By Scott Southard. By 2016 we’ve had no lack of subversive art based on the inevitable disasters wrought by climate change and the impending destruction that will likely follow. There have been Oscar winning films, Billboard ranking songs, incalculable quantities of visual art, and yet, the destruction is still impending, and the change we need has not come.
Snowfall follows in the tradition of another necessary work to highlight just how fatalistically screwed up our seemingly inevitable path is. It paints us a picture of an environmentally distraught future. A future that’s heated to the point of crisis, where attempts at band-aid climate control have failed, and direct attempts to alter the warming have irrevocably removed snow from Earth’s weather vocabulary. But what’s even more daunting than the rise in temperature (which seems like an agreed upon inevitability at this point) is the capitalistic reaction to it.
Due to the miracle climate work of the Hazeltyne Corporation, America has become a corporately sponsored cooperative, restructured and run by an opportunistic business that had the right solutions at the right times, and became quite wealthy in the process. Rather than giving us a cautionary tale about the dangers of pollution and global warming, Harris and Morazzo are taking a more critical, pragmatic look at the way corporate consumer culture plays into the cause and aftermath of climate change, analyzing the real motivations behind the “altruistic” help from enormous bureaucratic entities. (Spoiler: The motivations aren’t altruistic.)
There are moments in Snowfall that build a truly magical sense of setting, and make the reader believe in a world where snow has gone all but extinct. The opening Rosebud-snowglobe-zoomout sequence is a neat way to set a thematic tone and to give a hearty anchor to the reader, along with the knowledge that perspective isn’t always as simple as it seems. The use of multiple embedded narrators (with widely varied lettering) forces the reader to critically think about whose point of view we’re looking through, and whether or not they can be trusted. There is a lot at play here, and Harris uses some nifty narrative tricks to work through it all.
While I haven’t been sold on any of the characters yet, there is still plenty of time to work through the builds. I have high hopes for yet another work that tackles one of the more important, looming monsters that threatens human life as we know it. As it is, Snowfall is another vital piece in the canon of environmentalist art.
Image Comics/$3.99
Written by Joe Harris.
Art by Martin Morazzo.
Colors by Kelly Fitzpatrick.
Letters by Michael David Thomas.
7.5 out of 10
