The Slow Apocalypse in The Low, Low Woods

Abstract

The comics series The Low, Low Woods is set in the fictional former coal‑mining town of Shudder‑to‑Think, Pennsylvania. While the mines have long been abandoned, their variegated effects, from poverty to environmental destruction, still haunt the region. This article suggests that The Low, Low Woods identifies a convergence between the exploitation of the natural world, a coal industry on the brink of collapse, and a fragile form of (white) hypermasculinity that promotes a violent and race‑ as well as class‑specific idea of local identity that two teenage, queer women from ethnic minority backgrounds begin to challenge.

Keywords

• Appalachia. Coal. Comics. Ecocriticism. Ecogothic. Ecohorror. Extraction. Intersectionality. Mining. Trauma