My wife and I finally took our first vacation since the beginning of the pandemic and promptly got COVID. And I have to say, the experience left me renewed and full of appreciation for life albeit still hacking up a lung. I was forced to rest and had time to reflect.
Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day doom-and-gloom news and challenges and forget how far we have come in the last 100 years (of which I’ve been alive almost 60).
Think about it:
I just travelled to a Central American country from Canada in less than a day. International travel, once reserved for the ultra-rich, is now in the reach of a teacher and a nurse. Costa Rica, Argentina, Antarctica - all doable. Compare that to people in my great-grandparent’s era who were lucky to travel 50 miles from their home during their lifetime.
I had fresh tropical fruit delivered to me via room service. My father remembers the treat of getting a single orange in his Christmas stocking.
I self-diagnosed a deadly disease simply by jamming a cotton swab up my nose and reading the lines in the window of a disposable indicator. And knowing that I had that disease, I was still confident that I was likely to survive because I was fully vaccinated. Compare this to the dread my ancestors must have felt the day they caught a sniffle during the Spanish Flu (the flu that killed roughly 10 times as many people as COVID has so far).
Self-isolating, we were freed from any aspirations of doing any of the usual touristy things. We simply rested and read. My wife read seven books, all on a device that can easily be held in one hand; one that came into being only 15 years ago.
Apropos to the hopefulness and gratitude inspiring nature of the trip, I finally got to read the book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling. Former U.S. President Barack Obama said of the book “Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases.” If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. To get a sense for the book, this TED talk is an excellent introduction.
So what does this theme have to do with comics? I’d argue everything. We have so much to be grateful for as modern day comic creators.
Consider:
I grew up in an era when my nearest source for comics was a hundred miles away. Now, my comic is available to the entire world via Global Comix and the Internet.
I could sell my comic to fans in multiple countries via Kickstarter. Kickstarter has only been around since 2009.
The current comic industry angst-de-jour revolves around what social media platform will give us the safest and most reliable access to our favourite creators and comic fan base. AOL, my first introduction to online groups, started in 1985, so I was in my 20s before I had a way to communicate with my geek peers around the world, never mind industry professionals! Before this, it was the letters to the editor at the back of the comic or nothing at all. Now we are debating choices.
In the last six weeks, I have received online training from industry luminaries Scott Snyder, Brian Bendis, Taki Soma, Paul Allor, and Gamal Hennessy all via video conferencing in my own home. Zoom didn’t even exist 12 years ago. As a new writer, having access to these amazing talents fills me with awe when I take the time to think about it.
I’m a Canadian and our harvest holiday has come and gone. I didn’t really sit down to write a Thanksgiving post today, but I guess I have. Wherever you are in the world, may today fill you with gratitude for how far we’ve come and energize you for the progress that is still to come.