Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

Bingham 105
increasingly more discussed. Providing a space where topics can be treated openly and
frankly through fictional representation, even when taken to extremes, strips the
appearance that they are composed of an impenetrable shell and replaces this idea with
the notion of a barrier constructed with permeable membrane.
Graphic narratives can then be viewed as tools for empowerment. One of the
biggest problems these narratives help resolve is an absence of political voice. In 1988,
during an interview with Christopher Sharrett, Moore elaborated:
Politics has become some sort of quantum science which most people would
like to leave to the big boys and the experts and not bother with otherwise, which
I find a profoundly dangerous notion. Now, since comics are sort of inherently
garish and sensational, it might be possible to get across complex political and
moral ideas in a way that would be attractive to most people and can cause people
actually to sit down and read. Perhaps it's a small way of getting people to see
how the study of politics applies to everyday life...I think much can be done here,
and without vulgarizing or oversimplifying complex moral and political ideas... I
think comics could be a way of giving things back to the public, not just in the
area of politics but in, for example, the area of literature. No one reads poetry, as
a case in point. It's probably the easiest thing to get published and the last thing
people want to read, perhaps because in school they've had hosts of golden
daffodils crammed down their throats and came away thinking that's what poetry
is all about. In Swamp Thing, you may not have good poetry, but there is poetry
there which people can read and enjoy and perhaps see how poetry can be
connected to a larger world of ideas. It might be possible actually to give back
politics and poetry to people through this medium. (Moore, Sharrett 59-60).
Not only do works of art become valuable resources for historical understanding, but
their impact expands the vocabulary of those who are exposed to them and helps
reconstruct expectations. By engaging art, individuals are asked to consider the
relationship they share with the other people who have inhabited the planet before,
concurrently, or in the future. The popular art of comics is then well suited to treat these
multiple imaginations of temporal subjectivity because the medium enables creators to
present information in a manner which highlights and isolates multiple moments. In this