During the early days of pandemic lockdowns, I interviewed a librarian who was trying to find fiction set during the 1918 pandemic that was published shortly after the pandemic. He said that basically there was almost no contemporaneous fiction written about the Spanish flu or its impacts on society. Once that pandemic had passed, it was almost as though everyone just silently agreed to move on and forget what had happened, he said.
That’s happening now with Covid. You can feel institutions and individuals shoving the experience of the pandemic and lockdowns down the memory hole. Politicians want us to forget that government quickly acted to effectively get money into the hands of people who needed it, employers want us to forget that many people could easily work from home, society in general wants low-wage workers to forget that they were ever termed “essential.” Masking and free vaccinations and everything else is swirling down the drain of our collective memory.
As for me, I love reading about how the pandemic and pandemic-era lockdowns impacted people. In particular, I was a daily reader of Roger Langridge’s excellent five-year diary comic experiment, which overlapped with Covid. And now I’m a big fan of Seattle cartoonist Joe Alterio’s Covid diary comics, It’s Never Easy.
The book is beautiful, printed using a three-color risograph press that makes the colors on each strip look hand-applied. The comics are deeply observational, as though we’re seeing out of Alterio’s eyes. And because everyone is busy staying six feet apart from everyone else, there aren’t a whole lot of people to fix our gaze upon. A limp flag, a roof pelted by rain, a flight of stairs with no one on them. Each three-panel strip feels like a complete thought, a moment.
These comics put me back in the days of lockdowns, and I mean that in the most pleasant way possible—the silence, the contemplation, the sense that something important had changed forever. The fear and loneliness is there, too, and that’s important. Alterio captures all that nuance—the quietness and the way some things felt amplified to the point of incomprehension.
This is a book I can pull out to bring me back to those weird, unique days. While everyone is so desperate to pretend that the pandemic never happened, I’m glad to have this gorgeous book to remind me that not only did it happen—it mattered.
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