![]() ![]() "I was surprised by how endearing the character was," Czerwiec says. A satirical Egyptian news show even "interviewed" the coronavirus, played by an actor wearing a Pinhead mask.īut 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. Those distinctive coronavirus spikes evoke for some the demonic character Pinhead from the Hellraiser horror franchise – recalling those early images of disease as devils. In a 1989 HIV coloring book for kids, 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. "HIV, early on, before we knew what the virus itself actually looked like, was more of a traditional monster shape," she observes. MK Czerwiec's interest in health and cartoons began during the AIDS crises of the 1980s, when she started looking at how artists anthropomorphized the epidemic. The initial xenophobia you saw in some mainstream cartooning has disappeared."Īs far as actual science goes, visualizing coronavirus in cartoons and animation has improved too. "They're backing away from that kind of imagery. However, he suggests that these days contemporary cartoonists who work for established media outlets are doing a better job. "It's often represented as a figure for an insidious foreign invader working its way into every element of society," Gardner says. 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. 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. "Usually, in the racist imaginary of the times, some sort of Mexican sombrero." "You'll often have a mosquito dressed up in a kind of toreador's cape, with what the cartoonist is imagining as a Spanish hat," Gardner says, with an audible grimace. 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. "Racism and xenophobia are deep in the genome of comics and cartooning," Gardner acknowledges. Many of these diseases - especially cholera, which circulated through the public pumps in housing tenements in London - had devastating effects on the poor and therefore, the victims became scapegoated as the source of the disease." "Because of course the poor were often the predominant victims. "A poor child," he says, pointing to a Victorian-era cartoon from the British magazine Punch. "Like little dogs biting our feet for gout, for example."Įven after germ theory began to change our understanding of what diseases literally looked like, Gardner says, illness and epidemics were often represented through depictions of the people who were most vulnerable to it. "A lot of the early anthropomorphizations are less about disease and more about pain," he explains. He curated a recent exhibition on the topic called Drawing Blood. He's a professor of popular culture at the Ohio State University with an interest in medical humanities and cartoons. ![]() "Little figures of demons that were physically attacking the body," offers Jared Gardner. So they used representations of illness and death that made sense at the time, such as the Grim Reaper. It was invisible, supernatural, terrifying. That means, she says, that cartoons of the virus are somewhat accurate, at least compared to the ways we pictured diseases in the past.īack when we first started imagining disease visually, people didn't even really know what disease was. "What's been remarkable about Covid-19 is from the beginning, we had a visual of the pathogen," says MK Czerwiec, a nurse, artist and scholar of cartoons and health. ![]() ![]() Which seems to make the coronavirus unique in our long history of anthropomorphizing diseases. That's how cartoonists and animators are anthropomorphizing Covid-19. Picture an angry little ball, covered in spikes, perhaps equipped with arms and legs, and definitely an evil grin. ![]()
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