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Over a hundred page-long comics from around the world, documenting humanity's retreat into COVID-19 lockdown and imagining our eventual, boisterous reemergence, from the founder of the Brooklyn Comic Arts festival and owner of beloved indie comic 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, the shop had shuttered indefinitely, and the world's major cities had 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?"
Hundreds of short comics from over 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 here are one hundred fifty 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 branching paths of 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 to a more just future.
