforum
CHAPTER 3 Mapping Ecosystems……………………………………………………...21
Social Engagement and Drawing Places
3.1 Exercises in Seeing…………………………………………………………………..22
Participating: Mission Creek Preserve to Falmouth, UK
3.2 Making Comics, Making Comics…………………………………………………….31
Lynda Barry and Constructing Comics Exercises
CHAPTER 4 Holobiont Relations……………………………………………………….34
www.aidankoch.com/environmentalcomics.html
4.1 Internet Archiving and Participation………………………………………………....38
Lisa Jevbratt’s Collaborations
4.2 Mojave Walk…………………………………………………………………………41
Scrolling Stories and Drawing Myself
CHAPTER 5 Staging Materials………………………………………………………….45
Thesis Exhibition, Works, and Reflection

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….49
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..52
Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………55

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. Aidan Koch, Frame 6, Mojave Walk, webcomic 2021…………………………………………….6
Fig. 2. Aidan Koch, spot illustration, Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World,
2022………………………………………………………………………………………………...9
Fig. 3. Aidan Koch, pp. 25, 26, Stone Blue Sky, published by Sporen, 2021…………………………….11
Fig. 4. Aidan Koch, pp. 11, 12, Man Made Lake, published by Kuš, 2020……………………………...13
Fig. 5. Aidan Koch, pp. 55, 56, La Espiral, co-published by AIA Editorial and Ediciones Valientes,
2020………………………………………………………………………………………………………..14
Fig. 6. Aidan Koch. “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World.” Bomb Magazine,
Issue #159, pp 85, 2022………………………………………………………………………..…16
Fig. 7. Aidan Koch. “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World.” Bomb Magazine,
Issue #159, pp 86, 87, 2022………………………………………………………………………18
Fig. 8. Aidan Koch. “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World.” Bomb Magazine,
Issue #159, pp 88, 89, 2022………………………………………………………………………18
Fig. 9. Aidan Koch, spot illustration, “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World”,
2022………………………………………………………………………………………………19
Fig. 10. Workshop participants at Giant Rock, Landers, CA……………………………………………...21
Fig. 11. Workshop participants’ drawings at Mission Creek Preserve, Desert Hot Springs, CA…………24
Fig. 12: Multiple artists, “Exquisite Tree” exercise, 2021…………………………………………….…..27
Fig. 13. Carys Boughton, “Zoom Out” exercise, 2022…………………………………………………... 29
Fig. 14: Nich McElroy, “Following Tracks” exercise, 2022……………………………………………....31
Fig. 15: Lynda Barry, page 10, Making Comics, 2019…………………………………………………….33
Fig. 16. Aidan Koch, Environmental Comics, website, 2021……………………………………………..35
Fig. 17. Aidan Koch, “Position,” Environmental Comics, website, 2021………………………………...37
Fig. 18. Lisa Jevbratt, Interspecies Collaboration Field Guide, 2009…………………………………40/41
Fig. 19. Aidan Koch, Frame 15, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021…………………………………………42
Fig. 20. Aidan Koch, Frame 16, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021…………………………………………43
Fig. 21. Aidan Koch, Frame 17, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021…………………………………………43
Fig. 22. Aidan Koch, Frame 18, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021……………………………………..…. 44
Fig. 23. Aidan Koch, Frame 20, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021………………………………………....45
Fig. 24. Aidan Koch, installation at Michael O’Brien Exhibition Commons, July 2022. Photo: Aidan
Koch………………………………………………………………………………………………46
Fig. 25. Aidan Koch. Environmental Comics Worksheets: Rock Thoughts and ZOOM OUT, risograph on
paper, 2022. Photo: Aidan Koch………………………………………………………………….48
Fig. 26: Shifting sand dune ecosystem, Palm Springs, CA. Photo: Aidan Koch………………………….49

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Art is a way of life I inherited.
My maternal grandparents are artists. My grandfather is a ceramicist and my grandmother is a
paper crafts artist and programmer. Her mother was a weaver.
My father has mapped ancestors who worked with their hands in the generations descending
back to Fischbach, Germany.
My parents are artists, both of whom deferred their passions to raise children in the small, dark,
forested town of Olympia, Washington on the tip of the Salish Sea.
Olympia raised me too; between the shadows of Mount Tahoma (Rainier) and the Olympic
Mountain Range, the traditional lands of the Nisqually and Squaxin Island peoples, among the
great blue herons, the foxes that would sleep on our porch, and the musical legacies of Kurt
Cobain and Riot Grrrl. I learned how to be an artist in relation to my community, both human
and nonhuman, as a form of participation, language, and identity. I am eternally grateful for the
support and energy I received from this upbringing as it has shaped my being in ways I’m still
discovering every day.
Thank you Nich McElroy and Margaret Tolbert for your emotional and creative support.
From Emily Carr University of Art + Design, thank you Jay White and Randy Lee Cutler for
your supervision and conversation as well as Allison Hrabluik and Lauren Marsden for sticking
with us till the last day.
Thank you to my cohort of 2022 who persevered despite global obstacles and distances.

5

1 ADAPTING TO FAILURE

Fig. 1. Aidan Koch, Frame 6, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021.

As I think of the world’s problems and what to do about them, I am learning to offer different
questions–more generative questions…bubbly, hospitable, and humbling questions: how are we
already collectively responding or in response to our specific crisis? How are we mattering…or
how are we showing up vis-a-vis the specific challenges we are encountering? How do we
account for these emergent realities in terms of what is missing, what we find unintelligible, or
what is being excluded?
—Bayo Akomolafe
In 1988, the year I was born, the US senate held a monumental hearing on global warming,
addressing it as a scientifically proven, impending, and exponentially threatening condition to all
6

living beings. During my life, nearly half of all remaining global wildlife has disappeared1,
carbon emissions have only gone up, and catastrophic weather events are increasing2. Growing
up, a narrative perpetuated in which the worst could still be avoided; blame being simultaneously
cast upon individual's consumer habits and the inevitable price of human progress. Despite the
work of theoreticians like Donna Haraway3 and TJ Demos4 or Kathryn Yusoff 5 to reimagine the
term Anthropocene, which homogenizes and reduces accountability, towards something more
suiting the corporate-colonial-neoliberal-extraction machine deserving the majority of the blame,
I am not absolved.
As a fourth generation mixed European descendant living on unceded Serrano6 lands in the
Mojave Desert of Southern California, I have profited from these systems while slowly learning
to confront them in myself. An inheritor of whiteness, access, education, ownership, I’ve
struggled in reconciling this position with ecological precarity and my love for the nonhuman
world. Throughout the process of this Masters of Fine Art degree at Emily Carr University I have
turned again and again to the question of ‘Why make art?’ when the conditions and
consequences of political and social failure are so immense; as flames move through the San
Bernardino Mountains, as developers deny their land is anyone’s home, and as water lines fall in
the Colorado River. During my Independent Research semester I even explored a future that
minimized art by proceeding with ecology courses at a local college and connecting with
volunteer fieldwork on ecological surveys through University of California Riverside’s Center
for Conservation Biology.
Despite these inclinations, I was reminded of philosopher, writer, and activist, Bayo Akomolafe’s
wisdom in These Wilds Beyond our Fences in that “we don’t observe facts and then decide to do
something about it. Ethics is not external to the material doings and undoings of the world, but
emerges with it–so that our bodies themselves are ethical responses of the world and its own
1

The World Wildlife Fund’s 2020 Living Planet Report calculated a general population loss of 68% of
vertebrates since 1970.
2
Even the Environmental Protection Agency correlates rising carbon emissions to global warming despite
their general lack of regulations or reinforcement.
3
Haraway has suggested such alternatives as “Chthulucene” and “Capitalocene.”
4
See Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today by TJ Demos, 2017.
5
Kathryn Yusoff has argued that defining the Anthropocene through geology is inherently imbued with
racist and imperialist history that must be reckoned with in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018.
6
Yuhaviatam and Ma’arenga-yam

7

complexity” (242). This thinking helps me unravel the bonds I’ve placed upon myself in
believing there should be a clear and specific way to respond- even if that requires forsaking my
own practice. My life has been shaped by the negligent environmental policies of my lifetime
and art has been a space for processing and responding. The meditative qualities of drawing as
an activity, combined with its connection to imagination and observation have made drawing a
lens. Through examining the potentials of this intersection, and trying to understand what kind of
niche I can hold, an emergent practice of environmental comics has grown. This practice asks
how comics can be a strategy for building awareness and responsibility through a time of
ecological crises. My responses and MFA Thesis Project include workshops, webcomics,
published writing and a website. It has also developed under a larger pedagogical umbrella in
hopes of finding intersections with different communities to both draw together and act in
response to the environment. The work is ongoing, as no one response is a conclusion, but an
invitation to ask how to adapt as an artist amid the overwhelming ecological failures of our time.

8

2 GENERALIST SPECIES

Fig. 2. Aidan Koch, spot illustration, Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World,
2022.

Comics are a way of thinking. They are a medium I came to over a decade ago and they remain a
dominant force in how I visualize and produce work, whether or not the outcome qualifies as
comics. Through them, my practice mirrors the behavior of a generalist species7 who easily
adapts and moves through different habitats, finding my work as easily applied to a wall in a
gallery, circulated newspaper, or hanging silk; or in the context of remote schooling working
through ephemeral and transitory practices like writing and teaching rather than object based.
7

In the Mojave, ravens and coyotes are some of the more abundant generalists. They have varied diets
and most can successfully adapt to human altered environments.

9

Cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud defines comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other
images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic
response in the viewer” (9) in his foundational work Understanding Comics. Expanding this
lengthy description in Drawn to Change: Comics in Critical Consciousness, scholar in History
and Indigenous Studies Sean Carleton emphasizes how “comics are necessarily partial texts that
require readers to bridge the gaps, or gutters, between panels by using their own imaginations
and the blended images and visuals as guides” (162). Yet in the practice of actually making
comics, constantly producing in relation (to image, panels, and audience) translates into a larger
methodology and mental state, much closer to Lynda Barry’s understanding of “comics as a way
of seeing and being in the world and transmitting out experience of it”(Making Comics, 14).
Both Carleton and Barry’s descriptions showcase how comics require participation by both the
artist and reader to see and think relationally.
I am often made aware that my comics don’t necessarily follow preconceived ideas of what
comics look like or how they function when I share my work with peers or strangers hovering
over my table at art book fairs. American cartoons, French bandes dessinées, and Japanese
manga rarely stray from their historic drawing tools, much less use abstracted figures and color
planes to move their stories along. The tools for making comics are not their defining factor
though, as both McCloud and Carleton’s definitions uphold, and one reason I love the medium is
the way tools can be adapted into the narrative. One of the most important parts of my work is
the visual tension gained through using both representational drawing as well as abstracted or
fragmented drawing with a mix of mediums. These stylistic choices are used deliberately to work
between seeing and feeling for my characters and my readers.
This exploration within sequential stories grew out of the single image storytelling process I
studied as an illustrator for my undergraduate degree, becoming enraptured in the
“story-conjuring power” (Barry, Making Comics 12) of the medium. My stories have explored
the boundaries of perception, focusing on emotional landscapes, dreams, and alternative realities.
One of my most recent published works, Stone Blue Sky (2021), goes as far as employing talking
frogs and friends on a psychedelic-plant-infused walk to consider environmental degradation and
species reintroductions. Figures 3 and 4 show a spread from this story in which the frogs lament

10

the eutrophication8 of their pond and disappearance of migratory birds. The looseness of the
pastel blurs the boundaries of the characters and environment they’ve sprung from; the absence
of medium in the pond, a disruption in its health or state of being; the cut in framing in fig.4
showing the heron’s world and perspective as sky-centric, while the frogs’ of the earth and water.
In these stories, perspectives are always moving and colors, shapes, textures, and abstracted
figures become tools for re-examining reality and encompassing a multitude of ontological
orientations9.

Fig. 3. Aidan Koch, pp. 25, 26, Stone Blue Sky, published by Sporen, 2021.

8

Eutrophication is a phenomenon in bodies of water in which increased nutrients lead to an increase in
algae and plant growth, who consume more oxygen and block sunlight. This suffocates other living
organisms in the water and eventually the algal and plant matter also die resulting in dead zones.
Increases in nutrients are usually linked to runoff from industrial farming and agricultural sources.
9
Other recent stories of mine include Man Made Lake (2020), in which a human tries to describe to their
therapist their past life as a fish; and in La Espiral (2020), the human story is interrupted by a narrative
following two rivers converging and moving towards the ocean.

11

In their essay “Experiencing the More-than-Human World,” Micheala Fenske and Martha
Norkunas specifically look to storytelling to ground the possibilities for more-than-human
understanding. They state “narratives as an ancient form of understanding and communication,
offer both a record of that connection and a path to creatively establish vital new relationships in
the posthuman world” (Fenske and Norkunas 109). Though they are not specifically referring to
comics, I can’t help but see comics as an exceptional form of storytelling for just this purpose,
specifically the role of narrative as a longstanding form of communication and connection.
At the fringe of storytelling modalities, abstract comics can be seen to push the limits of what a
story can be. Artist and art historian Andrei Molotiu describes how in abstract comics “the
‘story’ being told is primarily one of formal transformations and visual energy, not the depiction
of a narrative that can be otherwise conveyed verbally.” He notes “words may play a part in
abstract comics, but primarily as graphic elements, not to communicate or to further the plot.
Some imagery can be there, too, as long as it does not form into a story and as long as it does not
cohere into a unified space” (Molotiu). I believe this in turn links to possibilities for non-human
storytelling and “the very attempt to imagine how a different kind of intelligent agent might
differently negotiate—enact—the world” (Herman, Storyworld/Umwelt). In some of my own
past work like in Man Made Lake (2020), as seen in figure 4, visual abstraction is central to the
perceptual understanding of the plot in illustrating the lack of language to describe having
transformed from a fish into a human. In this example, the transition from human profile to
collage texture, watercolor wash, and pastel shapes, carries the reader from a literal embodiment,
to a sensational and metaphorical one.

12

Fig. 4. Aidan Koch, pp. 11, 12, Man Made Lake, published by Kuš, 2020.

Moving away from abstraction, comics history also offers a lineage through “funny animals,”10
to explore animacy and who a character can be. From George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944)
to Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1948-1975) and Tove Janssen’s Moomin (1948-1975), comics history is
laden with examples of animal and animal-ish beings whose agency reframes reality and its laws.
Although often their worlds reflect aspects of ours or are instrumentalized to discuss human
politics,11 their status as non-human is also essential to their existence. All of these characters
live in diverse multispecies worlds and maintain non-human characteristics due to their
physiology, perception, or environments.

10

The term “funny animals” applies to a genre within comics using anthropomorphized non-human
animals (Gardner).
11
Pogo regularly produced commentary on 1950’s America, tackling “McCarthyism, communism,
segregation, and, eventually, the Vietnam War” (Wills) as well as early environmentalism.

13

More contemporary work like Alan Moore’s revisioning of Swamp Thing (1984-1987) as a plant
based humanoid, Richard McGuire’s Here (2014), in which time and place become a narrator, to
Clément Vuillier’s L’année de la comète (2019), which disposes of human and animal characters
to follow a comet strike on earth and its geologic consequences, represent a different era of
nonhuman character, broadening agency outside the animal kingdom. In my most recent graphic
novel, La Espiral (2020), the human narrative is interrupted by chapters following the
convergence of two rivers and their movement towards the ocean. As seen in figure 5. These
pages are all painted with watercolor using a wet on wet technique. By employing this artistic
method, the medium and water itself expresses something akin to agency in how it spreads
across the page and bleeds over the panels. I felt my lack of control over this process only
enhanced the narrative in allowing a connection between the river or water as a character and a
means of visual production. And while I still own up to my wholly human perspective, my own
experimentation as well as these examples express ways to push interpretations and thereby
experiences of our world.

Fig. 5. Aidan Koch, pp. 55, 56, La Espiral, co-published by AIA Editorial and Ediciones Valientes, 2020.
14

This opportunity to further perspective within comics is assisted through comics’ versatility and
inherent adaptability to various platforms and audiences. In The BEAT interview with
Kwakwaka'wakw comic artist Gord Hill, he describes comics as “effective in communicating to
people who may have difficulty reading long historical texts, such as children or even adults with
poor literacy skills or who simply lack the time and energy to commit to researching history”
(Hill). In EcoComix, editor Sidney Dobrin details their extensive intersections with
“ecocomposition, animal studies, posthumanism, ecofeminism, queer ecology, semiotics, visual
rhetoric and communication, ecoseeing, image-text studies, space and spatial theories, writing
studies, media ecology, ecomedia, and other methodological approaches”12(5). These reflections
show a growing interest and investment in comics from both a populist standpoint as well as
academic. While Dobrin categorizes the work in his publication as “Eco” short for ecological
and “Comix,” relating to subversive and experimental American comics from the 1970’s, my
choice of “environmental comics” flips emphasis to relate to the activist history of
“environmentalism” within a general framework of comics.
Environmental comics are an artistic practice of thinking through ecological relationality using
the expansive form of comics as its outcome. As described above in discussing comics as a
medium based in visual relationality with a rich history of exploring other than human
perspectives, nontraditional storytelling methods and populist readership, comics provide a
unique format with which to approach the difficult ecological crisis of our time in providing a
new tools for discussion when so many others have failed. In expanding my position as a creator
within this niche, I outlined some of these connections and arguments in Environmental Comics:
Drawing Stories for a Changing World, published in Bomb Magazine’s Spring 2022 issue (See
Fig. 5).

12

While reflecting many of these intersections, EcoComix felt neglectful towards the visual artistry of the
works it analyzed. This emphasized for me the necessity of an artist’s voice on the subject in addition to
academics and critics.

15

Fig. 6: Aidan Koch. “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World.” Bomb Magazine,
Issue #159, pp 85, 2022.
16

2.1 Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World
Having my pitch accepted to Bomb Magazine by editor Chantal McStay13 in Fall 2021, I spent
much of winter crafting this work as a call within the greater arts community to consider the
possibilities and influence of a comics lens in creating or reading ecologically oriented works.
The final piece, published in the Spring 2022 issue, covers five pages and includes my
illustrations throughout as visual guides and references for how image lends to greater
comprehension of text. My writing was inspired by Elvia Wilk’s All Systems Go published by
ArtForum in the beginning of 2021. In Wilk’s essay she surveys ecosystemic fiction from Jeff
Vandermeer’s Southern Reach (2014) trilogy to Richard Power’s Overstory (2018), popular
books that have advanced in the vein of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Giun, focusing on
relationships with unknowable yet intertwined others. Wilk, a fiction writer herself, builds a
supporting case noting “that weirdness is partially why fiction works even in times when
revolution is repressed; it is also why you might not realize that the revolution is already upon
you until you read about it in a story” (Wilk). This reflects TJ Demo’s closing argument in
Decolonizing Nature in that within art there’s possibilities for “constructing a different form of
life, decolonizing nature within and beyond the human, even while we recognize that art as such
offers no automatic or guaranteed redemption” (271-272); a reflexive admission of ambiguity
that rings true to my own questions of artistic reconciliation with ecological disaster.

13

I first met Chantal in 2016 on comics at the Sequential Artists Workshop on comic that I taught in
Gainesville, FL and have enjoyed an ongoing dialogue on comics, art, and writing since.

17

Fig. 7: Aidan Koch. “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World.” Bomb Magazine,
Issue #159, pp 86, 87, 2022.

Fig. 8: Aidan Koch. “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World.”
Bomb Magazine, Issue #159, pp 88, 89, 2022.

18

My essay expresses this creative quandary and representations of environmental comic works.
Filling in the gaps of academic books like Animal Comics, edited by David Herman, and
aforementioned EcoComix, I discuss the work of Lauren Redniss, Ines Estrada, Mita Mahato,
Gord Hill, Joe Sacco, Hayao Miyazaki, and Maggie Umber. I found presenting the work as a
graphic-essay rather than comic strip best suited the density and cerebral nature of the content.
Drawings of myself act as a guide throughout and spot illustrations demonstrate references and
connections as they come up in the text. These include my avatar drawing, reading, and
soliloquizing as well as aspects of my personal surroundings like my book pile or my cohabitors
Tulip, Smiley, and Chippy. These personalize the larger inquiry by putting it in context of my
daily life and nonhuman interlocutors, who so often emphasize for me the importance of
grounding theory with being present and active in my relationships.

Fig. 9: Aidan Koch, spot illustration, “Environmental Comics: Drawing Stories for a Changing World”,
2022.

19

By pursuing this writing and its outlet in Bomb Magazine, my goal was to extend the web of
relationality between comics, contemporary art, and ecology. It also acted as a call to encourage
cross-disciplinary collaborations, visualizing new possibilities within the form for exploring
pressing issues facing our planet.

20

3 MAPPING ECOSYSTEMS

Fig. 10: Workshop participants at Giant Rock, Landers, CA, permissions not granted

I was drawn to the idea of environmental comics not simply as a genre or personal approach to
making work but for its pedagogical potential. Through pedagogy and group participation, the
“feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that
binds us” (hooks 40). bell hooks describes her struggles and successes in forming this type of

21

learning community in Teaching to Transgress, a text I turned to while trying to understand the
role of teaching. Building and facilitating this sense of community feels important as a way to
tackle the emotional isolation of caring about animals, ecosystems, and biodiversity in a wealthy,
capitalist, neoliberal country that has done little more than lip service to climate change. By
positioning myself as a facilitator, I’m responding to the “catalyst that calls everyone to become
more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning” (hooks 11). If nothing else,
assuming this role is a device to keep myself motivated through responsibility to my human and
nonhuman communities.
Though I have limited professional teaching experience, I drew upon the confidence others have
extended to me for coordinating past workshops. Alternative educational bodies like cartoonist
Tom Hart’s Sequential Artist Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, and experimental educator Frank
Traynor’s NoSchool for youth in Rockaway, New York both invited me to teach for them with
little to no experience. Their models emphasize the value in sharing a diversity of art practices
and taking risks14 in the learning environment. These programs connect to the legacy of artists as
teachers and alternative arts education in America stemming from Black Mountain College
(1933-1957) in Asheville, North Carolina. Today various other artists and groups have taken up
this agenda including Stephanie Springgay’s The Pedagogical Impulse, Fritz Haeg’s Salmon
Creek Farm, and 2727 California in Berkeley.
Participating in programs based on these models, I’ve been inspired by their ability to support
relationships. By operating outside the hegemonic educational system, value exists in more than
outcomes. Community building and personal creative practice find space to flourish. Since
working with Tom and Frank, I’ve facilitated many more workshops, and continued to find
inspiration in using teaching as a creative process to learn about my own practice and that of
others.
My current work involves hosting independently organized environmental comics workshops in
various geographic locations, allowing these places to “become ‘pedagogical’ through cultural

14

Frank let me lead a workshop where kids in Rockaway made comics as “ancient scrolls” that we rubbed
in mud and lit on fire.

22

practices that enable or encourage us to attend closely to their multifarious qualities” (Gough
71). In, “Ecology, ecocriticism and learning: how do places become ‘pedagogical’?” Noel Gough
specifies “becoming” to avoid an essentialist argument as well as demonstrate the relational
quality of pedagogy. This nuance felt accurate to the type of encounters I wanted to work with. I
wanted to find a way to not just make work about the environment, but to ground the making in
actual experiences with people in places. This approach places the work in the category of
ecopedagogy, a term rising from Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, yet incorporates ecoliteracy as
an integrated and substantial aim (Lang). In the US, most ecological education occurs only
within the sciences and with an emphasis on being objective or nonpolitical. Yet, ecopedagogy
adheres to the necessity for ecological education to be paired with social justice, understanding
that these are intrinsically linked in the modern world. In creating a learning branch of this
conceptual project, I’m emphasizing the need for holistic ecological education outside the
discipline of natural sciences, that encourages new forms for critical thinking.
The participants for my workshops have ranged from internet followers, friends, and friends of
friends to university students specifically studying sequential arts.15 By using a comics
framework, the exercises I design mirror and expose some aspect of the relational quality of their
environment, and encourage new ways of seeing.

3.1 Exercises in Seeing

15

Definitions of sequential arts vary, but the term usually refers to comics-related art practice. I tend to
think of it generally as art displayed in sequence to imply a connection. Sequences could be linear or
spatial and at the discretion of the artist as to how they’re read.

23

Fig. 11: Workshop participants’ drawings at Mission Creek Preserve, Desert Hot Springs, CA.

In designing exercises, I found setting up a foundation of strategies helped in planning. These
strategies are observation16, position17, perspective18, collaboration19, and integration20. While I
have not employed all of them yet in practice, they offer a roadmap for myself or others hoping
to share an environmental comics curriculum. For place based workshops, I have tried to be
sensitive to the conditions and circumstances by employing the concept imparted in Anna Tsing
et al’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and “[begin] with a practice at once humble and
difficult: noticing the worlds around us” (M7). For the online workshop, participants were
directed to use their position and different perspectives through digital references and memory.
16

Using direct sensorial observation.
Using oneself and one’s family or cultural history.
18
Attempting the perspective of another by considering physiological constraints. The idea that different
organisms have unique experiences based on their biology is commonly referred to as umwelt.
19
Attempting to consensually or passively collaborate with a nonhuman entity like wind or sun.
20
Creating site specific work.
17

24

Below are some descriptions and exercises from the various workshops. I’ve included a few
corresponding images from participants, fig. 11-13, to help illustrate the variety of outcomes.

NOVEMBER 14 2021
Mission Creek Preserve
Desert Hot Springs, California
Traditional Serrano and Cahuilla land
This was the first workshop and incredibly intimate. I picked up my friends Andrew and Vanessa
in Yucca Valley and drove them down to Mission Creek Preserve where Kwonyin met us. The
preserve is tucked in a valley surrounded by the foothills of the San Bernardinos. It is a vital
habitat for liminal species like black bears and mule deer, providing an active water source
between the mountains and the desert. We used the old stone houses and a decommissioned
cattle trough, our drawing surface as seen in Fig. 10, as work stations over the two and a half
hours we were there drawing.
Illustrating Presence (30min)
-Divide a single piece of paper in two sections either by folding or a line.
-Spend 15 minutes wandering the landscape. Write notes about observations and experiencessmells, sounds, colors, feelings- on one half of the paper.
-Return and trade papers.
-After reading the written observations, on the other half of the paper, in either a single or
multi-panel drawings, illustrate the writing.
-Share.
GOALS: In this exercise I hoped to both offer a unique moment of quiet, concentrated
observation in an outdoor setting, and through changing hands, the challenge of interpreting text
into image. The sharing of observations built a wider interpretation of the landscape and exposed
the limits of individual attention. The practice of interpreting another’s writing also flexed the
valuable skill of communication and translation, as well as bonding through trying to understand

25

one another’s perspectives. I repeated this exercise in some variation with every workshop
because of how positively participants reacted to both halves of the work.
DECEMBER 5 2021
Payne’s Prairie Preserve
Gainesville, Florida
Traditional Timuca and Seminole lands
On December 5, 2021 I hosted a workshop at Payne’s Prairie Preserve, a biodiverse swamp and
grassland, in Gainesville, Florida. My friend Margaret Tolbert helped organize and reserve a
shelter to gather and work under. Collectively there were about a dozen participants from a
landscape architect and a botanist, to a couple of cartoonists, only a few of whom I’d met before.
The workshop lasted approximately three hours including coffee and conversations.
Exquisite Tree (15min)
-Oriented vertically, fold a single piece of paper into three parts.
-Keeping it folded, draw the base of a nearby tree on the bottom third, extending the trunk lines
just over the fold.
-Trade papers without looking at the bottom third.
-Using the extended lines to start from, draw the trunk of a nearby tree, extending any extra lines
just over the top fold.
-Trade papers without looking at the bottom two thirds.
-Using the extended lines to start from, draw the canopy of a nearby tree.
-Unfold and share.
GOALS: This exercise was designed as a group warm up to feel a sense of cohesion together and
to cast off insecurities about presenting solitary/individual drawings. In creating a hybrid tree, I
also hoped it might open curiosity onto the relationship between different species of trees located
in proximity and their histories/relationships. While in this instance, it quickly loosened nerves,
prompted observation/tree-appreciation and brought people together in admiring their shared

26

work, I think an extension to the exercise would need to be added to build deeper ecological
implications.

Fig. 12: Multiple artists, “Exquisite Tree” Exercise.

27

FEBRUARY 21 2022
Falmouth University
Falmouth, UK
(ZOOM)
Having connected with Hugh Frost, a friend from the comics community, in 2021, I reached out
to him about experimenting with his MA in Authorial Illustration class at Falmouth University in
the UK for a digital environmental comics workshop. We arranged it as a Microsoft Teams
session and I tried to plan out ideas that could be less reliant on physical locality.
Zoom Out (40min)
-Divide a piece of paper into four panels.
-In the first panel, use a web based live-cam of an animal sanctuary, nature preserve, or zoo and
draw from the screen what’s there.
-Type in the name of the animal sanctuary, nature preserve, or zoo into google image search. Fill
in the second and third panels by drawing two images found in the image search.
-Type the name of the animal sanctuary, nature preserve, or zoo into Google Earth. Zooming in
or out, choose a perspective and fill in the final panel with a drawing of this view.
GOAL: While working together online I wanted to utilize a technological frame- a view we can’t
directly achieve but is something that has influenced and shaped environmental conversations
since the famous 1972 “Blue Marble” photo.21 I hoped using these platforms would help connect
the participants thinking about real places and their own geographic connections. The final
search through Google Earth led to the most conversation as it surprised people in seeing the
scale of these places in comparison to other types of land use leading to critique and speculation
about proper wildlife habitat and welfare.

21

This image has become ubiquitous in the cultural perception of Earth. The photograph was taken in
1972 from space in the precise position to show the Earth fully in line with the sun, therefore fully
illuminated and glowing like a marble. This view was interpreted to show how small and contained our
planet is highlighting the consequences of our actions to potentially have global effects.

28

Fig. 13: Carys Boughton, “Zoom Out” exercise, 2022.

FEBRUARY 25 2022
Giant Rock
Landers, California
Traditional Serrano lands
For the last workshop concluded under my MFA, I hosted four local mixed discipline artists22
near my home at Giant Rock, a significant landmark of the high desert for its massive scale, as
22

Kiko the dog was also there but did not participate beyond holding down supplies from the wind.

29

seen in Fig. 9. The site is operated by the Bureau of Land Management (BML) and associated
with off-highway vehicle recreation, though also used for graffiti, free-camping, illegal-dumping
and gun shooting. It also sits adjacent to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in
Twentynine Palms. Though not abundant in plant life, the boulder mountains and vast sandy
acres are home to a variety of reptiles, insects, and mammals.
Following Tracks (24min)
-Divide a piece of paper into four panels.
-Find a set of tracks in the sand and in the first panel, draw them from above.
-Based on the size of the tracks, try to lower your eye level to the height of their maker.
-Follow the tracks.
-In the second and third panels, draw two scenes from the imagined perspective of the track
maker.
-In the fourth panel, make an educated guess about who made the tracks based on print size and
shape and draw the culprit.
GOAL: In this exercise, I wanted to encourage a shift in perspective out of the human. My hope
was that this could enhance the participants' own awareness to different planes of life and see
how variations in landscape less perceptible from a human eyeline may have great effects on
different beings. By asking for three views over the four panels, it also sets up a sequence in
which a reader could infer the transfer of perspective without outside context based on the
linearity of the discovery at the end. This exercise felt successful in both activating a sense of
excitement and curiosity as well as critical thinking about physiology.

30

Fig. 14: Nich McElroy, “Following Tracks” exercise, 2022.

These workshops were essential in understanding the possibilities for environmental comics.
They were both part of the art and part of my own research. Talking with participants after
drawing together in the physical workshops, an important comment was how rare it was to just
spend hours outdoors in one place with other people. During the pandemic especially, this felt
like a valuable offering in itself, one that I also gained a lot from. Each time I also learned from
how participants engaged with the exercises- which processes really stimulated creativity, which

31

observations offered surprises and excitement, and how to evolve certain areas to engage more
deeply in the future. While I see the goal of these particular events as being the experience itselfobserving, drawing, collaborating- I can imagine a more concentrated body of work at another
time that collects outcomes for publication or distribution, memorializing the time, place, people,
and creation.

3.2 Making Comics, Making Comics
As I realized my work was turning towards comics pedagogy, one book I immediately pulled
from my library was Lynda Barry’s Making Comics (2019). Her work and presence have been
with me since childhood starting in 1999 at a reading for her forthcoming book Cruddy (2000) at
Orca Books in downtown Olympia. Despite being a former Evergreen State College classmate of
Matt Groening and Charles Burns, Barry’s work has always existed more on the periphery of the
comics world. Her experimental mediums, busy style, and cartoonish characters often mask
tough stories about coming of age and familial relationships. Starting with 2008’s What it is, her
work started shifting towards workbooks and harnessing creativity.
Making Comics is an invitation to draw and learn through Barry’s methods. It’s outlined like a
class, with a supply list, grading description, and expectations, followed by 150 pages of
exercises that take from five to ninety minutes. Each page is elaborately illustrated and includes
her reproductions of student work as well as various animated characters to lead through the
handwritten text instructions. She is a generous teacher and maintains that anyone and everyone
can draw comics.
What makes this book compelling is how it frames comics as a way of processing experiences
rather than simply a means to creating a product. She notes “the hand is experiencing the same
world in a different way. It’s you but not you” (Barry, Making Comics 37) and that “different
methods of seeing the world will make your comics more alive” (37). Translating realities from
imagination or eye to hand and image is part of what I find most stimulating about working in
the comics medium. Specifically practicing observational drawing can help train away

32

reductionist and simplistic ways of seeing. Following lines and shapes with your hand can open
up understanding to the vast differences and specific natures around us. Stepping out of single
image and into sequence opens even more space for subtle variation and changes to unfold.

Fig. 15: Lynda Barry, page 10, Making Comics, 2019. Copyright Lynda Barry. Used with permission from
Drawn & Quarterly.

Barry’s exercises in the book run from drawing characters with both left and right hands to
Monster, this is your life, a snapshot lifecycle of a monster character from newborn to funeral in
six panels (Fig. 14.). The brevity and experimental quality of the exercises in Making Comics are

33

similar to what I’ve developed for environmental comics workshops, especially in being
designed to accommodate any level of artistic skill or familiarity with comics. A notable
difference is that while Barry is focused on accessing imagination as a tool for storytelling, my
work is based around identifying stories within pre-existing ecological relationships, and one’s
perspective in relation to them. In my Zoom Out exercise, which I directed both in person and
online, the goal was to connect the micro and macro. Whether starting from abstracted details of
rotting wood/nest-cam to treeline horizon/aerial geo-mapping, putting these images in sequence
made apparent their relationality and embeddedness- the micro existing in the macro. Even in the
exercises I’ve developed for remote teaching, I ground prompts in memory or online tools that
can offer new perspectives on actual places. Though we cannot separate ourselves from a human
lens, playing with perspective in this way can deepen awareness of our surroundings. This step is
essential to the environmental comics concept in aspiring to build stronger relations with places
and nonhumans. Barry’s work sets a strong example though for keeping comics pedagogy
unpretentious and welcoming, no matter the conceptual aim.

34

4 HOLOBIONT RELATIONS

Fig. 16. Aidan Koch, Environmental Comics, website, 2021.
http://aidankoch.com/environmentalcomics.html.

Over the summer 2021, I constructed a website as a guide to the concept of environmental
comics. Using my web 2.0 skills in dreamweaver, I tried to make it playful and informative,
incorporating a variety of images and links. While this was mainly in response to the COVID-19
pandemic restrictions and not having a physical exhibition option at Emily Carr University of Art
+ Design, I also liked it as an active archive available worldwide. I have always been drawn to
35

the archival and collection aspect of the internet, having built my first personal artist website in
2007 at the age of 19 and maintaining online relationships through sharing experimental comics
on flickr and tumblr for the decade after.
The resulting website is a research project and hub. The introduction states:
The intention of environmental comics is to position and support the environment as a significant
character in our lives and stories rather than backdrop within sequential visual narratives.
Environmental comics considers eco-criticism, land-based art practices, folk memory, fairy tales,
post-humanism, and intersectional environmentalism.

Five foundational facets of environmental comics are: observation, position, perspective,
collaboration, and integration. These strategies ground dialogue around how sequential visual
narratives examine their environments. These are simply points to build from and explore.

36

Fig. 17. Aidan Koch, “Position,” Environmental Comics, website, 2021.

37

The site exists like a holobiont23, an assemblage of disparate elements grouped around their
domain forming an ecological unit. Though elements can be seen and accessed as discrete pages
or images, I would have never conceived to create or connect them without the larger site to
guide me. Under the strategy sections of observation, position, perspective, collaboration, and
integration, exist descriptions, image examples, bibliographic references, and links to relevant
articles and youtube lectures. The research mixes explicitly art material with more abstract
theoretic and political content. Under the page “Integration” I cite Miwon Kwon’s One Place
after Another: Notes on Site Specificity (1997) connecting the possibility of site specific comics
to contemporary art discourse as well as links to relevant projects by artists Steven Gill, Nicholas
Galanin, and Naziha Mestaoui. These illustrate the breadth of influences that can be drawn upon
from a comics lens. A link to Mojave Walk and Other Stories leads to a webcomic I drew while
Environmental Comics Blog links to a tumblr page with loosely related works of art pieced
together from the internet.
Creating this site was as much an archive for myself to reference as for others. In thinking
through the broad scope of connections to environmental comics, maintaining an active,
growing, space to form ideas and literally link resources is valuable to my continuing research.
For others, it should offer some unique perspectives as to what this intersection of theory and
practice can be. Referencing Lisa Jevbratt’s interspeciescollaborations.net, I can also see
potential for it to become a participatory space.

23

A holobiont recognizes both host and organisms maintained within the host as intertwined, inseparable,
and necessary for life. The way in which the internet links and connects material suits this kind of
structure. One could say social media especially mirrors holobiont relations in that the framework has no
value without the users to activate it.

38

4.1 Internet Archiving and Participation
I first came to interspeciescollaborations.net24 as I was filling in resources for another
web-platform of mine, the Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations, 25 ifiaar.org26. This site
immediately felt like a kindred spirit or virtual predecessor without my having been aware of it.
The heading for this site declares it as “a collaborative research space for documenting the
progress of art projects made together with non-human animals and for posting resources
relevant to such endeavors” (Jevbratt, interspeciescollaborations.net). Although it was
“originally developed for the class "Interspecies Collaboration" (Art 185LJ/ART130) at UCSB”
(Jevbratt, interspeciescollaborations.net) which was conducted on and off from 2006 to 2014,
the site allows access for non-student contributors.
The site is divided into several categories including reference information for the site, and
sections By Collaborators, Resources, and For Collaborators. Visitors can explore postings by
past students documenting their collaborative proposals and projects along with personal
journaling about their progressions. The Field Guide pdf offers an abbreviated version of the
general principles in a form that is printable and mobile including ethical guidelines and quick
start project ideas like Sing together with a Coyote or a Cat. The Interspecies Collaboration pdf
link on the other hand is a longer academic document. This writing is a key reference for my
work and generates a framework that can be applied and adapted to a variety of mediums and
methods. Her division of approaches into collaborative forms: protocol, interface pattern,
communication, limbic resonance, also inspired my thought process on breaking down
categorical strategies within environmental comics. The ability to break down the larger concept
into cohesive concepts creates repeatable and relatable ways of working27.
While the framework for Jevbratt’s class site lays out an aspirational model for online pedagogy,
the specific topic of interspecies collaboration is less relevant to the environmental comics work
24

http://128.111.69.4/~interspecies/
2017-present. IFIAAR is a publishing, event, and resource platform focusing on collaborating with
artists on human-non-human animal topics. Projects have included submission based cell phone animal
video compilations to a week long symposium at a gallery in New York.
26
http://ifiaar.org/
27
See 3.1 Exercises in Seeing.
25

39

I propose. Though listed as one potential strategy to begin a comics work, I mainly suggest
working with entities like wind and sun, where potential harms and issues of consent are less at
the forefront, and there is a clear path towards a visual art product. It’s possible that the term
“collaboration” becomes less suitable to the nature of the experiment, but assuming some degree
of agency by those entities, I don’t think it's wholly inappropriate. A deeper investment into the
possibilities for non-human animal collaboration leading to a comic piece as its outcome is
interesting, but not the distinct goal or focus of this work, and would come with a deeper
interrogation of the approach.

40

Fig. 18. Lisa Jevbratt, Interspecies Collaboration Field Guide, 2009.

Jevbratt’s personal work and practice looks at digital interfaces, specifically in relation to
translation and communication with non-humans. One of her best known projects, Zoomorph
(2013), offers “software filters for video and imaging software and smartphones simulating how
animals see” (Jevbratt, zoomorph.net) combining biologic/physiologic inquiry with technology,
art and animal studies.
The way her work thinks about perception and communication feels critical to the dialogue I’m
building on comics and the aspirations I hold for continuing my website and pedagogical
practice. The continued existence of interspeciescollaboration.net as a domain allows the project
to influence beyond its use within the classroom and is a generous resource and tool.

4.2 Mojave Walk & Other Stories

41

Fig. 19. Aidan Koch, Frame 15, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021.

In developing the five conceptual categories for my pedagogy of environmental comics, position
stood out as a place I personally needed to ground the creative research with. I saw it as an
opportunity to think through the various conflicts I’ve been feeling about making art at all.
Though historically I’ve avoided using myself as a character28 the merits of drawing one’s life
story are not lost on me, especially given two of the most critically acclaimed comics29 Art
Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy
(2006), are autobiographical.

28

This is probably some mix of privacy concerns, cowardice, and deep curiosity towards the world outside
myself.
29
More commonly regarded as “graphic novels.”

42

Fig. 20. Aidan Koch, Frame 16, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021.

I started trying to sketch myself in my journal on a regular basis to find an authentic portrayal,
one that was both recognizable and artistically interesting to reproduce. I looked to Amelie von
Wulffen30 and Trenton Doyle Hancock31 who, besides being established contemporary artists,
have deeply revealing comics practices in which they act as characters though not in strictly
autobiographical narratives. Trial and error brought me to an androgenous nude with a braid held
by two scrunchies- my most common hairstyle of the past six years- smudged with tonal
multicolor pastel. As I allowed this character to take shape, they began sharing the depths of my
ecological insecurities, mostly in conversation with a little black dog, Tulip, my 8lb
chihuahua-mix cohabitor.

Fig. 21. Aidan Koch, Frame 17, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021.

Using dialogue actually made describing my own feelings more direct and clear, allowing the
wavering nature of my beliefs to come out between characters and over time. Drawing and script
coevolved. Insecurities about being an artist when something more utilitarian like a biologist or
lobbyist could have more direct political impact were enhanced by showing myself becoming
physically immobilized lying down. Tulip acts as relief and a counterpoint to these insecurities
by emphasizing the present and a more generous view. This is both another part of myself
30

In At the Cool Table, deceased Spanish painter Francisco Goya tags along with Wulffen to art openings
offering snide commentary and addressing her insecurities as an aging female artist.
31
Doyle Hancock recently entered his ongoing sci-fi story-world, the Moundverse, as a character.

43

speaking, and a genuine feeling she offers me through the grounding of her needs and her
unwavering emotional support.

Fig. 22. Aidan Koch, Frame 18, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021.

The drawings shift the tone, beginning with voice bubbles floating next to solitary landscape
panels, oscillating the source of the voice between land and figure. Pauses are marked by full
bleed plein air watercolors I painted throughout Spring 2020, a quiet and desperate time in which
my greatest solace was watching the desert bloom. The second half of the piece starts with a
walk cycle sequence32 where the repetitive imagery slows time and allows a lingering on the
conversation. My body is represented as simply a body shape with gestural color pastel smearing
over the lines. This mix of nudity and ambiguity reflects my own confusion over my defining
physical characteristics and wondering what might I look like to Tulip whose relationship to my

32

This sequence refers to the work of Eadward Muybridge, whose photographic documentation of human
and animal walk cycles were both a lesson in biologic locomotion and essential in development of moving
image arts. I use it as both a gesture towards my own cyclical anxious thought patterns and my daily dog
walks.

44

body includes jumping, climbing, and sleeping on me daily.

Fig. 23. Aidan Koch, Frame 20, Mojave Walk, webcomic, 2021.

The finished comic is presented on the aidankoch.com/environmentalcomics.html website under
the title Mojave Walk. It reads vertically through scrolling downward and without boundaries
demarcated between panels. I thought this suited the online nature, conforming to how most
people read web-based content. The piece is supplementary to the mission and primary content
of the site but is valuable in giving a backstory and an example of how comics can be a strategy
for coping with ecological crises. By framing the link as Mojave Walk & Other Stories, I’m also
leaving an opening for myself to continue sharing and processing through this method.

5 Staging Materials

45

Fig. 24. Aidan Koch, installation at Michael O’Brien Exhibition Commons, July 2022. Photo: Aidan
Koch.

In designing the final thesis exhibition, I was challenged by materializing works that had largely
existed in nonmaterial space. Given the final opportunity to work on site at Emily Carr in July
2022 though, it felt meaningful to try and translate the projects shared in this document as an
installation. I tried to consider each area of my project and describe it through new materials.
In order to allow access to the website, I had the landing page and strategy links printed on fabric
and sewn together, leaving the ends unfinished to represent the ability to grow and extend the site
like a quilt. The essay, present in print in Bomb Magazine issue 159, was displayed along with a
poster of scanned comic book references relating to environmental comics from Phillippe
Squarzoni’s Climate Changed (2014) to Melanie Gillman’s As the Crow Flies (2017) offering a
guide to those curious to read more.
I converted the panels from the webcomic into a projected slideshow adding a brief animation of
hand drawn wind in pastel to mark the beginning/end of the loop. This was back-projected onto a
46

two sided wooden frame with screens of printed fabric showing a pink landscape and abstracted
landscape. The screens make a kind of dimensional comic in themselves while the projection
activates more direct storytelling and an environment for my characters.
In order to encourage engagement and represent the workshops, I made sixty risograph print
editions of two worksheets for gallery attendees. One, for drawing in the space, prompted the use
of rocks collected on my travels from California to BC, while the other, asks for a slower,
reflective moment outside the gallery space to begin. Immediately after installing this work on
the plinth, myself and others in my cohort noted people standing around the worksheet table. By
the end of opening night, a small stack of worksheets sat to the side, filled in. I enjoyed looking
through the anonymous pile and the diversity of visual responses. It worked in breaking the
norms of the gallery show in asking the audience to make work, not just consume it. It was also
validating in proving how even a passive display can get a real level of participation when the
invitation is clear.

47

Fig. 25. Aidan Koch. Environmental Comics Worksheets: Rock Thoughts and ZOOM OUT, risograph on
paper, 2022. Photo: Aidan Koch.

The process of converting the works into the gallery space emphasized the adaptability I
mentioned at the beginning of my writing. While not produced for this specific context, the work
lent itself to becoming. In this sparse physical space where people would be moving through- my
choices were not survival strategy, but a strategy of relationality and finding modes and methods
that best suited the environment.

48

4 CONCLUSION

Fig. 26: Shifting sand dune ecosystem, Palm Springs, CA

Through the spring, I spent most weeks heading down to Palm Desert, driving by the massive
wind farm at the base of Mt San Jacinto, Coachella Festival billboards, and a newly
under-construction hockey arena.33 An evaporative haze hung over the valley from hundreds of
acres of sprinkler-fed golf courses with a brown tint lent by exhaust drifting from Los Angeles.
Here I joined biologists in counting annual wildflowers, arthropods, and vertebrates among the
shifting sand dune ecosystems. In these segmented parcels of land, endemic lizards like the
flat-tailed horned lizard and Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard can be found tucked under
dormant saltbush; ribbon-like tracks of shovel-nosed snakes and paced prints of a trotting coyote

33

Palm Desert has an average of 99°F for almost four months of the year with summer highs reaching the
110°’s. From an ecological standpoint, the choice to place a hockey arena here is beyond ration.

49

make patterns in the rippled sand. In this ever-worsening drought year, flowers were few and far
between but we spotted some milkvetch pushing up the sand.
It’s hard to know if my artistic pursuits would be different if the dunes and fringe-toed lizard and
life in the desert weren’t on the precarious edge of existence. Global warming and over
development34 are violent realities of this time. My mind is often dominated by the fear and
urgency of losing what’s left and having to witness that loss. In Dr. Lynn Sweet’s 2019 report on
the future of the iconic Western Joshua Trees within Joshua Tree National Park, she warns of a
near extinction in this historic range by the end of the century, primarily due to climate change
(Sweet et. al.). I live 18 miles from the park where rapid development of illegal marajuana
grows, short term rentals, and lack of reinforced protection on top of climate change are having
visible consequences now. When the ones by my house fall, there may not be others to take their
place.
The difficulty in concluding this description and research of an emergent practice is that like the
complex systems and problems around me, there may not be a clear resolution, but there is
change and growth. As the pressures of my life before COVID-19 and school return, my mind is
again dominated by the simple insecurities of making a living as a working artist, something
difficult to reconcile with ephemeral practice. While this is a familiar pattern in my life, I also
know the conversations I’ve begun through this work- with participants and readers- will
continue to resonate beyond myself. As of this August, I have scheduled a speaking engagement
with the New York Comics Symposium to discuss environmental comics, a workshop being
planned in the desert for late Fall in collaboration with a local field biologist, and have
corresponded with a student who participated in my class at Falmouth University about how to
imagine interviewing a compost pile. Activating these connections, I’d like to continue to work
towards interventions and collaborations that have real impacts and outcomes that reach beyond
or expand upon conventional art making.

34

These are the largest threats to the desert ecosystem. Habitat alteration and loss as well as changing
weather patterns to hotter and drier create potentially catastrophic circumstances for many endemic
species.

50

The process of this degree helped me recognize the importance of holding the joy of slow,
curious, caring, and reciprocal relationships to places and creatures along with the fear of
witnessing their loss. These relationships are helping to teach me gratitude towards being an
artist in this time; an excuse to watch, learn and listen. They offer me glimpses of different
worlds. I’m hoping to simply help others see them too.

51

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Akomolafe, Bayo. These Wilds Beyond our Fences. North Atlantic Books, 2017.
Barry, Lynda. Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
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Hill, Gord. “Interview: Gord Hill on the 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book.” By Avery
Kaplan. The BEAT, October 12, 2021.
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Koch, Aidan. “Environmental Comics: Drawings Stories for a Changing World.” Bomb
Magazine, issue #159, Spring 2022.

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Rock Thoughts and ZOOM OUT Worksheets, 8.5x11,” pdf printout, 2022.

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