“Death Drive” to Los Alamos: Puma Blues as Eco-Male-Ancholia

It is the privilege of man to revolt against nature and make himself sick.

Gavia Immer sits in his government-issued cabin in year-2000 Massachusetts, as military planes drop tons of lime in the Quabbin Reservoir “to compensate for the effects of acid rain” (Murphy & Zulli, 2015, p. 27).1 He starts to watch a trove of experimental videotapes produced by his late father, setting in motion the primary narrative trajectory in writer Stephen Murphy and artist Michael Zulli's The Puma Blues (2015), an independent comics series presenting a starkly pessimistic science fiction vision of ecological catastrophe in a near-future USA, where mutated manta rays sweep through the skies, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roam the southwest desert sands, and nuclear catastrophe looms.2

Part environmentalist fable, part dystopian nightmare, the series resonated with the zeitgeist of the era which gave us the Chernobyl accident, the Bhopal disaster, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.3 “It was a child of its age,” writes Stephen Bissette, “a tapestry composed of ecological activist ire, various New Age belief systems, wholly invented species (key among these the flying manta rays, which became emblematic of the series) and visitations from mythic beings and archetypes” (2015, p. 529), while Alex Dueben calls Puma Blues a “missing link—a pop culture precursor to DC's Vertigo Line, The X-Files, Twin Peaks and a thousand other creative works” (Dueben, 2016).4 Largely ignored in its time, Murphy and Zulli's cult series anticipated the anxieties over climate change and the eradication of the

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Amanda Boetzkes, Kyle Whyte, Anthony Lioi and the organizers of the inaugural Colby Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities in August, 2019, whose input greatly improved this essay.