Being in the wilderness challenges our limits and brings us out of everyday experience. It’s no wonder that nature exerts such a strong appeal on people of all ages and backgrounds. In the illustrated book Animal, young Simon answers a call of the wild and decides to leave his family for life in the forest.
Nature can disguise surprising secrets, like the library hidden in the belly of a whale in Zidrou’s latest tale The Library-Whale, but it can also lead to catastrophe and struggle. John Clark, the main character of Aimée de Jongh’s powerful graphic novel Days of Sand, is sent as a photoreporter to the Dust Bowl, an area of the middle United States plagued by devastating drought and sandstorms in the 1930s.
At the end of the day, we must all accept that nature can be both idyllic and disrupting, and learn to live in harmony with it. What will happen if we don’t? A few answers may be found in a non-fiction comic with a revealing title: Extinctions.
