Contemplating Covid through Understanding Comics: Conveying Meaning with Panel Transitions in Covid-themed Comics

ABSTRACT:During the dreary initial lockdown in 2020, illustrators and instructors at the Arts Students League in New York put out an open call for submissions for a comics anthology as they could see the toll the quarantine and pandemic were having on their students. What started out as an invitation to artists to share their personal pandemic experiences through comics, This Quarantine Life (2020) soon became both a platform for seventy-six artists-in-quarantine from all over the world to showcase their work and a means of catharsis through comics. Within these single-page submissions were complex yet compact graphic narratives, which relied on careful and efficient manipulation of panel conventions. This article discusses the findings of an analysis of the use of panel conventions in This Quarantine Life. In doing so, I illustrate how among all of Scott McCloud's panel transitions, non-sequitur and aspect-to-aspect panel transitions can effectively convey complex emotions and meaning even within rigid space restrictions. Furthermore, I argue that the relative prevalence of these panel transitions in the anthology reflects a kind of fragile, fractured, yet highly contemplative frame of mind that many were in during periods of isolation and uncertainty in the early stages of the pandemic.