As we’ve discussed, nuclear disaster results in strange entanglements of time and place. From the deep time of radioactive decay to the affinity between Fukushima and Chernobyl, there is a simultaneity and a deferral that are held in close contact within the structure of nuclear futures. We live in contact with multiple time scales. Fears around radioactive waste and climate change bring it into sharper focus but, deeptime is in the rocks around us, the sun, systems of erosion and deposition, fossil fuels, the list continuing ad naseaum.  In Haraway’s reframing that “we are compost, not posthuman” there echoes the fact that our bodies are always already part of the process of earth-making (55). That is, caught up in the process of decay—the deferral of which haunts us.

I want to think about deferral and serialization together as terms that are reflected in the form and content of the two works we recently encountered: Dark and Ichi-F. Both works demonstrate in strange ways what is can be called thick time. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker in their essay titled, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality”, explain thick time as being “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past” that helps us “to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible” (1). Thinking in thick time is, as David Farrier suggests in his new book, Anthropocene Poetics, the “capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to ‘thicken’ the present with an awareness of the other times and places” (9).

To describe the ways in which thick time is a function of deferral and serialization in these two works, I want to turn to comics theorist Scott McCloud.  McCloud describes the formal elements of narrative time in comics as operating in such a way that “Each panel of a comic shows a single moment in time. And between those frozen moments–between the panels–our minds fill in the intervening moments, creating the illusion of time and motion” (94). But time in comics is also described through the unfolding of sound-as-text in a single panel. The instantaneous and singleness of the moment of sound can’t be taken as coinciding with the image beside it . “Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time–sound” (95).  Closure is  “The phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole”  (63). How we rely on incomplete information to construct semantically meaningful wholes. Like glimpsing only half of a soda can and recognizing the whole label.  This can help us think of serialization and deferment in that we are presented a splintered text that resists telling a full story until assembled into a coherent whole. However, the whole still has the formal elements of time that complicate and make messy the ways that plot unfold (mirroring/affinities in Dark, the quotidian in Ichi-F). The way that both simultaneity and motion are layered within and between the static images of a panel are a perfect visual model for understanding thick time.

Ichi-F exemplifies this in depicting the process of donning clothing for clean up. Each garment is represented in fine detail along with the process of putting it on. The mask cleaning process, the taping of the wrists of the sleeves, the booties, dosimeters, along with the specifics of where to find each and how to carry and operate them. Something as quotidian as dressing is shown to be part of a larger, more intimate relationship with radioactive deep time, thickening it. The process is drawn out from panel to panel, showing each step and urging the reader to assemble all the parts of dressing into a coherent whole. All of this points to larger moments of deferral that happen in comics—that is,  the way in which content is produced through serialization. Ichi-F was, afterall, originally published in three installments before being translated and resold as one volume in the English edition.

Dark operates differently from other forms of serialized content since it lives on Netflix. As a place so entangled with the concept of binge watching, serialization takes on a different meaning here. Serialization, I would argue, is a function of content over time. However, Netflix complicates that relationship in how it releases shows and encourages viewing habits. These habits we could argue are the by-products of consumer driven content creation. The ease of making and the result of on-demand content created in the age of platform capitalism.

But Dark also confuses the unfolding of plot usual to the serial with the ability to view it in all at once (if one were to follow the ethos of Netflix, as the writer has, or almost has). I want to suggest that because content about nuclear futurity echoes the formal aspects of time in comics, that we can read Dark in a similar fashion. The viewer is invited from the very beginning to give up on the assumption of time’s linearity. The narrator at the beginning most explicitly establishes a sense of thick time when they state that the distinction between “past, present, and future is an illusion” (Dark ep 1). In the same way that closure makes for continuity in comics, we can read closure in serialized media as well, both in content and form.

Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifices Zones, and Extinction, Minnesota UP, 2019.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.

Neimanis, Astrida and Rachel Loewen Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality, Hypatia vol. 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014), pp. 558-575.