Pandemics: COVID-19

Creating comics can be a way of coping with difficult and traumatic situations, such as those experienced by many during the global phenomenon that affects nearly every aspect of our lives—the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic became a creative impetus for thousands of comics that collectively help us commiserate and understand what we experience. Created by cartoonists reflecting upon changes in their communities or by healthcare workers processing their frontline experiences, these comics capture the immediacy of the pandemic and graphically demonstrate the “outbreak narrative” from multiple perspectives. Drawing upon comics’ ability to depict and manipulate time and space, both affected by the pandemic, these works zoom across scales, from the microscopic to individual households to local and global communities, mapping the viral spread, chronicling the closing off of spaces, and expressing fear and concern.

Chronicling COVID-19 in comic form has been done online, published in compilations and zines, appeared in major newspapers and magazines, and is beginning to appear in individual volumes. Most of the works in this exhibit were indeed published in 2020, before the Delta and Omicron variants existed.