Mike Dawson
patreon
Soon.
🕑 Added 2022-08-19 14:57:52 +0000 UTCThis is a diary comic I made somewhere in the middle of that first year of the pandemic, when we were all at home, stuck on our screens, not seeing anybody.
I include this strip in the presentation that I take to school and libraries, to talk to the kids about how art and writing can be a place to explore feelings that are sometimes sad. Sometimes, particularly when I was first delivering my slideshow, I'd get emotional while trying to read this comic. I had thought about taking it out, maybe kids don't want to be reminded of all this stuff, but I feel like there's so little written simply about the sadness of that period, how isolated we all felt, the feeling that the world had spiraled out of our control. I think it's good to include, because while I think in many ways kids are bouncing back from the trauma of the past few years perhaps better than many adults, just acknowledging that it happened, and that we all felt this way, is a good thing.
Mileages may vary, but in many ways, we have reached that place of "Soon". Kids are back in school, they are having playdates, we're going out doing things, but it doesn't feel to me like we've yet gotten back to "how it was". People are still getting sick and suffering every day. The immunocompromised it seems have been abandoned. Whole swaths of people are dedicated to ret-conning the pandemic away entirely, talking now like it was never such a threat, like we put on masks and social-distanced for no reason at all. I think this is repugnant. The pandemic was real. We are still dealing with it. We seemingly still have never managed as a society to properly mourn all the things that were lost.
