I was curious how this one would hit me, now that we’ve got some distance from the pandemic. Well, we’ve stopped acknowledging it as a culture anyway, and that’s kind of like getting some distance, right? Oh America, you self-destructive scamp you. This is a collection of comics, starting off with a subject that a lot of people went through during the pandemic (including me): adopting a pet. I get nervous when I think about the number of those pets that ended up staying with the people who got them, but this is about Elise and her family, who adopted the adorable Bertie. She takes us through the adoption process and the acclimation process (for the dog and the humans), which luckily seemed to be relatively simple for all involved. Next up is a story about how Elise eventually started making masks for everybody she knew during the pandemic, and how it ended up bringing in some money for her due to odd jobs around the area and people in need online. That image of the environmentalist holding up a line filled with thrown away masks will haunt me, but people barely knew what they were doing at the time, and just about nobody was thinking long term. Next up is her family’s experience of all getting covid at the same time, and it will never cease to amaze me how differently that virus affected different people. She also mentioned in her update that her family got it again shortly before the book was set to be published, so there’s that. After a short piece about her imagination of how the new people she talked to regularly would look without their masks (versus how they actually looked when the masks came off), the last story of the comic deals with her getting way into making pizzas for the family while they were all stuck at home. And if you’re wondering, yes, she absolutely does include the recipe for the pizza, and yes, it does sound delicious. She even includes a recipe for another version of it that sounds a bit easier to make. So come on in, revisit a time when most of us thought “boy, it can’t get any worse than this, right?” Yeah, about that… $12
