Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Fantasy of American Comics" by Daniel Worden

The comics page has long been a place for cars and energy. Comic strips like Otto Auto, Toonerville Folks, and Gasoline Alley related a nation that happily motored about in a car-centric world.

Daniel Worden, an art professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, relates that history in Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics.

“This book analyzes how comics represented this transition to fossil fuels from the late nineteenth century to the present, a transition that shaped the comics medium itself,” wrote Worden, who teaches a course on comics at RIT.

“I write this book during an ongoing climate crisis, and comics are relevant to this crisis because the medium both shaped fossil fuel culture and offers ways of making, reading, seeing, and belonging that pull away from the time and space of fossil fuel culture,” he noted.

Comic artists in magazines and newspapers chronicled America’s oil industry, comparing the growth of Standard Oil to an octopus reaching out across the country. One of Worden’s favorite examples is Oil John, the Detective, a strip by Gus Mager that caricatured the oil trust. Oily John is a lanky John D. Rockefeller who captures small dealers, “a ridiculous miser out to get the little guy,” noted Worden.

Along with being the focus of comic art, oil companies were also comic enablers, distributing their own four-page funnies in the 1930s before traditional stapled comic books were produced, said Worden.

“The media landscape has changed. Comics are everywhere now,” he said, adding that the traditional printed comics in newspapers and magazines have migrated to the internet and graphic novels.

Worden’s Rochester class focuses more on “serious” comics such as the work of Joe Sacco whose comics have focused on subjects such as the Bosnian War and the conflict between Israel and Palestine than superhero exploits, he said.

“There have been a number of good non-fiction comics about climate change,” said Worden, citing examples such Science comics that detail the origin and impact of climate change in its “Wild Weather” series.

Worden sees comics as becoming a regional asset. He organizes the Rochester Indie Comics Festival every spring that brings 60 to 80 comic book artists to the town where they can sell their comics to the public.

Having just attended a similar festival in Columbus, Ohio, Worden said he sees comics not only becoming more of a regional issue but serving as a tool to help educate the public.