Rescue Party edited by Gabe Fowler
Many of us would rather forget those first months of Covid when the world was locked down and “shelter” assumed sinister meanings. But regardless of whether we repress our memories, the anxiety of those early days left a mark. Perhaps on the good side, creativity flourished among artists accustomed to working alone, especially writers and visual artists suddenly confined and stripped of normal work responsibilities and social obligations.
Rescue Party! is a representative sampling of cartoons made and posted during the lockdown—some of them graphic diary entries—as curated by comic arts dealer Gabe Fowler from his Instagram account. Visual styles shift radically from one contributor to the next. Fowler imposed only few conditions on the artists whose work he solicited. Rather like a poetry editor insisting on sonnets, he limited his contributors to nine panels. Oh, he added that their work must envision “a utopian world after we survive this moment.”
Strictly speaking, many of the cartoons collected in Fowler’s handsomely produced “best-of” book didn’t end in a glorious new world. Some spoke to personal survival. Others were funny or enigmatic. In Jo Aguilar’s graphic, the cats inherit the Earth. John Gagliano expressed a thought some had—at least for a moment: “I don’t even want to go outside again.” But also represented was the brief phase when many dared to hope that something better would emerge from the global systems failure that resulted from the pandemic. “Normal wasn’t working for most of us,” Mike Taylor put it in his cartoon. Are we back to normal four years later?
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