we get it, going vegan will not save the planet. (so is anybody going to tell us what will?)

Earlier this year, Billie Eilish told her followers to “be smarter” and go vegan after sharing a graphic video of what is pretty much industry standard. She’s been an open advocate for veganism, but many still debate the individual consumer’s impact on the animal product industry.

I’m vegan, which I don’t tell people often because I live in Texas and I honestly don’t care if other people are or aren’t vegan or vegetarian at all. I wasn’t always vegan, but people do not enjoy stories of my goat-slaughtering youth.

We often hear the statistic that the meat industry is the biggest contributor to climate change, so capitalists can put the blame on individuals instead of industry. It still gets tossed around in young adult spaces.

I’m going to assume for now that young adults are the primary audience for any kind of activist-encouragement, which is what As the World Burns, a satirical graphic novel about climate change… tries to do?

I want to start off by saying I don’t actually recommend this book, and it was a struggle to identify the audience for it. I don’t like Derrick Jensen, well-known as a transmisogynist (I decided not to subject you to his hateful rhetoric, please don’t seek it out if it will upset you). McMillan may be alright.

Putting aside logical issues that makes this seem more like propaganda than a factual yet inspirational text (to someone who actually agrees, which is.. just.. how??? How do you even do that?), I categorized the audience as preteens-to-young adults who aren’t already activists. Just chillin' in the library.

Let’s be totally transparent about this, though. This book was published in 2007. It’s 2019. Excluding climate change deniers (who clearly aren’t going to do anything to help, including even at the individual level 🙄), we already know that we’re running out of time.

I don’t know a world pre-global warming - media has made jokes about the earth dying since I can remember. Teens already organize worldwide to protest climate change. It’s hard to imagine this book helps anyone but kids who might not even get the chance to act.

So... let’s just try to talk about what works...?

Shoving your idea in someone’s face is not a good way to get them to agree with you, which is why subtlety is key for political comics or cartoons.

But we know that is not the intent of this satirical tell-not-show comic, which I think would work well to speak to 13 year olds on the fence. Be direct with them, and they’ll understand - Haha, dumb hippies, telling foxes to go vegan! LOL the cute bunnies are labelled terrorists! Good old Axe-odored humour and unwittingly niche complaints.

Showing video of vivisections or animal torture is too unpleasant, but with cutesy pictures we get to further ourselves from reality, so it's not a real animal that has to suffer to get the point across! Lucky us! (Don’t mention that somehow the book manages to keep you in comfortable denial of reality while still arguing against it! Oh darn! I mentioned it!)

I guess the primary benefit to comics is that as an art form it’s almost limitless in what it can represent and how. All art forms and even word forms can be used in graphic novels to build worlds that do and do not exist, repeatedly. 

This book is similar to social activist zines in how it communicates the message with both crude and cutesy depictions of talking animals and violence and serious or alarming topics without being a boring infographic with citations*. Its real strength is probably in the exaggeration of both the message and how it's written.

Using a story is an ideal way to get the message across, and so this easily be an infographic if it was purely for educational use instead of also being hyperbolic for entertainment, which perhaps it does too much.

I guess, ultimately, I have to say that everywhere this book could succeed - like with its multiple narratives and viewpoints, visuals and text that don't match in tone to create a different form of satire, ability to capture emotions and actions that are technically impossible - it manages to fail completely, in a bizarrely contradictory way.

That’s not to say graphic novels aren’t great at encouraging advocacy and change. I think As the World Burns is just a bad example of it.

*data and infographics are not boring to me. sincerely, a data lover