Even after germ theory changed our understanding of what diseases looked like, illness often was represented through depictions of the people who were most vulnerable to it. Which is to say, the poor. And then, there's all the racism. So much racism.
cover from 1882 depicts disease as three skeletons hovering over San Francisco. The skeletons represent malarium, small pox and leprosy.Then, there's all the racism. So much racism."Racism and xenophobia are deep in the genome of comics and cartooning," Gardner acknowledges. For example, during the great flu pandemic of 1918, he says, people wrongly thought the disease was spread by mosquitoes, and that's reflected in the era's cartoons — with an ugly xenophobic twist.
It's a challenge for contemporary cartoonists to work against conventions so deeply embedded in the medium, and at the beginning of the current coronavirus pandemic, Gardner says he observed even mainstream political cartoonists using offensive stereotypes in their comics about the virus' first outbreak in China. He saw freighted images, such as the octopus, standing in for China — which, he says, was also used by Nazi cartoonists to represent Jews back in the 1920s and '30s.
However, he suggests that these days contemporary cartoonists who work for established media outlets are doing a better job."They're backing away from that kind of imagery. The initial xenophobia you saw in some mainstream cartooning has disappeared."As far as actual science goes, visualizing coronavirus in cartoons and animation has improved too.
, distributed by the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force, the disease was presented as a malignant green beast with claws and a tail — and in a detail not unlike today's coronavirus cartoons—spikes on its grimacing head.Those distinctive coronavirus spikes evoke for some the demonic character Pinhead from the Hellraiser horror franchise – recalling those early images of disease as devils. Aeven"interviewed" the coronavirus, played by an actor wearing a Pinhead mask.
But Czerwiec points to how the virus was anthropomorphized on the Stephen Colbert's animated political commentary series,"Tooning Out the News," as a bouncy green ball with expressive eyebrows and a bratty smirk."I was surprised by how endearing the character was," Czerwiec says. Which might seem counterintuitive, she added, but there's a logic to picturing coronavirus as cute.
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