Slow Comics: Resource Extraction in Graphic Narrative

This essay investigates how comics, through their capacity for ‘slowness,’ can challenge readers to reflect on the far-reaching effects of resource extraction in a globalised world. Focusing on Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022), both set in Canada, I analyze how comics’ formal properties represent the disruptive effects of extractive practices such as mining, forestry, and fracking. These works reveal how extraction reshapes landscapes, fragments ecological and social rhythms, and imposes alienating temporal regimes. At the same time, they engage readers in a ‘slow’ mode of reading, foregrounding the in/visibility of extraction and inviting reflection on our own ethical and emotional entanglement in extractive economies. In my discussion of Sacco’s and Beaton’s texts, slowness is approached as a formal and narrative technique that decelerates and intensifies reader engagement, critiques temporal disruption, and foregrounds reflexive and embodied inquiry. © 2026 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.