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A Graphic Anthology of COVID Lockdown
by Gabe Fowler
More than 140 single-page comics from artists the world over, documenting humanity's retreat into COVID-19 lockdown and imagining our eventual, boisterous reemergence, gathered by the founder of the annual Comic Arts Brooklyn festival and owner of the beloved indie comics shop Desert Island.
On April 1, 2020, the Instagram account of Desert Island, Brooklyn's celebrated alternative comics shop, put out a call. By then Desert Island had been shuttered indefinitely, and cities all over the world had been locked down as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.
"We all need something positive to think about, and a lot of us have time on our hands," the post read. "Who wants to make something?"
What happened next was nothing short of remarkable, as hundreds of short comics from more than fifty countries poured into Desert Island's inbox. Some came from notable cartoonists. Most, astonishingly, came from amateur artists just looking for an outlet to create in the midst of tragedy—for a chance to join the rescue party that leads us out of isolation.
Collected in this book are more than 140 notable entries from the Rescue Party project, capturing the loneliness and the surprising comforts of early lockdown; the mania of its middle days as the mind begins to fray; and the many paths forward toward humanity's future, as we re-enter a world wracked with injustice.
Bracing, beautiful, and conspicuously optimistic, Rescue Party is part graphic diary, part time capsule, and part field guide: a grassroots project that tells the collective story of lockdown from a chorus of global voices and charts a course toward a more just future.
"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." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Rescue Party is a chronicle of the ebb and flow of how an epic event was lived across many countries, but it is also an ode to the power of art and comics to capture a moment and to crystallize the wish for a better world." —Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker
"A head-spinning variety and breadth of visual invention incredibly housed in a single anthology. This stunning, kaleidoscopic assemblage of comics captures a time and an experience, somehow both individually and collectively ... The fragments form an epic." —Ivan Brunetti, cartoonist, illustrator, comics scholar, and author of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice
"One of the most essential projects of the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, Rescue Party ... made each day just a little better. I've been waiting for this collection since its genesis, and I'm thrilled that it's finally appeared." —Karen Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University
This information about Rescue Party was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gabe Fowler is the founder and owner of Desert Island, one of America's most beloved independent comics shops. Founded in 2008, Desert Island is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It features a wide variety of underground and alternative comics, zines, artist's books, graphic novels, and art magazines, including its own quarterly comics tabloid, Smoke Signal. Fowler is also the organizer of Comic Arts Brooklyn, the annual comic book festival and art book fair, which spotlights independent, underground, and alternative comics.
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