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The sun iconographically symbolizes climate change, the environmental degradation mentioned in the text. There is a clear abstraction in this comic: the graphics do not directly depict what is described in the text (indeed, the text itself is abstract, complicating the idea of a simple graphic depiction), and the graphics do not have a coherent narrative. There are no characters to analyse and adore and write fanfiction of. This requires more work, interaction, active engagement from the reader. As Rodolphe Töpffer writes, translated by Sergio Figueiredo, the graphic line demands the consumer fill in the necessary gaps and omissions—and the filling-in becomes exponentially more alongside the text and imagetext.

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The use of a specific and recognizable brand logo alongside the high gas price is a pathetic (pathos-evoking) move meant to evoke emotion in the reader. These are familiar objects, things we may see often or even every day, but in this comic they stand in for other things, namely “environmental degradation in the name of profit” and by extension the exploitation of the workers we see in the graphics (and ones we don’t).

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The driver is drawn in a simple style. They have bags under their eyes, mirroring the worker in the panel underneath. The worker has precariously balanced their coffee cup on top of their car. Their foot breaks out of panel containment, drawing the eye naturally down the panel underneath, linking the two human figures in this section. We are not getting their voice. The narrator in this comic is Issy herself, not any of the people she depicts in this comic (yet). Later in the piece she will depict herself as well as some other named people, but here we see only nameless, storyless individuals. We are lacking the author-text connection (discussed by Rachel Rys in her piece Powerful Marginality: Feminist Scholarship Through Comics). Even so, the gestural and visual language in this panel tells us this person is wearing scrubs (indicating a medical profession), they are near an overpass (indicating an urban environment), they have bags under their eyes (indicating overwork). These cues become even more important in comics like this, where we are not given the stories of these figures.

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The overpass, simplified to only its barest nuances, is placed strategically beneath the hot red sun. Together they represent the urban, capitalistic destruction of the environment. Rodolphe Töpffer, translated by Sergio Figueiredo, tells us that in comics, simplicity is paramount—accuracy counts for little, and clarity everything.

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The licence plate 2TIRED adds a familiar comic element to the panel. Reminiscent of the type of jokes made in traditional comedy graphics (such as animated sitcoms and comic strips), it brings the reader back into the world. Not as remediation, but as its own original part of the comic’s language.

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Here the gutter sharply demarcates the two panels, aside from the driver’s foot, which breaks down the line. This adds life and movement to the drawing and visually connects the two panels featuring worker figures. The images in these panels do not present a linear narrative sequence; indeed, without the text they appear to be complete non-sequiturs. The text makes them comprehensible. As Gabriel Sealey-Morris writes, “Comics are not prose. Nor are comics image. And yet, comics are also not merely a combination of the two.” (Sealey-Morris 5). The text of this comic without the image would be garbled; similarly, the image without the text would be absurd. The gutter provides a clean divide so the reader can fill in the blanks.

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The map of Germany brings a more scientific language into the panel, despite its simplification. It harmonizes with and also contrasts against the other art in this comic with its combination of the “real” (putting aside the distortions of cartography) and the “cartoon” or “stylized”. Without the provided text, however, this image would be incomprehensible. Germany? A clock? Is this some kind of message about impending fascism? The text grafts its meaning onto the image, and now the half-coloured outline suddenly makes sense.

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The USA’s clock is full; this creates a sense of urgency, time “running out”. This outline contrasts with Germany’s in a very striking and graphic and immediately recognisable way. The USA is full, busy and tired and fed up. Germany is, simply, not. The lack of text specifically attaching itself to this image means nothing; we understand it just fine with what we are given.

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This text, quoted from “Work Hours and CO2 Emissions: Evidence from U.S. Households” (cited to Fremstad, Paul, and Underwood), is signified as such with its yellow background. Across panels, we know the source of these quotes because they differ obviously from the main narrative text and voice of the comic. In this way, the text and image play off each other in creating meaning: the statistics and scientific language add a research-based backing to the narrative text, and the presentation of this text clearly marks it as different from the rest. The eye and brain can easily follow this connection between the panels and we understand visually that this comes from someone besides Manley herself.

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The debris on the desk is another type of gestural language (as discussed in Aaron Humphrey’s “Visual and spatial language: the silent voice of Woodstock”) telling us the worker is unhappy, time-crunched, and put-upon. The waste needs to be produced through sharp climate-change-causing resource exploitation and worker exploitation just like what we see here in the panel.

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This worker is designing an advertisement, a type of job commonly characterized as useless, harmful, and/or capitalistic/consumeristic (as opposed to the worker above, in scrubs and therefore likely working a “necessary”, “essential”, “helpful” job). Staring at a screen and making small movements with the mouse is detrimental to workers’ physical health, and the production of more graphics to drive purchases is detrimental to workers’ mental health. This is even more acutely true when working long hours. The gestural language in the panel tells us the worker is tired, miserable, plugged in.

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The borderless nature of the panel allows it to bleed off the page and into the other panels. The reader and the outside world are invited to participate in it and even implicitly included within it.

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The graphic fades out at the bottom without a hard stop, just dissolving. Several panels in this comic do this, “releasing” themselves onto the (web)page and into the world. We, the readers, fill in the blanks.

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The cell phone is just another tally on the sheet. The worker is exhausted, forcing other workers to suffer (delivering food) for them, but in turn likely forced to do this at risk of losing their job by taking too much time for themself. The phone’s speech bubble is handwritten in a different font and the blue matches the blue of the walls (and the blue light of phones is another risk to workers’ health). This is part of the visual language of the comic, which uses a variety of fonts and colours to establish voice/different voices (as discussed in Humphrey’s “Visual and Spatial Language”).

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I hate my puter