Snakes and Things: A Comics Exploration of Species through the COVID-19 Crisis

While extensive research has been done by animal rights activists, philosophers, and interdisciplinary academics on the animal body in moments of crisis, there is little analysis and exploration of this topic in the comics form. Through engaging in the comics form (both as a maker and scholar), I argue that comics offer a unique perspective to consider body and space, especially regarding human-animal relationships in our current moment in time. The comics form offers the ability for scholarship and theory to unfold and layer beyond textual analysis; with the use of both text and image, comics not only explore topics, but reposition them to cultivate new meanings. For this project I aim to not only unpack human-animal relationships through themes of body and space, but to also demonstrate why the comics form is especially useful when understanding these topics. In employing the comics form, I aim to explore questions like: How does the comics form allow the reader to engage with theory? Why is the comics form pertinent to understanding human-animal relationships today? How are animal bodies and identities considered as living beings during the COVID-19 crisis? How are their bodies constructed and dismantled in spaces that have been created and defined by the COVID-19 crisis? My source material consists of interdisciplinary modern, spatial, and animal theory, as well as comic analysis and theory. In using the comics form and theoretical approaches to explore body and space, this project aims to add a new intervention into the comics realm, demonstrates how the comics form must be a considered approach in animal rights and spatial academia, and offers a new lens in understanding how we can use comics as a method to approach body, space, and the COVID-19 crisis.