Introduction

This comic explores whether my responses to the pandemic can be told using nonrepresentational or highly abstracted art and still successfully convey the events. Its success is up to each reader. Finding visual metaphors and devices to carry the narrative was challenging but fulfilling. I intended to start with a full script, but the ideas just would not come. When I decided to “write” the article in pictures and then add narration the process became much smoother. In hindsight, I suppose that’s logical given the visual nature of the medium. This article was drawn digitally using Clip Studio Paint. The narrator is drawn extremely simply to allow the visual devices to create the narrative rather than the traditional renderings of facial expressions and figure poses. Panels 4 and 5 on page 6 include content that previously appeared in The Lame Halloween (Richardson and Whatley 2021)

Author’s Note

Panel 23 includes, with attribution in the comic itself, two third-party images, one by Tom Brenner (2020), © Reuters, All Rights Reserved; and one by Miller and Gibbons (1990), © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced here under educational fair use/dealing for the purpose of criticism and review.

With exception of third party-material, the images included in this article are copyright © Edward Whatley and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Editors’ Note

This article is part of the Rapid Responses: Comics in and of The Moment Special Collection, edited by Jeanette D’Arcy and Kay Sohini, with Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.