Comics, Cartoons, and Vignettes: The Graphic Narratives of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Comics and cartoons have been showing a great capacity to describe illness in a far richer way than plain texts do. When COVID-19 pandemic was declared in Spain back in March, I started collecting these cartoons expecting to end up with a large collection of Graphic Medicine material. I created a folder called COVID graphic medicine and started to save any cartoon I came across in the social media that contemplated the situation from any of its many angles: the virus, the biology, the disease, the human and professional suffering and the way people and the health system were confronting such a new and complicated situation. The expectation was to find rich and complex descriptions of the disease but surprisingly once I started analyzing in depth the creation of hundreds of authors (mainly Spanish), I was surprised to see that there was little Graphic Medicine in them. I took up the challenge of doing a revision, analysis, and classification of the cartoons for various talks. I found out that here were several themes that came up in a recurrent and persistent ways: (a) anthropomorphism of the virus, (b) the suffering of the health care workers, their hero-like attitude, and their physical and emotional struggle, (c) death portrayed as a classic skeleton dressed in a cape and cloak hood but little about the process of dying, (d) the “flatten the curve” as an inspirational idea for many cartoons, (e) the confinement and life in the balconies (Spanish people live mainly in apartments rather than houses), (f) facial masks in various and fascinating ways. Surprisingly, in spite of the suffering of so many, there has been very little on the disease itself, the admission of COVID-19-afflicted persons to a hospital, the ICU patients or the deceased. Reflections and thoughts about a collection of nearly 500 cartoons are presented here.