Under the Surface with Sofia Alarcon

Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness is back from the printer! A first collection of graphic stories about climate change and eco-anxiety, Alarcon’s Endsickness is an unblinking and humourous reflection on our current reality. Check out our Q&A with the author below to learn more, and pre-order your own copy of Endsickness now!
1. Eco-anxiety is a big subject and one that is relevant to everyone, but I don’t think I’ve seen many comics devoted to the subject. What prompted you to work on this subject in this format?

It wasn’t really a conscious choice, it was more the result of circumstance. Drawing and comics were the most accessible outlet that I had available to me at the time. I think if I had been more intentional, and I was hoping to reach a lot of people, I might have chosen something other than the niche world of alternative comics. I’m being facetious, but my point is that it came about mostly because I needed to process a lot of thoughts and feelings regarding climate change, and a piece of paper and pencil were the most accessible things I had at my disposal. I never expected anyone to read my com- ics when I first started, I didn’t have an “audience”, so it very much started as a personal project. But I’ve been making work about climate change for a long time now, and I’ve only recently realized this. So maybe it’s just a natural progression of something I’ve been thinking about for a while, something that needed to come out. In fact, the first cartoon I ever drew was about climate change. I was in a political science class in grade ten or eleven, and one of our assignments was to draw a political cartoon — I drew a cartoon depicting George Bush and Dick Cheney underwater while Bush said “Global warming isn’t real.” That was almost twenty years ago now and that cartoon could be redrawn and updated for today very easily. At the moment, it does still feel like there’s a big gap between what people are feeling and how it’s talked about in the media and pop culture — even though there’s no shortage of cli-fi literature and even Hollywood took a stab at it with the film “Don’t Look Up”. But I think we’ll start to see a lot more cli- mate-related work in many formats as climate change intensifies. Self-esteem and the End of the World and My Time Machine are some recent comics-specific examples that come to mind. Art has always been a place to address collective fears and anxieties, so I think it’s inevitable that we’ll start to see a lot more of it.

2. Are you involved in any environmental activism outside your comics?

Any activism I’ve been involved in has been very lowkey — some local protests, letter-writing campaigns, and boycotts. Being an activist is a big undertaking. It requires a lot of sacrifices — a lot of time devoted to organizing, coordinating, net- working, and building community relationships and in some cases running the risk of being arrested. It can be a full-time job and not everyone has the capacity to be an activist. I have two kids and I don’t make a living from my comics, I’m very much working-class, so any free time I have has gone to making my comics. But as my responsibilities and commitments shift, I am hoping to get more directly involved with activism. I’ll also add that activism isn’t the only way for people to get involved in climate change and environmental movements, it can be as simple as checking in on elderly neighbours during a heat wave, or helping with street clean-up (when it’s safe) after a storm or hurricane, or organizing your neighbourhood to buy a communal generator and freezer to keep food from spoiling during a power outage. Even talking to your friends and family about climate change can have an effect: studies have shown that the majority of people don’t talk about cli- mate change in their everyday lives. And I wouldn’t discount the things that people can do on an individual level: reducing meat consumption, buying second-hand, repairing and upcycling, making more environmentally friendly transportation choices, divesting from companies that harm the environment, etc. It can be really easy to cop out and shift the bur- den of responsibility to the governments and companies that are responsible for the climate crisis — and they definitely need to be held accountable — and individual action alone cannot address the problem, but the change that is required to address the problem is monumental and it is required of everyone (specifically people in the Global North) not just governments and corporations. Effectively addressing climate change will require some pretty big lifestyle changes from people in the Global North who are accustomed to a certain level of consumption and convenience.

3. You live in Halifax. How do you find the comics community there?

The process of making comics is pretty solitary but I’ve found that the Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival (which takes place every summer in August) is a pretty good venue to see what people are up to and connect with other cartoonists. In my experience, attending and tabling at local and national comic festivals is a pretty good way to connect with the comics community. And this is less in-person, but my local library has an excellent graphic novel collection and they have been an in- valuable resource in staying up to date with new releases and what other cartoonists are up to.

4. Is there a noticeable effect of the climate crisis on the East Coast?

There most definitely is. I think it’s especially noticeable in the last few years. Last year was one the worst (if not the worst) wildfire seasons for Nova Scotia — as well as Canada. At one point it seemed like all of Canada was on fire. I remember my son was in a ball hockey league at the time of the wildfires in Tantallon and some of his teammates had to borrow equipment because they were affected by the evacuation orders and had to leave so quickly they didn’t have time to take much of anything with them. On the heels of this, we experienced catastrophic flooding — an unprecedented amount of rain fell in a very short period of time which caused flash floods that killed four people (three of which were kids). And then there’s Hurricane Dorian and Fiona which also come to mind. We lost a lot of trees, there was a lot of damage, and there were power outages that lasted several days for both of those storms. Even this year, post-tropical storm Beryl caused flash floods in Wolfville that caused the death of another youth — we are failing our kids in more ways than one. It’s difficult to say that all of these events were caused by climate change, but they’ve been made more intense and destructive by climate change. For more than twelve months now we’ve surpassed 1.5C degrees of warming. As the atmosphere heats up, forests will get more dry, heat waves more intense, and droughts more likely, which makes for ideal wildfire conditions. On the flip side of this, because our oceans absorb a lot of the extra heat in the atmosphere, they’re getting hotter. All this extra heat in the ocean acts as extra energy for storms to form. Additionally, a hotter atmosphere holds more moisture, which means wetter storms — a lot more rain. We’re going to see a lot more extremes as climate change intensifies, and we’ll have less time to recover between these catastrophic and unprecedented events. How climate change manifests will depend on your location, but the climate is everything, it’s all interconnected, and there is no place that is safe or immune to the effects of climate change.

5. You’ve been nominated for awards for your self-published mini comics. This is the first time you are making a book. How is it different?

There’s a lot of things that happens behind the scenes with self-publishing. With self-publishing you have to cover the cost of printing (and each choice you make has a cost), you have to worry about the layout and collating and assembling of the actual book, you have to worry about distribution and how you will get your stuff out there, self- promotion (which I hate) and applying to comic festivals, you might be writing grant proposals to help with the costs of self-publishing and exhibiting; there’s a lot that goes into it. I’m fairly new to the world of self-publishing so I’ve been learning as I go, I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. But when making a book, some of those responsibilities can be shared with the publisher, which makes things a little easier. Additionally, each printing method I’ve come across has its own unique quirks and requirements, and none of them have been able to reproduce the quality and colours of the original artwork. For instance, I only recent- ly learned that for commercial printing, it’s better to keep the linework and colour separate. For self-publishing you can go as low-fi as you want — use an office printer if that’s all you have — so you don’t have to be as precious about the artwork. When it comes to making a book you have to think ahead a little bit more and consider how the art- work will translate when it comes to printing; it’s a more sustained and extended endeavour so all the decisions you might make when self-publishing a mini-comic are com- pounded when making a long-form work. I can see why some cartoonists stick to black-and-white artwork; it just eliminates a lot of the headaches and hassle when it comes to printing and it’s a lot cheaper! I think if I were to make a book again, I would be more considered and intentional in how I approach the making of the artwork; with self-publishing, you can be a little more spontaneous and flexible. It’s been a steep learning curve either way, but I hope I can keep making mistakes and learning from them.