Sites of the successive overlaying of Indigenous, colonial, Creole, and contemporary histories, New Orleans and Louisiana have been characterized by recurrent narratives of (in)visibilization. These include: displacement of Indigenous peoples and resignification of the land, waters, and cityscape as sites of exploitation by successive colonial powers; and development of distinct ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural identities associated with the region. Moreover, of ever-increasing importance are the globally intertwined economic and environmental concerns that stem from the reclamation of land and coastal erosion, the exploitation of offshore oil reserves, rising sea levels and the impact of weather events such as hurricanes, and the varying consequences of (re)construction initiatives for residents, businesses, and other interested parties.

This panel opens with Brannon Costello’s analysis of the Louisiana swamps in the comics series Swamp Thing, paying particular attention to a key pair of stories from writer Doug Wheeler’s little-read run (1989-1991) that grapple with issues such as coastal erosion and toxic roadbed material contaminating the wetlands. Costello argues that Wheeler’s Swamp Thing departs from the series’ more habitual depiction of the wetlands as a verdant paradise and a pastoral refuge from the corruption of industrialized modernity that the title character must defend from outside forces bent on despoiling their pristine beauty. Costello treats Wheeler’s stories as resources for envisioning ways to love and claim an abject-ified region on its own terms while also working to help it thrive. Visualizing the Louisiana swamps as they are, including oil pipelines and industrial pollution, challenges our attachment to an environmental “normal” that cannot and should not be sustained—in Louisiana and on the planet.

Next, Dana Cypress examines graphic representations of Hurricane Katrina in Mat Johnson’s Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010) and Dapper Bruce Lafitte’s artwork King of the Antpin. While the neighborhoods of New Orleans serve as the epicenter of action in Dark Rain, Cypress focuses on how the graphic novel constellates evacuation sites such as the Louisiana Superdome and Texas—via the Houston Ship Channel—alongside the historic Congo Square and Iraq, placing these into conversation with the militarization of the city in Lafitte’s work. These creators’ visualization of place, Cypress argues, maps the compounding histories of enslavement and colonial violence that converge in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane, the financial crisis of 2008, and the privatization of security resulting from the War on Terror. Cypress concludes that Johnson’s and Lafitte’s graphic narratives revise our vision of the U.S. South and index the global imbrication of imperial war and environmental collapse in the 21st century.

Our panel concludes via a broadening of focus to spiritual geographies. In his paper, Paul Humphrey examines Nalo Hopkinson et al.’s representation of Louisiana and Haitian Vodou in House of Whispers (2018-2020). Drawing on work in Black studies and the environmental humanities regarding the oceanic archive, contact zones, and transcorporeality, Humphrey elucidates how the liminality of the shorelines and wetlands of Louisiana renders them locales imbued with spiritual and queer possibility. He argues that these littoral spaces function as sites of agency and metamorphosis, making possible both the transfeminine protagonist’s transmogrification into a lougawou and the titular House of Whispers’ aquatic crossing to the realm of the dead. As Humphrey concludes, these interstitial, neither/nor spaces—where the physical and spiritual are frayed—trouble heterocolonial frameworks of gender and sexual identity, extractivism, and the human–more-than-human divide to instead foreground connection, resistance, and transcorporeal potentiality.

Taking the location and presidential theme of the 2025 MLA as a critical occasion for re-visioning New Orleans and Louisiana, this panel asks what lessons comics offer about visualizing a region, its geography, the material connections to the environment, and the ways individuals and communities navigate it. Each panelist will speak for eighteen minutes, followed by general questions and discussion.