Chronicling of lockdown trauma in comics

According to comics scholars, the verbal/visual tracks of comics are an invaluable means of representing embodied experiences (McCloud 1993; Purcell 2021; Squier 2008). It is thus unsurprising that the multimodal medium was appropriated to depict people’s responses to the lockdown of 2020 and their modified cultural beliefs for a future “new normal”. Several collections of works, many of which were entitled “Chronicles” (see List A for prose and comics published globally between 2020 and 2023), incorporated visualisation to share pandemic experiences and for educational purposes (Rocque, Cameron and Mauro 2023; also O’Brien 2021 and Vågnes 2020). This chapter focuses on how lockdown trauma, as an intangible phenomenon, is imagined, comprehended and thus chronicled through comics. Using exemplary works from COVID Chronicles. A Comics Anthology edited by Kendra Boileau and Rich Johnson (2021), it spotlights how pre-traumatic stress (Saint-Amour 2015) is effectively depicted by the combined tracks of comics (Ganteau and Onega 2016; Orbán 2023). Highlighting the invisibility of trauma in the face of ever-growing uncertainty and the saturation of ever-changing information (Bényei and Stara 2014; Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006), it demonstrates the amplified sense of absence during the lockdown as public spaces became empty and lives were lost to the war against the highly contagious virus. With their embodied form that transcends words to address the slippery nature of trauma (Luckhurst 2014), the selected comics illustrate how people dealt with pre-traumatic stress by filling in the void with images, expressions and affective responses from previous traumatic events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack (Kaplan 2005; Petrovic 2015; Richardson, “Terrorism” 2015). Finally, the chapter shows that embodied comics-making/reading offers creators and readers a feeling of control over the lockdown and a chance to form affective connections through the culturally-modifying chronicles amidst physical isolation (Matthews and Sunderland 2019; Richardson, Gestures 2016).