RESCUE PARTY

Editor and comic-shop owner Fowler curates a collection of more than 140 nine-panel-grid comic strips created during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic by a variety of artists responding to his call to envision the utopia waiting on the other side of quarantine.

The foreword and introduction explain how Fowler, quarantining in a rural Connecticut cabin after shuttering his Brooklyn storefront, posted to the shop’s Instagram account a call to make art with the purpose of buoying a beleaguered populace. Though overwhelmingly North American and European and always in English, responses came from around the globe: three-by-three grids of left-to-right sequential art, whimsical, sentimental, psychedelic, and sometimes all three at once. Many of the works collected here express a longing for physical touch, a yearning for reunions with friends and lovers and even the casual physicality of busy bars and bustling sidewalks. Others celebrate the slowing down that accompanied quarantine, savoring simple pleasures and walks in nature and the idea that an earth ravaged by industry was healing through the deceleration or even cessation of human activity. Many depict transcendent journeys through the cosmos and/or planes of existence, encountering more than a few ghosts and cosmic entities. Pets feature prominently, with one small pup teleporting from his couch to an alien world where he snatches mutated coronaviruses from the air like they were spiky tennis balls, chomping and chewing the plague into submission. The most poignant feel grimly optimistic, seeing the quarantine as an opportunity to reset oppression and inequality (“Normal wasn’t working for most of us”). Vividly expressed through linework with occasional collage, these individual accounts of a shared event strum the cord that connects us. Our current fraught postquarantine moment haunts the pages, and time will tell if it is unfinished business or missed opportunity.

An invaluable time capsule and an arresting expression of the human condition.