2023/11/03 by Stephanie Garcia · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Comics and Graphic Narratives
paper · doi:10.16995/cg.10296
openalex publication_date 2023/11/03 · openalex created_date 2023/11/04 · openalex updated_date 2025/12/22
<strong>This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.</strong> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; font-size: medium; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The COVID-19 pandemic has had many components and presented many challenges over the last two years with multitudes of impacts to personal, social, and political life worldwide. Many of these perspectives and expressions, both visible and invisible, of horrors can be found in comic anthologies that were released shortly after the “lockdown” period of 2020. While comics were popularly used as an informative and educational tool during the pandemic, creatives also used it as an outlet for their fears, anxieties, and adjustments into the new normal of life that the COVID-19 pandemic introduced. While examining digital anthologies such as <i>Covid Chronicles, and Quarantine Comix, </i>I will be looking for ways in which mobile technologies are drawn to illustrate internal anxieties around the mundane horrors brought on by the lockdown period in 2020. <i>Doomscrolling </i>is a term coined during the pandemic which describes actively scrolling through a constant stream of bad or emotionally damaging news. In the past, mobile technologies were used in comics to speak to relationships, socialization, and commentary around the negative impact they have on external relationships. Since the pandemic, this has shifted to focus on how mobile technologies incite internal dread, anxiety, and an addiction to chaos, while also serving as a lifeline for positive emotions and connections with others. This dichotomy between good and bad, detrimental versus helpful, serves as a vicious cycle of mundane horrors and the duality between needing a mobile device to feel connected and informed but also relying on a device that produces negative stimuli. <o:p></o:p>