Inés Estrada’s breakthrough science fiction graphic novel, Alienation, integrates ranging instances of alienation through the relationship between form and function in comics. Estrada paints a not-so-distant future where corporations like Shell, Google, Amazon, and Starbucks have massacred the land and saturated the American market. Alienation tells the story of Elizabeth and Charly, and their experiences with entering the virtual world at will via the GoogleGland brain implant. Despite the obvious freedoms of virtual reality, the GoogleGland comes at a steep cost. 

Eliza and Charly’s reality is muddied by the virtual, as Charly suffers from hallucinations while Eliza’s GoogleGland is non-consensually compromised by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that intends to use her body as a vessel to bear the first humanoid baby, thus propelling 2054 humanity from a transhuman species to a posthuman species. By venturing into virtual reality, Estrada is reproducing and critiquing the exploitative and oppressive nature of Anglo-American posthumanism. 

My proposed thesis explores how science fiction— a genre of literature that generally casts a critical lens towards modern society— transforms when the story of Eliza, an Inuit woman, and her boyfriend, Charly, is told from the perspective of Estrada, an author whose storytelling continuously transcends physical and theoretical borders. By focusing on climate catastrophe, Estrada creates a language to talk about violence on the land and on the body simultaneously. Estrada paints a speculative future from the margins between word and image, high and low brow, and across borders and genres.

In the 14th century, alienation meant a “transference of property, mental instability, delirium,” and by the 15th century, the term encompassed “state of insensibility or numbness, insanity, madness, estrangement” (OED). Now, alienation is referred to in terms of citizenship (resident alien) and Marx’s (theory of alienation), intersecting at the estrangement of the body. Thus, alienation is positioned as both a mental and physical form of estrangement. 

While the physical form of alienation can be identified and represented across mapped borders, mental alienation eludes representations of itself. Comics, however, approach representations of alienation through the disjuncture between the word and the image, and the collapse of an inherently Western spatio-linearity. Colonialism is rooted in the fixity of space and materiality; therefore, the comics form, as a multimedia assemblage that does not depend on spatiolinearity to construct narrative, attracts marginalized stories and storytellers.