Panels for literacy: visualizing climate change literacy and awareness through Rohan Chakravarty’s webcomics on Instagram

Undoubtedly, climate change and its related issues need immediate and special representation and attention from everyone. However, recent scholarship in the field of environmental humanities suggests that the present climate crisis is aggravated by a crisis of imagination, indicating that traditional literary genres often fail to capture its intensity in words. As a result, environmental critics worldwide have been urging us to focus on visual media, such as graphic narratives and comics, to capture this crisis and tackle the massive challenge ahead. While a visual medium like comics can capture the intangible nature of climate change, which is often impossible to convey in traditional narratives, recent scholarship has focused on comics posted on social media platforms like Instagram. So, focusing on a few webcomics posted on the Instagram page ‘green humour’ by the Indian comic artist Rohan Chakravarty, this article discusses how these comics act as a potential medium in fostering climate change literacy and awareness. This article also highlights how Chakravarty’s illustration of human-centred, solution-based narratives, along with his use of key aspects of comics, such as multiple scales of space and time and sensory depiction, makes these comics particularly well-suited to promoting literacy and awareness.