Mike Classon Frangos

Halloween night is truly carnivalesque. All the values are inverted. People in the US give things away, walk from place to place, and interact with their neighbors.

Violence of Melt: Visual Infrastructures and Erasure in the Arctic The Arctic is melting. In the visual culture of the Arctic and environmental research, melt is affective. It is treated as an object of aesthetic and study, a symbol of urgency. Most prevalent images ...

"Violence of Melt: Visual Infrastructures and Erasure in the Arctic" by Audrey Medaino-Tardif is the second post in Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by @issygapp.bsky.social and guest edited by @sarahmpicks.bsky.social

niche-canada.org/2025/10/27/v...

#envhum

Here is what I said. I am proud to be a Cape Bretoner, a Nova Scotian, a Canadian. And I am with the Mi’kmaw land defenders on Hunters Mountain. (1)

Peter Lang Verlag - Utopian Variations Utopian Variations is a comparative critical study of a variety of kinds of utopia and utopian discourse. Rather than focusing on more familiar forms ...

Thrilled and delighted to say that my new book, Utopian Variations: Utopia in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, is now out! Thanks to the University of Essex's open access fund, it's available via open access too. You can download the full book for free here: www.peterlang.com/document/156...

We don't need neo-dada in this moment, what we need is people exercising their "right to culture" to help us remember that we live in society, that fact is inescapable, and we shouldn't let anyone tell us otherwise

www.its-her-factory.com/2025/10/devo...

enlightenment ideas of the autonomy of art got it all wrong: it's not art's freedom from social reproduction that makes it great, it's that making and receiving art are collaborative experiences where we develop individually through the mutual support of others.

CFP: A Time of Monsters The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

Our new CFP is up and it is monstrous.

Lyric Logic | Columbia University Press Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new.... | CUP

[clears throat]...I have another book coming out in the near future

if you'd like to read a bit about LYRIC LOGIC, there are some very generous blurbs over at @columbiaup.bsky.social

(my thanks to Marjorie Levinson, Oren Izenberg, Theo Davis, Nan Z. Da, and also @philipleventhal.bsky.social)

A three-panel comic. The first panel is a scrap from a dictionary that says crypsis, noun: patterning or coloration that allows a bird to remain concealed by blending in to its environment. In panel 2, labeled effective crypsis, an american bittern blends in with a marsh full of tall plants. In panel 2, labeled ineffective crypsis, an american bittern fails to blend in among some short plants, next to a wet floor sign, and behind a stop sign.

I do a comic about ornithological vocabulary for every issue of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's wonderful Living Bird magazine. Here's the latest one, featuring the American Bittern.

Today is publication day!

EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is officially out with @wwnorton.com - find it at a bookstore near you or order online💚📚 wwnorton.com/books/978132...

OK, I started this related critical AI list too here: olivia.science/ai#allies with allies & resources — @jsanofranchini.bsky.social @annakornbluh.bsky.social @ehayot.bsky.social (let me know if I failed to tag anybody)

and importantly, feel free to contact me to add more! 🤍

I admit I never gave up hope Robert Redford could have been US president as envisioned in Watchmen. What a missed opportunity!

To Rescue a Self Climate fiction: At the Green Nigeria Youths Fellowship, Eketi tries to find her voice.

African Climate Fiction.

To Rescue a Self
Eketi tries to find her voice.

#Africa #African #Nigeria #Ghana #Kenya #SouthAfrica
#Ethiopia #Egypt #Congo #Tanzania #Solarpunk #ClimateFiction #Fiction

grist.org/climate-fict...

Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “Gormenghast” by Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast 2) The sixth essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (1950), the powerful second novel in his Titus series.

And so I take on Gormenghast! Which is great. Just very good stuff. And I also look at James Gifford's excellent book A Modernist Fantasy (2018) and the anarchist reading of Gormenghast. This is the 6th essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy Reread series.

I wrote about how three events in 1996 - the Telecom Act, Welfare Reform Act, & "Changing Highbrow Taste" article - signal the beginning of the end of taste

www.its-her-factory.com/2025/09/1996...

In his article on “Comics Anthropocenes,” Mike Classon Frangos argues that the unique nature of the Laila Starr story highlights a world view that moves away from “undifferentiated humanity” and into a more complex portrayal of intersecting timescales. #lailastarr #comicsstudies 1/9

The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy This book brings the emerging field of petrocultures and energy humanities discourse into conversation with the field of animal studies.

My book The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multi species Encounters in Extraction Zones is coming out this year 25th July: link.springer.com/book/9783031...

Nothing has made me feel like a time-traveler from the past when I visit the US after living abroad for 15 years like vacuum cleaner design. Who came up with these bizarre floor-cleaning space ships?

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

For our next unit, we’ll be looking at “The Many Deaths of Laila Starr”, written by Ram V and illustrated by Filipe Andrade. The series follows the complex journey of the Goddess of Death, as she navigates the messy world of human mortality. #lailastarr

Haunted by Hydrocarbons Essay Collection, Deadline Reminder!

We're accepting abstracts until August 31st!

See the CFP for details: drive.google.com/file/d/190Eh...

“No Future”: A Lexicon If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now?

In a new series at PB, Systems & Futures section editor Matthew Wolf-Meyer (@mw-m.bsky.social) introduces “No Future”: A Lexicon.

Throughout the week, contributors will explore the question: Can we reject the future?

We're delighted to announce publication of 'Nordic Climate Histories' (Dominik Collet et al. eds), an essay collection exploring how the people of the Nordic countries have confronted challenges from climatic variability down the centuries: www.whpress.co.uk/publications... #climatehistory #

My book Teenage Time comes out August 21st from Bloomsbury: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teenage-t... Here it is!

Dispatch from the SFF Archive #6: Charles R. Saunders’s “Imaro” (1981) and “The Quest for Cush” (1984) Dispatch from the SFF Archive #6: A look at Charles R. Saunders’s first two Imaro novels, Imaro (1981) and The Quest for Cush (1984), groundbreaking sword and sorcery novels drawn from Africa…

My 6th dispatch from the SFF archive: A brief look at Charles R. Saunders's first to Imaro novels (1981, 1984), their covers, cover copy, blurbs, etc.

“There Isn’t A Word of Truth In Any of That”- A Conversation With The Elusive & Prolific Clair Noto on Hollywood, Marvel, and Her Erasure from Red Sonja Who is Clair Noto? Clair Noto is a footnote in the history of Marvel Comics. Superciliously deigned as a co-writer (which she denies), lazily written off (if written about at all) by supposed fans …

The first long interview with the mysterious Clair Noto, one of the 1st women comics writers, who wrote the cult fave Red Sonja series in the late 1970s, and about whom little is known.

She tees off on Roy Thomas, who she accuses of stealing credit, & Frank Thorne, who she detested. Juicy stuff!

Climate necropolitics I have been thinking of politics and death recently. In fact it’s all I can think about. I think you should too.

Climate necropolitics: thoughts from the middle of the heatwave.
jksteinberger.medium.com/climate-necr...

A surprising amount of so-called ”global English” falls into this category I think.