Fighting Covid-19 with history, comics and the undead!
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, I locked myself in my apartment in Ithaca, NY, to wrap up my B.A. in Literary and Visual Storytelling at Cornell University.
Every time I read the news, I felt I was being haunted by the word “unprecedented.” The way the situation was being reported, it seemed there were no historical events that we could study to guide our societal response to this dangerous disease.
Meanwhile, I was researching and sketching out a short comic about the history of a dramatic ruined building that overlooks one of Ithaca’s many waterfalls. Along the way, I dug something up that instantly felt all too familiar: the tale of a chronically mismanaged epidemic that wracked the town in the early 1900s.
I realized that disease is nothing new, and neither are the ignorance, greed and apathy that can turn a few treatable cases into an uncontrollable public health catastrophe.
Finding such a relevant historical lesson in my own backyard, I knew I had to spread the word. The fact that fraternities and sororities were continuing to hold large, indoor, unmasked parties in town throughout the first lockdown only confirmed this imperative for me. My response was to create a mini-comic that summoned up the ghost of legendary local bartender Theodore Zinck (a popular figure in Cornell lore), whose life was tragically shaped by that previous epidemic, so that he could teach contemporary Ithacans some long overdue lessons on the importance of public health.
Throughout the story, I wove together the narrative strands of then and now, employing visual humor, political caricature, and heartbreaking drama to bring the facts to life. These elements play out across pages of ornate and expressive hand-inked illustrations, designed to capture the attention of a wide variety of readers.
I ultimately published Reflections: A Covid-19 Ghost Story as a zine in February of 2021. Several print runs and a digital edition later, the story has also been featured in the Cornell Daily Sun, Kitsch Magazine and Howl: The Voice of UNM Taos.
You can order a print copy or download a digital edition of Reflections at my Etsy shop, or read more about the project in the Cornell Chronicle.
