I decided to carry on with The Buckets and Hubris as though the world they live in doesn’t have a COVID-19 outbreak.
Mostly because:
1) Not That Funny,
2) Hopefully, in a couple of years, all the COVID cartoons won’t make much sense. Like looking back on French Political cartoons by Daumier now- you see ’em, you read ’em (or the translations) and you say, “Huh. I don’t get it.”
This is more serious than I like to be here, but I really hope that the stress and strain I see online and in people around me (when there are any) becomes incomprehensible sometime soon. Kind of like hearing about the 1918 Flu epidemic and not, until recently, being able to picture how much it changed lives for months and months. Historical events are tiny points that have names and dates. We personally don’t remember the spiraling months of death and fear from 100 years ago. We remember “Flu Outbreak of 1918. Killed a lot of people.” Those people lived all the little weirdnesses we’re living now, and ours will go the way that theirs did. Honestly? I hope this outbreak doesn’t go far enough to get a historical name. I hope it’s a chapter in the next century’s epidemiological textbooks, with the kind of information that will help next time, and doesn’t stick around as a historical milestone of misery.
In fact, if you’re reading this in some archive of Hubris comic strips any time after, say, 2021, I hope you’re baffled at how morbidly serious I just got about something that you have no genuine feelings of loss over.
